A parachutist died Thursday afternoon when his parachute failed to open properly and he fell into the front yard of a private residence, authorities said. The victim, whose name was not released pending notification of family members, was an experienced jumper who had been parachuting for about 10 years, police said. The plane used in Thursday's jump was operated by the Freefall Adventures Skydiving School of Williamstown. David Pancake, an instructor at the school, told the Gloucester County Times parachutes must be deployed at about 2,000 feet to give sufficient time to operate correctly, and that the victim may have lost track of his altitude.
Bad time to lose focus.
The accident was being investigated by county prosecutors and the Federal Aviation Administration. The last fatality reported from the skydiving school was in 2002, when a 28-year-old Brooklyn man died after his parachute failed to fully open. Last month, a 50-year-old woman was injured when she jumped from a Freefall Adventures plane and crashed into tree branches after her parachute collapsed.
Um, mebbe I'll pick another activity, anybody need a pudgy, pear-shaped bounty-hunter in Afghanistan?
Posted by: Steve White ||
09/03/2004 1:05:27 AM ||
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#1
One of my best friends is an avid skydiver, but I see little reason to jump out of a plane unless it is on fire, the controls are slack, and at least one wing has come off.
Actually, about six to eight feet. We had an instance when I was stationed in OH in the early nineties when a lady jumped and had a failure of both her main and reserve - she landed in a marsh on her back, and lived to tell about it. The local newsies had a picture of where she landed - and may God forgive me, but it was a perfect lady-on-her-back shaped hole right out of a Warner Bros. cartoon, the wet ground being what saved her. Witnesses saw her actually bounce ABOVE the low trees and bushes in the area. She was in the hospital for more than a year but made a full recovery.
Mike
Posted by: Mike Kozlowski ||
09/03/2004 14:00 Comments ||
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#5
Mike---Talk about dipping deep in the luck barrel! I read about a guy that jumped out of a bomber at 10,000 ft and hit a deep snowdrift and lived. As for me, I will remain nice and cozy in the cockpit of my C172P, snugly strapped in with my 4-point inertia reel harness.......until the plane is stopped and I can step down to the tarmac without parachute assist, thank you veddy much!
Posted by: Alaska Paul ||
09/03/2004 20:38 Comments ||
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A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
