Dr Ross Williams and Andrew Hensel jumped out of a plane for O-Week 1986
Andrew Hensel on the Barr Smith Lawns circa 1984/5, promoting the Skydiving Club. The board behind him displays images from the book series “Skies Call”.
“We Could Die!” announced the posters that Ross Williams and Andrew Hensel plastered across the North Terrace Campus during O-Week 1986.
Beneath this provocative heading, they printed a picture of a human figure under a parachute with the strings cut.
The dramatic posters drew quite the crowd to the University oval to witness a “demonstration jump” – a skydive performed by Ross and Andrew, alongside prominent South Australian skydiver Ian Wark, on the afternoon of 3 March 1986.
“We took off from Adelaide Airport in a tiny Cessna VH-RFQ,” recalls Ross. “The plane was so overloaded that we had trouble taking off.”
Ross, who founded the University’s Skydiving Club while he was a Ph D candidate in Computer Science, has now performed 300 jumps. He still remembers this one in particular detail. Ross had cut his teeth with jumps above the wide, empty fields near the Adelaide Skydiving Centre north of Adelaide. On 3 March, shortly after leaving the relative safety of the tiny Cessna, the complicated nature of a city jump became suddenly clear.
Andrew Hensel parachutes towards the University oval with a flare dangling from his leg, 1986.
“We flew to the university and got out at 2500' above the university oval and immediately opened our parachutes. This was my first ever demonstration jump and, instead of seeing the vast paddocks of Lower Light beneath me, I saw a complicated city of buildings and power lines with a tiny university oval that I was supposed to land on!” recalls Ross.
“Furthermore, I was supposed to ignite a flare on my leg! I spent too much time trying to light the flare and then focused on finding the oval and steering towards it. I became aware that the Adelaide Zoo was just across the river and remembered that it had a lion pen…”
“I spent too much time trying to light the flare and then focused on finding the oval and steering towards it. I became aware that the Adelaide Zoo was just across the river and remembered that it had a lion pen…”
This moment of realisation about the fate that might follow a misjudged landing perhaps added a sinister edge to the “We Could Die” posters so light-heartedly stuck to the University buildings below.
However, despite the various mishaps and mid-jump misgivings, Ross arrived exactly where he was supposed to. “Somehow I managed to land on the oval about 10m from the target,” he says.
The crowd on the ground were not the only audience for the stunt. “Channel 10 turned up and it was on the news that night.”
As well as being an enthusiastic skydiver, Dr Ross Williams (B Sc (Ma Sc) 1983, B Sc (Ma & Comp Sc) (Hons) 1984, Ph D (Ma & Comp Sc) 1990) became a highly successful entrepreneur and founder.
Landing on the oval, 1986.
In 2000, alongside Dave Sag, Ross founded Carbon Planet Ltd to help businesses measure and manage their emissions. His earlier technology company Rocksoft was acquired by ADIC (now Quantum) in 2006. He created several novel technologies, namely the Veracity data integrity security tool and the Blocklets redundancy-elimination software, and is considered a significant contributor to the data deduplication space globally.
In 2007, Ross made a generous donation of $200,000 to the Vice-Chancellor's Scholarship fund at the University of Adelaide, securing academic opportunities for ongoing generations of students, researchers and aspiring entrepreneurs.
His fellow skydiver, Andrew Hensel (B Sc (Ma Sc) 1985, B Sc (Ma Sc) (Hons) 1986), went on to be awarded a Master in pure mathematics at the University of Waterloo Canada. Andrew passed away in 1990, and Ross remembers him fondly as an extremely skilled mathematician and a unique character.
L-R: Andrew Hensel, Ian Wark and Ross Williams smiling after their jump, 1986.
“He was an extraordinary person,” says Ross. “For example, when Ernő Rubik [creator of the Rubik’s cube] visited Adelaide on a promotional tour, Andrew was the one demonstrating solving the cube for the public in the department store John Martins. His time was about 45 seconds, I think. He created a hot air balloon out of several garbage bags and set it flying and managed to shut down Adelaide Airport. He once got several exercise books and wrote out one million zeros because he wanted to feel just how big one million was. He wrote a list of 10,000 things in his life. He just did stuff like that all the time.”
Happily, apart from a sprained wrist (the only injury Ross ever acquired in his 300 jumps), the demonstration jump that these two exceptional alumni performed together with Ian Wark in O-Week 1986 went off without a hitch.