Skydiver survives without parachute

MALINDI, Kenya, Nov. 15 (UPI) -- Lt. Charlie Williams of the Royal Army plummeted 3,500 feet after his parachute failed to open, but a corrugated iron roof of a Kenyan hut broke his fall.

Williams awakened dazed in the living room of a home with astonished faces of Kenyan villagers gazing at him, but he escaped with three cracked vertebrae and a dislocated finger.

"I don't know if I'm very lucky or very unlucky. I'm alive and frankly that's all that matters," said Williams, who is recovering at his parent's home in Bradford, England.

Army instructors thought he was doomed after he leapt from a Cessna 102 plane over Malindi Airport in Kenya, clipped the side of the plane and ended spiraling downward, head-first, the Sun reported Monday.

When he pulled his ripcord his feet became entangled in the parachute's rigging.

"Everything I tried failed," he said. "I resigned myself to the fact I was about to die."

However, he said the next thing he knew, he crashed into the roof of the house -- at an estimated 120 mph