Sad Accident over Deland

On Thu, 28 Apr 2005 14:23:11 GMT, "Jay Honeck"
wrote:

I fly in that environment. There's a very active jump club at our
airport. I deal with it every nice day I fly and have for a long time.
If it's safe why in the world did he fly into the jumper? Keep the
jumpers below the airplane and you don't have an issue. They don't
always land or approach where you think they will. Anything within 1/2
mile of the drop target should be suspect.

Deland is unlike any jump operation I've seen (and, admittedly, I haven't
seen more than a handful), in that there are literally no gaps between
jumps. They have so many jumpers that want to skydive that they are able to
keep two (and possibly more) Twin Otters running continually. They never
shut their engines down -- they simply taxi back to load, load as many as
will safely fit, and blast off again.

Zypher Hills was keeping 2 turboprop twins and a DC-3 running
virtually all the time. The turboprops would beat most of the jumpers
down. The DC-3 had an engine failure on take off a few years back and
they parked it in an orange grove. I think the worst injury was a
broken ankle.

the jumpers come down on the SE segment of the field while the planes
use 18/36. There is *usually* plenty of room, I've made 4 or 5 trips
in and out of there in one day when they were really busy.

Roger Halstead (K8RI & ARRL life member)
(N833R, S# CD-2 Worlds oldest Debonair)
www.rogerhalstead.com

In fact, the only time we saw them stop was to refuel. It's an amazing
operation -- but one that doesn't allow a sensible suggestion like yours to
be implemented. There will ALWAYS be planes beneath jumpers in a
continuous operation like this one.