Follow-up -- Leon Sebek -- Press Clips

[quade 3]

http://www.yorkregion.com/yr/newscentre/richmondhill/story/799534p-948118c.html

Quote

Skydiver makes miracle recovery
Richmond Hill man wasn't expected to survive fall

Linda Johnson, Staff Writer
Dec 22, 2002

Leon Sebek's holiday plans to do some shopping and see friends may sound a lot like anyone else's.
But for him and his wife, Betty Dysart, it'll be a Christmas like no other.

When the Richmond Hill resident suffered a horrendous skydiving accident in August, no one expected him to live.

Today, little more than three months later, he's home.

"Amazed," he said Wednesday, to describe the way he feels about his recovery.

Talking by phone from his room at the Toronto Rehabilitation Institute, he sounded eager to get home Thursday and finish his Christmas shopping.

"I can walk unassisted pretty much anywhere and do stairs - whatever I want to do. So I'm going to go out and brave the crowds," he said.

The accident, which happened Aug. 31 at the Dundas Air Plaza, west of Hamilton, was Mr. Sebek's first serious mishap in 10 years of skydiving.

Without help from his log, he wasn't quite sure whether the jump was his 94th or 97th, but he was closing on the 100 mark.

It was about 7:30 p.m. when Mr. Sebek was standing on the plane's wing preparing to jump. As he tells it, the wind grabbed the small pilot's chute and dragged it out. That extracted his main chute and dragged him off the wing and into the tail.

His head hit the tail of the plane and he fell, drifting unconscious 3,000 metres to the ground.

When members of his Skydive Swoop club couldn't find him, an intense search began, which included police from Durham, Hamilton and Halton. At about 3 a.m., a police helicopter finally found him in a quarry northwest of Dundas.

The accident left him with a hole in his skull. His neck was broken in two places and he had multiple broken bones. Doctors at Hamilton General Hospital told his wife they couldn't do anything.


'... we haven't done this on our own. To me, something other than his medical help has got us this far. His determination and prayers have got us this far.'
"They came into the waiting room to tell me there was no hope for him," Ms Dysart recalled. "Then, 45 minutes later, they came in and said, 'There is some life. We're going to go in and fix his head.' It was wonderful."

After being in a coma for three weeks, Mr. Sebek began to recover slowly.

"It's been tough. It's been very tough, but I've had a lot of close friends with me, helping me. You need a lot of support, people's prayers," Ms Dysart, adding the experience has strengthened their religious faith.

"We weren't churchgoers. We believed in God, but that was about it. But, we haven't done this on our own. To me, something other than his medical help has got us this far. His determination and prayers have got us this far."

Mr. Sebek has no recollection of his fall. In fact, the last thing he remembers was eating lunch on the day of the accident.

A native of Edmonton, he was living in Calgary when he tried skydiving for the first time at a friend's invitation.

"That got me hooked. So every weekend, I drove up from Calgary to Edmonton, about 1,500 kilometres a weekend to go skydiving," he said. "I was really passionate about it. I got my licence that first summer.

"There's a thrill associated with sticking your head out the door and your brain saying, 'You're not a bird. Get back in the plane'."

Despite the sport's obvious danger, he said he never considered the possibility of a really serious accident.

"No, I always thought I was invincible and something like this would never happen to me," he said.

Mr. Sebek still has months of therapy ahead of him and must go for out-patient treatment twice a week. He's not expecting to return to work for another six months.

The couple, who have lived in Richmond Hill for 10 years, will be spending Christmas day with friends. Over the holidays, Mr. Sebek, a director at Celestica, also wants to see some of his colleagues from work.

And, of course, he's determined to get back to jumping as soon as he can.

"Absolutely," he said, adding he intends to do everything exactly as he did before.

But there is one thing he'll do differently. "I'll be double-checking my pilot's chute before I get out on the wing," he said.

quade -
The World's Most Boring Skydiver

[robzay 0]

Glad he's alright. Good story just before Christmas... thanks Quade

[DYEVOUT 0]

Was his pilot chute already on it's way out of the BOC during climbout ? "standing on the wing" - Beech ?

Glad he's gonna get better.

----------------=8^)----------------------
"I think that was the wrong tennis court."

[PhreeZone 15]

182. Here is the link to the incident when it was first reported: http://www.dropzone.com/cgi-bin/forum/gforum.cgi?post=204588;sb=post_latest_reply;so=ASC;forum_view=forum_view_collapsed;;page=unread#unread

Yesterday is history
And tomorrow is a mystery

Parachutemanuals.com

[DYEVOUT 0]

Oh O.K. he wasn't "standing on the wing", he was hanging on the strut.

It' hard to believe the press could actually make a mistake, they usually write with such knowledgeable precision, and exhibit such a deep understanding of the subject.

