A Bay area skydiver is going into the Skydiving Hall of Fame for his work on tandem skydiving. Actually, the 78-year-old helped create it.

  • Bill Morrissey helped invent tandem skydiving
  • Morrissey going into the Skydiving Hall of Fame
  • At 78, still jumps put of planes  

“I’ve trained over 750 instructors, military, civilian, all over the world,” Bill Morrissey said.

Morrissey started out as a paratrooper with the Army in the late 1950s. Once he returned to civilian life, he couldn’t shake the parachuting bug and continued to jump out of planes on his down time.

“I thought parachuting was pretty fun,” he said. “I didn’t find it frightening at all.”

Morrissey wanted to find a way where students could skydive attached to their instructors.

In the 1980s, he shared his vision with his friend Ted Strong, who owned a parachute manufacturing company. Strong made a parachute large enough to support the weight of two people. He and Morrissey took two test jumps – one with Morrissey in the back and another with him in the front. They landed a little bumpy, but his jumps were successful. Strong put Morrissey in charge of creating the technique.

“I became the tandem instructor, I became the tandem instructor examiner to teach tandem instructors, and I became the program director, all in the space of two hours and only having made two jumps,” he said.

Tandem skydiving was born. Morrissey trained hundreds of instructors over the years – and possibly saved hundreds of lives. The students no longer had to make their first jump alone.

“We’ll never lose another student, ever,” he said.

Morrissey isn’t sure he’s worthy of going into the Skydiving Hall of Fame.

“I’ve never won any world championships, I’ve never won any big medals,” he said. “Though I tried for the U.S. team and didn’t make it.”

But he understands that what he and Strong did changed the face of skydiving.

“I keep thinking, ‘That was pretty neat. What we did here was pretty cool,’” he said.

Though Morrissey doesn’t teach as much as he used to, he still gives lectures around the country – and tips to skydivers who live beside him at the Drop Zone at Sky Dive City.

He still jumps out of planes. That won’t stop anytime soon.

“When I’m in the airplane, I look outside and I look down and I look around and I know that’s where I belong,” he said.

Morrissey will be inducted into the Skydiving Hall of Fame in October.