By STEPHEN D'ANTAL

Last updated at 00:02 13 February 2007

It's the most gut-wrenching, mesmerising and shocking clip of video footage imaginable.

Shot from the tiny camera in the helmet of champion skydiver Michael Holmes, it records with chilling clarity what happened when he plummeted 12,000ft to earth.

• World exclusive skydiver video... watch the incredible footage here!



There is the moment when he tugs his ripcord and discovers his parachute won't open. There are the frantic efforts to release it, made as he spins so fast that movement is almost impossible.

• Gallery: Click here for more amazing pictures of Michael's 12,000ft plummet



There is his attempt to release his reserve parachute - and the horror as he realises that, too, has become entangled above him.

Just 550ft above the ground, he waves goodbye to the world and screams a last message into the camera's microphone, resigned to a horrific death. Moments later comes the sound of the sickening impact - and then blackness.

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Michael's friend Jonathan King, who jumped from the the same plane, also filmed the whole event and landed shortly afterwards.

As he rushed to help, his helmet camera recorded the incredible outcome. Michael was bleeding, broken, unconscious - but alive.

Today for the first time, Michael, 25, tells the amazing story of how he survived that fall from 2.2 miles above Lake Taupo in New Zealand, with only a punctured lung and a broken ankle.

Michael, from Jersey, said: "I should be dead, absolutely. I'd certainly given up hope. When I was up above Lake Taupo, I had a little bit of hope that I'd land in the water.

"But even then, the sensible part of me knew it wouldn't be all right - that I'd probably be knocked unconscious at best and drown.

"I was spinning so fast that I was nearly passing out from the G-force. There was no way I could choose my landing spot or aim in any way.

"Towards the end, I thought I was headed towards the airfield car park. That was when I assumed survival wasn't an option.

"I thought I was going to hit the concrete and gravel and be killed instantly. It was just a matter of saying goodbye and then waiting..."

There is no fuss or hyperbole in his account. As one of the world's top ten skydivers with more than 7,000 jumps to his name, Michael - known as Mikey by his friends - is aware of the risks of his career and knows that panic-induced human error is to blame for almost all accidents.

Mikey's experience as a qualified instructor, a member of the British skydiving team and reigning New Zealand champion means he can recall the event in remarkable detail.

By his own admission, Mikey never gave a thought during his two minutes and two seconds of freefall to his middle-class childhood, his success as a schoolboy motocross rider, or his abandoned career as a computer network engineer.

He never paused to regret the moment seven years ago when his father, also called Michael, brought home a skydiving magazine containing an advert for a two-week parachute course in Florida - which first inspired his interest in the sport.

He didn't dwell on his girlfriend, schoolteacher Philippa Aitchison, from Neath, South Wales, or the renovation work that still awaits him at their recently purchased £100,000 cottage in Taupo.

"I didn't have time to think about anything," he insisted. "Friends ask if I was scared but really I was just angry that I'd done everything exactly as I should and it hadn't worked.

"I was very focused on what I was doing and I remember everything. Nothing's a blur."

It began as a routine day last December for Mikey who was instructing a group of trainees who set off in bright sunshine from an airbase.

He said: "There were 16 people on the plane, the usual mix of students and instructors. It was a routine jump from 15,000ft - about a minute's freefall and then opening my main canopy when the altimeter on my wrist showed 5,000ft.

"When I pulled the ripcord, I realised there was a problem almost instantly. Usually you get pulled upright and look up to see the canopy but this time I was just spinning. The parachute hadn't opened.

"I didn't think that was a big deal. That's why you open at 5,000ft - it gives you time to sort these things out, untwist the lines or whatever."

The video shows that Mikey spent 46 seconds trying to free his main parachute by reaching behind him to unsnag the fine cords between the harness and the canopy. It's a manoeuvre he had successfully completed several times before.

"This time I couldn't do it,' he said. "It still isn't a worry because you've got a cutaway cable, a cord which you pull to detach the main canopy from you, so you can open your reserve chute.

"It's happened to me seven times before in 7,000 jumps and countless times to others around the world. The system is very safe. I had complete faith in it.

"Actually it's just a bit of fun, because going back into freefall is a nice feeling and then you open your reserve chute.

"The only thing that slightly annoyed me at that time was that I would have to go to look for my main parachute, which costs £1,600, in a forest.

"So I pulled the cutaway at 3,500ft...and nothing happened. It was in that second that all hell broke loose in my mind. The lines had snagged, so the main canopy was still there.

"At first I thought they were caught on my clothes. I was wearing a hooded top that day and I thought the hood was the problem, so for a few seconds I was reaching behind me trying to clear it.

"But it wasn't that either - the cords seemed to be catching on part of the parachute container on my back, which is a one-in-a-million chance.

"We carry a small knife to cut the parachute lines if necessary but there was no way I could reach them. I was being thrown around like a rag doll, spinning in the air so quickly that I was nearly blacking out.

"I knew that if I opened my reserve chute into the mess of my main canopy, it could slow my descent rate down so I might not die.

"But on the other hand, it could make things worse by wrapping itself round the main chute, reducing the drag and causing me to descend even faster."

At 700ft - just seven seconds before impact - Mikey had no choice but to pull the reserve cable.

"That was the last shot. I'd left it late so there wouldn't be much time, if it didn't work, for me to speed up. And it didn't work.

"Nothing changed. So at that point I thought, well, I've got my camera and I'll wave goodbye. There's nothing left for me to do..."

The film shows he was at 550ft - five-and-a-half seconds from the ground - when he waved.

