High-flying Houston resident takes part in record-setting skydive

Penelope Howe became a United States citizen 19 years ago because she wanted to be able to vote in her adopted home country.

The Houston resident recently was part of “Project 19,” in which a group of women set a skydiving world record to commemorate the anniversary of the passage of the 19^th Amendment, which in 1920 guaranteed American women the right to vote.

Like the fight for women’s suffrage, which was arduous and filled with obstacles, Howe also had to persevere and overcome challenges to take part in the record-breaking feat – she was one of 80 women skydivers who connected for a mid-air formation, while falling in a head-down orientation, on Nov. 25 in Arizona.

The 40-year-old Howe had neck surgery to repair a herniated disc only one year earlier. And the year before that, as she started to train for the record-breaking freefall, she was displaced from her home in another part of the world because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“One of the messages that organizers and the team as a whole was hoping to propagate is just that teamwork and focusing on goals does work and is effective and can get us to great achievements,” Howe said. “So it was kind of a nice intersection of my personal story with the general story behind the event as a whole.”

Howe, a native of England who grew up in the Boston area and has considered Houston a home base of sorts since attending graduate school at Rice University, said she began skydiving as a 19-year-old and has been part of six world-record skydives. This was the fourth time she was part of a team that set the mark for most women in a head-down, vertical formation – with the previous records being 41 in 2010, 63 in 2013 and 65 in 2016, she said.

Howe used to serve as a skydiving instructor but has never considered herself to be a professional skydiver, despite having often made more than 100 jumps per year. She is a linguist and is currently working on a linguistic application for a speech recognition system, she said.

“The feeling of flying and being able to control where your body moves through the air, and then flying a parachute, is just an amazing feeling,” she said.

Norman Kent

Howe had a relative lull in her skydiving frequency after being part of the record jump in 2016, she said. She had focused on the language of Madagascar for her doctoral dissertation, later got a grant to teach there and started living there full-time in 2018.

Howe traveled to Arizona for a skydiving training session in March 2020, around the same time as the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, and said she was not allowed to go back to Madagascar for more than a year. She ended up leaving behind an apartment, some of her belongings and a significant other.

Stuck in the U.S., she was able to work remotely, settled in Houston and focused on getting back into skydiving and training for the record-setting jump. It was originally planned for 2020, the 100-year anniversary of the 19^th Amendment, but got pushed back because of the pandemic.

Howe said she did about 180 skydives during the last year and also trained at indoor wind-tunnel facilities. That came with a significant financial investment as well as a time commitment, she said.

“It requires a good bit of training to hold your body stable in that (vertical) position,” Howe said. “I trained that for years, really.”

The record-breaking event in November, in which multiple attempts were made over the course of a few days and the group first executed a 72-women formation and then 80 but could not add to that number, was more fun and less stressful than her previous record-setting experiences, Howe said. She attributed that in part to the organizers of Project 19, which was sponsored and supported by the Women’s Skydiving Network.

On one hand, Howe said, it left her feeling satisfied and like she could walk away from skydiving. On the other, the experience also rekindled her passion for the sport and made her appreciate it even more.

So when might Howe jump out of a plane again? First she has to take care of a nagging shoulder injury.

“There were times when I was trying and got discouraged and thought, ‘Maybe I should give up. I’m not going to get back to the skill level I need to do this,'” she said of preparing for the record-breaking event. “But in the end, I was so ecstatic to be there. I didn’t give up.”