----------------=8^)----------------------
"I think that was the wrong tennis court."

[indyz 1]

Quote

The accident... was Mr. Sebek's first serious mishap in 10 years of skydiving.

...

...he was closing on the 100 mark.

Does anyone know the story on this? Did he stop jumping at some point and then return to the sport, or does he really jump only 10 times a year or so?

[kizzie92 0]

I don't know Leon's jump history but he was certainly current this year and had been jumping at SWOOP most weekends. He had made at least three jumps that day. It was his 94th Jump.

Couple of things. Yes it was a premature deployment off the step that caused this accident but Leon's body did not hit the tail. There was a very obvious head sized dent on the underside of the right wing flap. It must have been a hard impact as the dent went right throu the flap leaving a bump on the top side. From the position of the dent I would say that Leon's left foot was still on the step and that he was bending over holding on to the strutt about to make a poised exit. The force of the premature would have pulled him back jerking his body upwards and thus his helmet made contact with the flap.

The parachute lines wrapped around the rear horizontal stabilizer nearly tearing it off. You could see the grooves where the lines ripped into the stabilizer. The whole tail section of the aircraft was twisted and the stabilizer was completely mangled.

Leons descent under canopy was very strange. From 9000 ft (where he was first spotted) until about 5000 ft, Leon seemed to be flying his canopy in a series of slow turns and holding himself more or less over the drop zone. At 5000 ft his canopy turned downwind and continued to fly in a straight downwind line until he landed approx four km's away. I guess we will never know for sure weather he was concious for part of that ride down or if a stonger wind at 5000 ft suddenly took him down wind but the fact that he was turning in different directions leads me to believe he may have had some couciousness initially.

This was certainly one of the strangest and longest nights of my life. The now knowing was the hardest part. You try to stay positive but as the hours go by without news you begin to resign yourself to the worst. At 2 am a cop took a few of us aside and told us that this was now a recovery operation rather than a search and rescue. At 3 am we are told that the choppers were running on fumes and that they would be calling the air search off until morning. Then five minutes later it came over the radio that they had found Leon and that he was still alive. We were obviously jubilant. Three hours later the hospital told us that he wasn't going to make it and that they had requested from his wife Betty that they turn off the life support. Well well well! Against all the odds Leon pulled through and went home for Christmas with his family.

Here's to him!

Tony

The big difference between sex for money and sex for free is that sex for money usually costs a lot less.

[Lsebek1 0]

Hi everyone. I am Leon Sebek and after reading the threads inn this Forum, I thought I should probably make a few comments and update everybody on my current status. Quade and Kizzie92 have the basic facts correct but in checking my Log book, it was actually my 95th jump. I was wearing a full-face Z1,I had a Wings container, a Cobalt Main, Cypres AAD, Galaxy II altimeter and PtoTrack Audible. There is no doubt that the hard shell helmet saved my life and I wouldn't have survived without it,as it was thoroughly crushed at the point of impact. As it was, the CT scan of my head showed that my skull looked like a very cracked egg. I broke my spine in two places (C2/C3 and T3/T4) and suffered a rotator cuff tear on landing (obviously I didn't get any accuracy points for that one). I was in a coma at Hamilton General for nearly 4 weeks before coming out of it and NO, I did not see any tunnel or "light", I just experienced some VERY strange dreams. It was supposed to be a twilight 8-way RW jump, with 2 planes of jumpers meeting up in the air. I was the first one out of our plane and moved out to the end of the strut when my pilot chute came out of it's pocket, caught the wind and extracted my main. It wasn't a case of my main coming out of it's container prematurely because of an issue with the closing pin. I saw some photos of the plane afterward and from the looks of things, I nearly tore the right horizontal stabilizer off - it was bent backward quite a bit. A couple of years later, when I met with the officers from the Durham Regional Police Air Support, one of them told me that the pilot must have been extremely skilled to safely land a plane in that condition. I have no idea why no one followed me down to ensure I was safe nor do I understand why the pilot didn't radio the other plane to tell them what had occurred and ask them to follow me down (or even radio the ground and alert them as to the problem). The next spring, I went to the club's "Safety Day" to see if they were going to implement any new policies or procedures as a result my accident but they didn't seem to have (they were all glad to see that I was alive but that was about the extent of it). Although I have largely recovered physically, the doctors tell me that because of my traumatic brain injury and it's after-effects, I will never work again. I have not been skydiving since the accident (more due to the fact that I no longer have my rig than any reluctance to jump on my part). I would like to thank all my doctors and the medical staff at both Hamilton General and Toronto Rehab, as well as everyone who prayed for my successful recovery.

Whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger!

L.S.

