Somebody Dies Here Every Year

Be Warned. The following story is not the usual sort of thing I write. It concerns the sudden and violent death of a skydiver. I wrote the first version of this story while hiding in my tent shortly after it happened. I  was trying to excise the sound of someones death from my memory and thought that putting the story to paper would help. It didn't. Read at your own risk.





Somebody Dies Here Every Year


The World Free Fall Convention. 10 Days of pandemonium and partying. Several thousand type A personalities, live bands, free beer, and an endless parade of every kind of aircraft you could imagine to jump out of. Skydiver heaven. And for those 10 days, it's one of the most dangerous places on earth. 


Somebody dies here every year. At a boogie this big it's difficult to maintain control and enforce safety rules because of the anonymity when someone does something they shouldn't. People will do things here they never would have been allowed to do at their home drop zone. They'll get on a formation far larger than anything they've been on before, demo a canopy much smaller than anything they've flown before, or attempt a high performance landing far above their skill level. At home, with the instructors and coaches who are familiar with your abilities, doing something stupid will at the very least result in a scolding, and if the offence is serious enough, you could be grounded. But here nobody knows who you are, or what you can't, or shouldn't, be doing. The causes of the fatalities here vary, but a common thread running through many of them is a mistake, sometimes several mistakes, that lead to your canopy getting away from you, ending in sudden impact with the ground, and death. It's usually anonymous, it's not someone you know, someone you would call a friend. It's silent, we often don't hear about it until hours after it has happened. The place is huge, a major airport with airplanes often on simultaneous jump runs hundreds of yards apart. With so much going on someone can go missing for hours until their absence is noted, or somebody sees a canopy lying half concealed in a corn field. We make jokes about it. "It's the bounce that kills you, so grab as much dirt as you can when you hit and hang on! Aim for something soft! Pick out somebody who's always pissed you off and aim for them!" Gallows humour.



But it's not always silent, distant, and anonymous.



We were in Load Organizer Tent 3 finishing up packing our gear after our first jump of the day. It was always the same group of people, we'd book all the seats on Mike Mullins King Air for the Dirty Bird load. We didn't want to be on the Early Bird load because as the first load of the day they often got a bad spot and had to walk back. Other people had arrived putting about 25 people in the open sided tent all talking in loud excited voices as we went over the last jump and started to plan the next. We were expecting to do 8-10 jumps before sunset, a typical day for us at the Convention. There was a pair of port-a-potties parked just outside the tent on the landing field side, and as we talked I was vaguely aware that a large pickup with a holding tank in the back had pulled up to perform the morning ritual of pumping them out.



I was on my knees, almost done packing, my pilot chute bundled in my hand ready to be stowed in its pouch, talking over my shoulder to Mathew Greene. Matt2 is an emergency room trauma nurse from Texas, a friend of long standing from previous conventions and skills camps.



Suddenly, with no warning, there was a huge bang that sounded like a high speed car collision and it seemed I could feel a shock wave pass over me. At the same intstant the engine on the idling truck stopped. I turned my head, looked past Matt, and tried to make sense out of what I saw. Someone was draped unmoving across the badly dented hood of the truck, suspension lines from a canopy dropping onto him, and the truck's front bumper was lying on the ground.



I couldn't process the scene in front of me. It made no sense. My first thought was that he was walking past the truck when the engine blew up, and that had somehow forced his canopy out of the container. It couldn't be a skydiving accident, not here, not right next to us, just outside the tent that we called home for ten days every summer. Accidents happened out in a field, off the end of a runway, silently, anonymously.



I found out later he had been flying downwind over top of our tent and had attempted a high performance landing, executing a 180 degree turn to dive and accelerate his canopy to enable it to swoop along at high speed with the pilot just skimming the ground. But he'd miscalculated, and was too low to complete the manoeuvre. Instead of skimming the ground he slammed into it a steep angle and hit the front of the truck a split second later. The impact was hard enough to stall the engine on the truck, and tear off the bumper.

Matt2 took two steps, placed two fingers on the guys neck as he checked for a pulse, and started pointing at people with his other hand as he firmly and calmly began to reel off commands. "You, run to manifest and tell them to call 911! You, run to the Air Boss and tell him there's been an accident! You, run to the end of the landing area and see if the ambulance station has been manned yet! You, ……."

Matt Dowling, Matt1, was a few steps away, cell phone out, already talking to the 911 operator. "We need a medevac flight now at the Rantoul airport to pick up someone who's been in a serious skydiving accident, paramedics are already on scene!"



The ambulance pulled up while Matt2 was still checking for vital signs, they had just pulled into their parking spot 50 yards away and had seen the accident happen. As the driver stepped out Matt2 looked up at him and said "He has no airway, I have to move his head and straighten his neck." The driver nodded and reached back into the ambulance for a cervical collar. Matt lifted his head, the driver reached in to slide the collar into place, saw the side of his head that had struck the truck, stopped, shared a look with Matt, and Matt slowly, carefully, put the guy's head back down on the hood of the truck. As Matt took a step back, his shoulders slumped, and his arms dropped limp to his sides. The driver turned to us and said in a shaky voice "Everybody please clear the tent, we're going to need this area."



Into his phone Matt1 simply said "Cancel the helicopter, he's dead." And snapped it shut.



There was a moment of quiet as everybody tried to process and absorb what had just happened, and then they slowly began to move, to gather up their possessions'.



I was still on my knees, my pilot chute in my hand, ready to be stowed.



And somebody I'd never met, who left behind a wife and 2 kids, was lying dead on the hood of a truck 15 feet away.



The rest of the day passed in a fog. We were put on a weather hold right then, a light rain had begun, and I fled to spend the next few hours hiding in my tent. I couldn't get that sound out of my mind. I had imagined many times what would happen when somebody went in, what would happen at impact, what the sound would be like. It never sounded like that when I imagined it. It was never personal, immediate, or nearby.



People who hadn't been there kept talking about the accident, how the truck shouldn't have been there, as if that would have prevented his death. To me, he was as good as dead when he started that turn. If the truck hadn't been there he'd have died when he hit the outhouses. If the outhouses hadn't been there, he would have gone hurtling through the tent, and it would have been impossible for him to get through that tent without hitting several people, causing serious and potentially fatal injuries to them.



Late in the afternoon a bunch of us met and decided to head into a nearby city for dinner and a movie. There was Matt1 and Matt2, Kelly, Bob, and me. I looked around the table in the restaurant, at the smiles on everybody's faces, listened to the jokes and the laughter, and wondered what the rest of them were thinking. Nobody mentioned the accident but I couldn't get that sound out of my head, and my meal tasted like paper Mache. It was surreal. A man had died, and we were carrying on like it had never happened, like it had nothing to do with us.



The movie we saw was Pirates of the Caribbean 2, but I have no idea what happened on the screen, instead I found myself wondering about that new widow, and the kids who'd lost their dad. I wondered what they'd been told, how they were coping.



By the time we returned to the airport an enormous storm had gone through and trashed the place. We pulled our sopping wet clothes from the wrecks of our tents and fled to a motel.



That day was finally over, but that sound is with me still.



Somebody dies here every year.