"In his hands the parachute chords felt like threads, thin filaments connecting him to the sky. Once a Merlin engine had kept him aloft; now all he had was the swollen fabric of the parachute canopy and its accompanying harness, leaving his life hanging quite literally in the balance."

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"He looked up again. Above him the canopy had fully deployed and he swayed beneath it like one of the puppets his sister had played with as a child. He knew he was lucky to be alive, lucky to have escaped the stricken Hurricane, to have made it out of the cockpit. So many others hadn’t. It was all too easy for the canopy to jam, or for oil to cover the windscreen, making it impossible to judge how close you were to the ground. Too close and bailing out would have been suicidal." 

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The Tall Sky, from the short story collection, The Painted Sky.