Willfully jumping out of an airplane, with or without a parachute, may strike some people as a symptom of advanced insanity. Yet today in the U.S. there are 35,000 skydivers, and to them parachuting is a thing of beauty bordering on the psychedelic.
The 20 jumpers who took off last week from Ortner Field in north-central Ohio had each taken the plunge more than 100 times, and they were awaiting yet another rhapsodic game with gravity. By a concatenation of unbelievable stupidities, their "fun jump" became a tragically bad trip.
The idea was to leap from 20,000 ft., free-fall exhilaratingly to 3,000 ft. or so, then pop their chutes for a landing. Ordinarily, such high-altitude jumps are made only after meticulous planning, on clear, calm days, from perfectly positioned aircraft, to targets safely distant from such hazards as rivers and lakes. On this day, though, the sky was mostly overcast at 4,500 ft., the winds aloft ranged up to 60 m.p.h., the air craft was a World War II B-25 bomber with rudimentary navigation equipment, and the pilot was Robert Karns, 29, who had never bothered to get a "type rating" for the plane. The jumpers' tar get: Ortner Field itself, only ten miles from Lake Erie.
Into the Void. Off they went in the B-25 climbing through the clouds and circling north over the lake before heading back toward the field. When Pilot Karns thought he was in approximate position, he radioed the Federal Aviation Administration radar station at Oberlin, Ohio, for a radar vector. The Oberlin operator announced: "You are three miles west of Ortner." "Fine," radioed Karns. "I'm releasing my jumpers." Looking down, all anyone on the plane could see was clouds, broken here and there by patches of brownish green. Both the U.S. Parachute Association and the FAA have regulations forbidding a jump through clouds toward a target that cannot be clearly identified. Nevertheless, Karns signaled the jumpers, and out they spilled into the void.
Bursting through the clouds, Jumper Robert Coy was astonished to find himself far out over the vast expanse of Lake Erie. "I was flabbergasted. I couldn't see land. Nothing. I could see the other parachutes going into the water." A passing boat rescued Coy and Bernard Johnson; two other chutists delayed their drop in order to jump from a still higher altitude and landed safely on the ground. A five-day search turned up ten bodies including one woman. The other six were presumed drowned.