IT WAS third time lucky for hospice nurse Heather Hird when she conquered her fears and jumped from a plane two miles up.

Heather, a former nurse at Ryedale Day Hospice, had done skydives twice before for St Catherine’s Hospice despite being terrified, but when she decided to give it a third go she found it was much more fun.

“I quite enjoyed it,” she said. “I’d clung on to the harness in terror before, but this time I managed to let go and wave. It gets better each time.”

Heather, who lives in Whitby and now works at St Catherine’s in Scarborough, was in freefall for the first mile, falling at 120mph before her instructor opened their parachute.

She did her first parachute jump five years ago. “I was so terrified that when I did it again four years later, the instructor said he remembered me because he’d never seen anyone look so grey,” she said.

Heather said she had decided to jump for a third time because, as a nurse at St Catherine’s inpatient unit in Scarborough and formerly at Whitby and Ryedale Day Hospices, she knows how much the hospice means to families.