Working Hollywood: Pete Swan, the high priest of parachute stunts

When it comes to surviving a jump off the tallest building in the Western Hemisphere, it helps to have Pete Swan on your team.

As the supervising parachute packer on the set of director Michael Bay’s 3-D action blockbuster “Transformers: Dark of the Moon,” Swan worked with four other experts to ensure that the film’s five BASE jumpers always had a soft landing, whether launching from a helicopter or the top of the 110-story Willis Tower in downtown Chicago (formerly known as the Sears Tower).

“There’s a certain amount of chaos with throwing a ball of nylon at 100 miles an hour out into the wind and hoping it’s going to stay organized enough to work,” Swan said. “A long time ago, I came to terms with it. Do your best every time and don’t look back. That’s my personal motto.”

Swan decided that the sky was the limit as an 11-year-old growing up next to an airport in Davis, Calif. He wandered over, began packing parachutes and looked forward to his 16th birthday, when he would be allowed to make his first jump.

“I remember there was one time when I was a kid, and I was just riding my bicycle and saw an airplane,” he said. “They pulled the power back, and I could actually hear the jump master giving commands to the student to get out and watch the round parachute take its inflation. I was probably 12 or 13 years old, and it’s been pretty much all I wanted to do since.”

Today, he’s one of the most skilled field repairmen on the West Coast. His 2,000-square-foot rigging loft houses two dozen job-specific industrial sewing machines. He honed his craft in several factories, manufacturing everything from parachutes to backpacks for firefighters, and even worked in a kite shop.

“My favorite thing is doing a really nice repair for somebody who thought their parachute was ruined,” he said, “and seeing the look on their face when I give it back to them, and they jump it.”

Canopy of heaven: “For BASE jumping, the Trango is the lightweight canopy we were using,” Swan said. “The choice of the canopies was so that they pack very slim, and they look good on film. The canopies themselves are a special fabric that’s about two-thirds the bulk and weight of normal fabric. They also had wingsuits — fabric jumpsuits that have wings from the wrists down to the waist or even down to the ankles, and then a surface area or wing between the legs. The closest natural analogy is a flying squirrel.”

Into thick air: In skydiving, there’s rarely such a thing as wide-open skies. “There’s air traffic,” Swan said. “There are other skydivers. At the skydiving center here in Lodi where I’m at, there are Southwest flights that go just to the northeast of us. Military goes to the southwest. A lot of people navigate just by watching the freeway in their airplane. So everybody has to stay really vigilant on the radios. We’ve seen, in freefall, airplanes pass right by us. They probably don’t have radios or something and have no clue where they’re at. But they go by so quickly. You just see it, keep going about your jump and think about it later.”

Weather or not: “At the skydiving centers, there are weather stations,” Swan said. “They’ll give you wind reports on direction and velocity. They’ll give you 3,000, 6,000, 9,000, 12,000 on up in feet, so you can plan where the current’s going. And as temperature and humidity go up, you get what’s called a decrease in air density. Your parachute actually feels like it’s at a higher elevation, so it’ll descend noticeably more quickly. Your parachute has less dense air to work with, and it can’t work as efficiently. You need to plan for it.”

Swiss precision: Although “Transformers: Dark of the Moon” was shot partly on location in Chicago, the BASE jumpers finalized their flight plans during a rehearsal in the Swiss valley of Lauterbrunnen. “They had cliffs that approximated the size of the Willis Tower and the Trump Tower and helicopter access,” Swan said. “Five jumpers and just myself and one other packer — we worked hard in Switzerland. We were there for 10 days, and they did 60 to 70 jumps. That’s a lot of jumps and a lot of packing for each of us.”

Sweet sixteen: In Chicago, they did about 16 jumps for the camera. “Some shots were jumping off of a 1,500-foot building, flying around another building and then opening over an intersection,” Swan said. “What they did for some of the shots was launch from the helicopter near some buildings like the Willis Tower, the Aon Center and the Blue Cross Blue Shield Tower [in downtown Chicago], where they flew between a gap in formation with wingsuits and landed in a park. Some of the jumps, they were landing on a steel barge in the middle of a river in downtown Chicago, and it was in a nasty river. You don’t want to go in that water. One jumper landed on the sidewalk next to the barge and we had to do a quick repair on his parachute with sail repair tape, because he tore it on a fence. After the last jumps on what I think was Wacker Drive, where they were jumping into a war scene, we were pulling out rifle blanks that were melted into the parachutes. I thought I’d seen a lot, but I’d never seen that. Watching these guys do this was pretty amazing.”

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