"Then, the nearer I got to the ground, the more everything seemed to speed up. You see the ground rushing up and it's just a matter of waiting for impact.

"I tried to think of something, the right thing to say for the camera. But I looked at the ground again and without thinking I just blurted out, "Oh s***, I'm dead...Bye!!!!"

"People have asked me since if I saw a white light or my life passing in front of me in that split second but there was nothing."

Mikey estimates that he had reached terminal velocity of 120mph during the freefall part of his flight, but that the drag of the parachute had reduced his impact speed to around 80mph.

He knew exactly what was likely to happen to him - Mikey had often heard his father, a police surgeon, give dispassionate, matter-of-fact descriptions of the aftermath of high-impact accidents.

Now it was his turn to give a cool, professional account of a disturbing event - not even pausing to wonder at the astonishing turn of luck that made him miss the water, where he would surely have drowned, and overshoot the airfield car park, which would have meant instant death, by less than 100ft.

Mikey didn't know it but there was a 6ft-high thicket of brambles and wild shrubbery on a patch of wasteground between the airfield and the shoreline of Five Mile Bay.

Even if he had known about it, in his terrifying vortex, he had no way of steering towards it. He must have taken just a fraction of a second to crash through the tangle of thick, thorny branches, but they arrested his fall just enough to save his life.

Even now, weeks later, the imprint his body made is visible beneath the thorns. During the impact, Mikey's right lung collapsed and his left ankle shattered.

Jonathan, who was 100ft above Mikey, watched helplessly as his friend plunged to the ground. Not surprisingly, his first reaction was that Mikey must surely be dead.

"I hadn't really appreciated how fast he was going until I saw - and heard - him hit the ground," said Jonathan, who is training to become a paramedic.

"Even from that distance it was a big, crunching thud and he sort of bounced up. The undergrowth was so thick that if I hadn't seen him land, no one would have found him.

"I honestly didn't think there was any hope for Mikey but I also knew that if he was still alive, every second would count."

As he slipped in and out of consciousness, Mikey's microphone recorded a sickening gurgle from his collapsed lung.

Then Jonathan can be seen hacking his way through the undergrowth, ignoring razor-sharp thorns slicing his face.

"He was kind of breathing," Jonathan said. "But then his lips turned really blue and he stopped, so I gave him a big pinch on his cheek and he came back."

With the pair's helmet cameras still rolling, the film records every detail of Mikey's rescue by stretcher and then emergency helicopter, which had been called by friends at the airfield who had also witnessed the fall.

Within minutes, he was flown to Waikato Hospital in nearby Hamilton, where he joked with doctors as they prepared for the emergency surgery to repair his punctured lung.

In hospital, pumped full of morphine, Mikey spent the next two days having nightmarish flashbacks of the whole incident.

"I was convinced I was dead,' he recalled. "I was heavily sedated so I can't really explain where I thought I was. But it was only when I fully regained consciousness that I realised that I had survived and only when I watched the video that I was able to accept that what I remembered had actually happened."

Perhaps it is his intensive parachute training or his father's detailed explanation of suspicious deaths in the Channel Islands, but Mikey's interest in his own near-death now borders on the forensic.

Like other professionals, Mikey studies reports in skydiving magazines which analyse serious accidents.

"It nearly always comes down to human error," he said. "It's the amateur, the weekend warrior, doing the wrong procedure or in the wrong order.

"I've known two people who have died, who have had collisions with someone else in freefall and been knocked unconscious. But injuries from equipment failure are almost zero. So all your training tells you you can cut away and be fine.

"Even now, when I see the film, I remember that my state of mind was quite intense because I didn't have much time and had to carefully follow a set of established procedures.

"Follow everything in the right order and you'll make a bad situation good again.

"My adrenaline was pumping but I wasn't freaking out, shouting "Oh my God, this is it, the end"."

Mikey was in hospital for just 11 days after the accident on December 12 last year as surgeons carried out two operations on his shattered ankle. At his bedside throughout was Philippa.

She said: "I'm waiting for my UK teaching qualifications to be ratified in New Zealand so I was doing a holiday job delivering Christmas mail when one of Michael's colleagues rang to tell me what had happened.

"I cried when I saw Mikey in hospital because his face and body were blown up to twice their normal size. But he was still conscious when I got there and more interested in asking about the new mountain bike he'd ordered that morning."

Philippa, herself an avid skydiver, has also sat through the video of Mikey's fateful leap dozens, if not hundreds of times, though she admits she would not have been able to watch it had the ending been different.

"If Mikey had died, I couldn't have watched his final wave or heard him say goodbye - not even once. It wouldn't have helped me and I would have wanted it destroyed," she said.

The couple both insist that Mikey's miracle escape will not change their way of life - after all, they are already following their dreams by travelling the world and skydiving.

Philippa said: "If anything, I think it's made us realise how much we really appreciate each other. Otherwise, at home, real life goes on just as it did before. Mikey's still on crutches but I still shout at him to take the rubbish out and that's how we like it."

Mikey hopes to resume skydiving in April. Despite his brush with death, Philippa will be cheering him on. "I'd only be worried if he said he didn't want to jump,' she insisted. "Then I'd think it had really changed him."

Mikey insists he hasn't altered. He said: "I'll continue making my living teaching skydiving and I'll still spend part of the year going round the world to different competitions.

"I've gone through everything that happened a thousand times in my head. It was a million-to-one chance. I'm prepared to stake my life on the likelihood that it will never happen again."

• Gallery: Click here for more amazing pictures of Michael's 12,000 ft plummet



Visit www.mailonsunday.co.uk/skydiver from midnight on Monday to watch the incredible world exclusive footage