Are these folks crazy?

That's the most frequently asked question of a group of Virginia Tech students and alumni who, despite seeming completely sane on the surface, spend their weekends doing what most of us would never dare: voluntarily jumping out of airplanes.

The Skydiving Club of Virginia Tech is a 30-year-old organization with 35 devoted members -- flying Hokies with a sky-high passion for the most extreme of extreme sports.

Dozens of members make a 90-minute pilgrimage south each weekend to the Adrenaline Air Sports drop zone in Jonesville, N.C., to let their bodies and inhibitions fly free.

Many of the students and alumni have hundreds of career jumps and several are certified jump instructors and parachute, or "rig," packers.

The Tech jumpers have committed themselves to growing the sport and dispelling the notion that skydiving is unsafe and insane.

The club always welcomes potential members to try an initial "tandem" jump, in which an instructor is harnessed to the jumper's back and operates a single, large parachute for the both of them.

"It's so safe," said club president Christie Nix, who as a psychology graduate student has probably studied insanity at least a time or two. "If you're with people who know what they're doing and who care about checking and maintaining their equipment, it's incredibly safe."

Indeed, on the club's Web site, skydiveVT.com, the group contends that skydiving is actually safer than driving a car.

Aaron Bernard, a forestry graduate student who's made 240 career sky dives, said everyone should try the sport at least once.

"It really does feel like you're flying," he said. "It's indescribable."

Bernard said he and many members of the skydiving club actually have a violent fear of heights. But for some reason the phobia never really avails itself when they jump from 10,000 feet.

"If I was standing on the edge of a tall building, I'd be terrified," he said. "And I'd much rather jump out of an airplane than to land in one."

Skydiving is enjoyable, the club members said, because a jumper never feels the scary, sinking feeling of falling that you would during, say, a steep drop on a roller coaster.

The small Cessna planes that carry the skydivers usually fly about 100 mph, so when a jumper exits the plane, he or she is already carrying that speed. Because a skydiver never descends much faster than 120 mph, there is a sensation of floating, not falling.

"If there's any way to describe it at all, imagine that you're floating like you would in a pool, except there's no water and there's a 120-mph breeze in your face," Bernard said. "It's an awesome feeling. When you're up there, you just look out at the sunset and the clouds and it just feels like you're part of a picture."

The Virginia Tech club has roots that date back to the 1970s, but only since 2001 has it set out to become a large, viable campus organization.

"We wanted to make it something more besides giving advertising to the drop zone," former president Jonathan "Woolly" Charlton, a Tech alumnus, said. "We wanted to make it more of a brotherhood."

As a registered club at Tech, the skydivers can post free advertising all across campus, and the university supplied them with their Web site. The club has regular parachute demonstrations out in the campus drill field to attract students.

Charlton, who graduated in May with an industrial engineering degree, said skydiving can be a strong source of camaraderie. Two years ago, he took part in a 73-person joint sky dive.

"It's just like in football when a team scores a touchdown and everyone celebrates together in the end zone," Charlton said. "When a bunch of people jump out of a plane together and everyone feels that same adrenaline, you can see it in each other's eyes. It's such a shared experience."

But there are safety concerns.

Charlton said most statistics show that some sort of parachute malfunction occurs once every 500 or 600 jumps, and true to the math, Charlton has experienced two such incidents in his 1,000-jump career. Both times, Charlton's primary chute failed to open, and he activated his reserve chute and landed safely.

Such malfunctions, Charlton said, are almost always the result of human error, usually improper chute packing. During the two times his primary chute failed to open, someone else had packed it for him.

About 30 people in the United States die a year in skydiving accidents, according to the U.S. Parachute Association. There are about 350,000 people who make 3 million total jumps a year, so there is one fatality about every 100,000 jumps.

"We really care a lot about keeping our equipment in good condition and we really take the time to make sure everything is done right," Nix said. "And we have a lot of people who really know what they're doing."

In addition to any safety concerns, a drawback of skydiving is its expense, especially for a beginner.

Tech club members can get a slightly discounted rate of $199 for their first tandem jump at the North Carolina drop zone. To become a licensed solo skydiver is quite an investment, requiring about $2,000 to complete the minimum number of tandem jumps and seven "accelerated free-fall" training jumps to be USPA-certified.

"Sometimes you have to decide whether you want to buy groceries or go to the drop zone that weekend," Bernard said.

Nix said Tech jumpers save money by having their own coaches, equipment and parachute packers, and experienced jumpers like her, Bernard and Charlton can sky-dive for about $20 a go.

With its loyal membership, the club has been able to succeed in collegiate skydiving competitions.

Last month, with about $2,500 in financial help from the university, Tech finished second out of eight schools that receive similar levels of funding in the USPA's national competition in Florida. The team competed in several one-, two- and four-person jumping categories, rating its ability to make dive formations and land accurately.

Tech's most experienced skydiver, Jamie Sides, who's jumped more than 2,000 times, won the gold medal for sport accuracy, maneuvering his canopy to land exactly on top of a 16-centimeter target.

Bernard said skydiving is an addictive sport that has helped him build countless friendships.

"I love to sky-dive, but more than that I love the people who sky-dive," he said. "If they were any different, I'm sure I wouldn't like it nearly as much."

On the Web: www.skydiveVT.com