was convinced that he was going to die when his auxiliary parachute failed, but escaped with a punctured lung and a broken ankle.

Mr Holmes’s ordeal was captured on a helmet-mounted camera, which continued filming even after he landed.

He landed in a blackberry bush, 30 metres from a carpark, where firefighters rushed to the scene to cut him free.

Mr Holmes, a skydiving instructor from Taupo Tandem Skydiving, recalled the incident, which took place on December 12, from his bed in Waikato Hospital. “When the second parachute didn’t open I realised it was all over,” he said. “I was going to die. You don’t have much time to say goodbye. I just said: ‘S**t I’m going to die’.”

“The next thing I remember is seeing friends, firemen, ambulances and police dogs.”

His ordeal was witnessed by John Siddles, a local man, and his 18-year-old son, Adam. The pair were at a nearby lookout watching the parachutists to decide if they wanted to try it themselves.

“One of the skydivers was coming down and going round and round,” Mr Siddles said. “He looked like he was all tangled up or something. He just came down, straight down. It looked like it had opened but it’s hard to say.

“We drove to the site where the skydiver landed and asked if we could help, but fellow skydivers had landed nearby and had things under control. It was a bit yucky. We decided it’s not for us.”

Constable Mark Bond of Taupo police said that a dog handler driving past was flagged down by a member of the public who thought the parachutist might be in trouble.

Mr Holmes, the youngest British person ever to qualify as a skydiving instructor, has been active in the sport for seven years. He was found unconscious after he landed in a conservation area in Five Mile Bay, Taupo, and was airlifted to hospital.

Hugh Barclay, a spokesman for Taupo Tandem Skydiving, said that due to the location of the landing there was some difficulty extracting Mr Holmes.

He said that the company will make no further comment pending an investigation by the New Zealand Parachute Industry Association.

New Zealand has up to three non-fatal accidents annually out of 70,000 solo parachute jumps.

Skydiving has its origins in the military and has been practiced since the early 1900s. Competitions first started in the 1930s and it became an international sport in 1951.

Lucky escapes

Flight Sergeant Nicholas Alkemade survived a fall estimated to have been 18,000ft during the Second World War by landing in a heavy snowdrift. He had leapt from a blazing Lancaster bomber

In 1972 Vesna Vulovic, a Yugoslav air stewardess, fell 10,160 metres (33,000ft) without a parachute, and lived after a DC9 passenger jet blew up over the former Czechoslovakia. She landed in woodland

In 1993 New Zealander Klint Freemantle, 22, plunged 3,000 feet into a 3ft-deep duck pond. He emerged almost without a scratch

The French parachutist Didier Dahran survived after being sucked into a cyclone that sent him spinning up to 25,000ft in 1993. He was in the air for two hours.