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8 way skydive. Two friends were getting married and they wanted to do a wedding jump for their ceremony.
Not a big deal, but the two getting married were very inexperienced jumpers with less than 100 jumps each. The rest of us were all highly experienced with hundreds if not thousands of jumps. At the time I was sitting a bit over 2000 jumps and was active on both 4-way and 8-way competition teams. (Not my videos, but fair representations of what I was doing at the time).
We planned a jump which would put the newlyweds at the base where they would not need to do a whole lot. Unfortunately the bride had the bright idea that she wanted to come in and dock on the formation, which she did not have the skill set for. I coached her on several jumps having her dock on me. She was terrible, but she did manage to dock on me the last two coach jumps. Part of my coaching was what to do if she goes low and finds herself under the formation and unable to get back up. People falling together fall slower than an individual.
Fast forward and we have a practice jump about a month before the wedding. The groom goes out with another experienced jumper in the base, the bride next then the rest of us diving out.
Well, the bride misses the formation, much like I figured she would. Except she doesn't follow her training and she just sits there under the formation. She was about 500 feet under the formation when she starts waving off, which is the signal she's about to deploy her main parachute. The formation breaks and tracks for their lives, which we literally were.
She deploys and it turned out that I was closest to her. I passed less than 20 feet away doing 120mph where she was slowing to less than 10mph. She later said I sounded like a jet airplane passing by. Had we hit, it would have been fatal.
I grounded her and gave her a good chewing out. We spent the next weekend doing more coaching and I told her if she wanted to do the jump she had to be in the base.
The wedding day came, but unfortunately the weather the day sucked and we didn't get to do the jump that day. We did it about a month later where the jump went pretty well and safely.
Damn as if skydiving wasn't already scary enough
Ehh, it's not that bad normally. I went on and did another ~2500 jumps in the subsequent years.
This was probably the worse situation I was put in, in my entire skydiving career. The fact of the matter the only real safety device in skydiving sits between the jumper's ears. Most accidents occur due to a bad attitude, or ignorance of how to safely do things.