A novice skydiver used techniques picked up from TV to survive after his instructor suffered a heart attack and died during their 13,500ft fall.

Daniel Pharr, 25, on his first ever jump, managed to pull the toggles on his already-deployed parachutes to narrowly steer around a house and some trees after George 'Chip' Steele lost consciousness in mid-air.

Eventually, the pair landed in a field – around one third of a mile from the designated landing strip, in Chester, South Carolina.

Mr Pharr immediately wrestled out of the harness binding him to Mr Steele and tried to give CPR to his 49-year-old instructor, but without success.

Staff at the diving school later said that if the novice – a soldier based in Georgia – had pulled his toggle too hard, the parachute would have spun out of control and he, too, would have died.

“They told me afterward that it was amazing that I knew to do that. This is my survival instinct at that point. I just kind of did what I had to do,” he said.

He said the jump had been given to him as a Christmas gift by his girlfriend. The two both went to a skydiving centre in Chester on Saturday to jump while attached to instructors. As the jumps took place, his mother was standing waiting for him on the landing strip.

Mr Pharr said that, in the plane on the way up, Mr Steele told him he had dived more than 8,000 times before. The pair were the last of about 10 skydivers to jump out of the plane and, after a minute of freefall, he said the instructor “pulled the chute".

“It got super quiet. It’s eerily quiet up there. I made the comment to him, ’It’s surprising how quiet it is.’ And he’s like: ’Welcome to my world,”’ Mr Pharr said.

A few seconds passed, and he asked his instructor another question. This time, Mr Steele didn’t answer. Mr Pharr repeated his question, to no avail.

“And then I just looked up at him and he looked like he was conscious, but just talking to him, I realised something was wrong,” Mr Pharr said. “So at that point I realised I was just going to have to do what I had to do to get down to the ground and try to help him.”

As well as being a terrifying ordeal for Mr Pharr, a miscommunication after he hit the ground left his mother and girlfriend fearing that he, too, had died.

After paramedics arrived and stepped in to diagnose Mr Steele, Mr Pharr asked them to call his girlfriend and mother to say he was safe.

However, they received no message for 15 minutes – and all they was a brief communication on another staffer’s radio which was that a tandem pair was down and it did not look good.

“It was an eternity,” Darlene Huggins said, when asked how long it took her to hear her son’s message. “No, really, it could have been 10, 15 minutes.”

Meanwhile, it looks as if Mr Pharr's skydiving future ambitions may have been thwarted by his family. He would like to dive again, he said - but they have told him to "keep my feet on the ground".

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