It’s the thrill of the fall

DICK Ryland only became a teacher for the sake of convenience. He had no idea what he wanted to do and went into teaching because the teaching school was close by.
“My mother really talked me into it,” he said.
“I was doing fairly well at school towards the end of high school – I was a bit of an academic so I thought I’d have a go at teaching. I just fell into it by accident; I was so short of ideas.
“As it turned out, you could say I’m a born teacher in the sense that I just love teaching or being taught.”
He has taught at numerous schools including Pakenham Consolidated School and the Clyde North, Narre Warren East and Bayles primary schools.
Teaching at schools was not the only thing Dick loved to do. Considered an aviation buff among his friends, he was involved with a range of flying related activities, including skydiving and glider flying, which he also managed to link back to teaching.
It was his initial interest of flying that drew him to parachuting, so once Dick experienced skydiving first hand at the Commando Skydivers club in 1971, he didn’t turn back.
“I’d always wanted to fly – I’d never thought of parachuting as flying,” he said.
“But then I found that you could go out of an aircraft and just fly like a bird. You could go down to people, fly across to people, around them and under them, it’s just beyond belief.
“I joined with the main intention of doing a single jump but 20 years later, there I was,” he said.
He competed at both a state and national level in freefall events but once he gained instructing qualifications, he was more than happy to teach.
“I did lots of things in parachuting but instructing beginners and more advanced people was what I really liked doing,” Dick said.
He progressed to becoming chief parachute instructor in the ’70s, which was a huge responsibility with numerous tasks to complete.
“The one year I was chief instructor (of the skydiving club) I had 15 staff and just controlling all that was huge,” he said.
“I was managing all the different personalities and all the work they had to do and organising them – if one would call in sick and you’d have to organise replacements. It was just a huge job.”
He was also delegated the task of writing the very first trained operations manual, which was compulsory for every club back then.
“That was a huge job; it was like writing a book, it was tremendous,” he said.
His time at the Mangalore Gliding Club was well spent as well, and he was appointed chief flying instructor in the ‘80s and completed 3500 flights.
Those couple of decades were when he was most active, both in clubs and as a teacher at school, but Dick didn’t mind juggling the enormous amount of work at all.
“With my weekend instructing work I was teaching seven days a week, and loving it,” he said.
Dick was responsible for much of the progress of the Commandos, and helped with improving many aspects, such as developing better and safer parachutes. He pioneered the first square parachute.
Parachuting was as much an expensive hobby back then as it is now, and Dick said the new and better equipment that was being developed at an incredibly rapid rate meant that even more money was spent to remain up-to-date.
“It was expensive, it was not only the parachute jumps but the equipment was improving so quickly as well,” he said.
“In one case for me, in six months the equipment was outdated so I just put it under the bed and bought the new set because it was so much better. Each set of equipment was about $4000 to $5000.”
One of the benefits he and other chief instructors back then enjoyed was the fact they were able to jump for free.
“Once I became an instructor I wasn’t charged at all – it was just too good to be true,” he said.
“I was doing what I loved doing because once I put the student parachutists out I could do a jump myself and with the more advanced ones I’d go up higher with them and do the exercises with them and at the end of the day I didn’t pay anything.”
Where most chief instructors now get paid a fair amount for sharing their time and knowledge with new students, it was common for chief instructors back then to not be paid at all.
“Now the instructors are getting paid quite well but during my time we weren’t getting paid anything, it was considered to be helping the club,” Dick said.
“When I got into gliding and became chief instructor there, I didn’t get paid either. People like me would just do it for nothing anyway.”
Dick also had the pleasure of doing the very first jump into the MCG. He and two other parachutists flew in for the start of the 1979 Boxing Day test match. One of them held the cricket ball and Dick flew in with the Australian flag attached to him.
“That was a huge event at the time. It’s done routinely now, but back then it was just unbelievable to us,” he said.
Unfortunately, not long after injuring his knee during a school trip in 1991, Dick was forced to retire from skydiving. He had completed 3150 jumps.
An aggravating foot injury that followed not long after further inhibited his passion to fly, and he was forced to also give up gliding.
Although he still looks back on those golden years with mixed emotions, he has now picked up some new hobbies, which include art and building model boats.
“I’ve completed building three model sailing ships of the great age of sail,” Dick said.
“Each model took almost two years to build. I am currently working on a model of Nelson’s ship, HMS Victory.” These days, Dick still reminisces about the old times through the many pictures hanging on his walls and the photo albums that he keeps around his house. He often visits the Commando Skydivers at Tooradin for a catch-up, for the days where he was parachuting are what he misses the most.
“Those were the golden years of my life. Those 20 years (at the club) just obliterate everything else.”