[pchapman 262]

Wow, I hadn't heard your name for 10 years, since the accident at SWOOP. Sorry to hear that you're still messed up from it.

(For others, another thread on the incident is http://www.dropzone.com/cgi-bin/forum/gforum.cgi?post=204675, although a lot of it is a debate about helmets.)

You never know how people will react in an emergency, and it can take time for the nature of the emergency to become apparent.

So I can understand if the other jumpers just jumped and freefell to normal opening altitudes, leaving nobody under canopy up high to watch you.

And the pilot, who knows, likely he was focused more on his own aircraft issues, and not wanting to go skydiving himself that day. Pilots aren't primed to the idea of chasing jumpers, especially non students, although a radio call would make sense. (Even if just to the other aircraft on ATC frequency up high. I certainly don't know either way whether the manifest radio would have been on, listened to, and whether it was tuned to ATC or a local area frequency.) The other aircraft might have been the party most able to keep an eye on you if alerted in time.

What did the jumpers in the other aircraft in the formation load do? Did they jump when others climbing out on your aircraft jump?

What size was the main you descended under? You ended up in the big gravel pits to the west of the DZ? [Edit:] So the main was undamaged, and it was just your body that hit the tail, or what was the situation?

[Lsebek1 0]

Apparently the jumpers in the other aircraft were unaware of what had transpired and just went through with their jump as per plan.

My Main was a Cobalt 170 and luckily, was undamaged. I can only speculate on whether my body struck the tail and caused my spinal injuries, as I was unconscious at the time

Whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger!

L.S.

[strife 0]

Incredible Leon. best wishes

having been in a coma for 3 weeks myself in an un skydiving related medical issue a couple of years ago the dreams are a bit freaky.

I was lucky enough to recover from my 3 months in ICU and take up skydiving.

Im assuming jumping with a TBI wouldnt be advisable either.

Cheers

[JohnRich 4]

Quote

...I have no idea why no one followed me down to ensure I was safe nor do I understand why the pilot didn't radio the other plane to tell them what had occurred and ask them to follow me down... I went to the club's "Safety Day" to see if they were going to implement any new policies or procedures as a result my accident but they didn't seem to have...

It used to be a standard unwritten law that someone would follow a jumper down who was in trouble. But these days that mindset seems to have vanished. Maybe it's the high-speed canopies and lack of accuracy skills now that make it more dangerous to land off-airport. Maybe there's some selfishness in it too.

The pilot I'm sure had his hands full just saving his own life. It wasn't his job at that point to worry about radioing someone about you.

What policy or procedure change do you think should be implemented? It sounds to me like the only problem was with your own gear. Jumpers need to be hyper-sensitive about protecting their deployment handles, and making sure the pockets aren't loose. That's not a policy or procedure problem with the drop zone - that's a personal gear and jumper issue.

[Lsebek1 0]

A couple of items that I thought I might see brought up (and possibly implemented) were: 1) In the event of an accident like mine, either another jumper would follow the injured jumper down, or at the very least, the pilot would radio the ground to inform them of the incident so they could have a "Chase" team go out after the injured skydiver, making locating them that much easier and expedient and 2) Implement a policy of doing pin checks (& re-checks) at this DZ (even though that was not the problem in my case)

Whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger!

L.S.

[MikeJD 0]

First of all, glad that you survived (albeit this was a long time ago!) and sorry that you're still unable to work.

Given that your pilot chute escaped, we have to assume one of the following: it wasn't properly stowed before you climbed out; your gear was poorly maintained; it was dislodged as you were climbing out. Do you know which it was? The first two scenarios could have been prevented by you or another jumper checking your kit on the ground or in the plane before you moved to the door.

But regarding pin checks, I don't think that's a DZ-level policy decision. Pins can be (and sometimes are) dislodged in the plane, which is of course why many people opt to have them checked by fellow jumpers prior to climbing out. That's difficult to police and/ or enforce, though - I think it has to be a personal decision.

On the other hand, in the UK we have flightline checks. This means that everybody must be checked by another jumper, and signed off on the manifest as such, before boarding the aircraft.

There are set guidelines as to what constitutes a flightline check, although I guess in reality it might vary slightly according to who's doing the checking.

To me, a rig check includes all of the following:
Harness sound, fully in place and not twisted, chest strap fastened and routed correctly, 3-ring and cutaway cable assembly correct, reserve handle securely attached to the cable, cutaway and reserve handles accessible and properly stowed, main pilot chute secure in the pocket with the handle accessible but no loose fabric emerging, bridle line routed correctly, pins straight and securely engaged. I also check that the jumper has a helmet, knife and calibrated altimeter (all BPA-mandated), and if he or she has an AAD and whether it's switched on.

Sounds like a lot of work, but it only takes a few seconds and I'm quite sure it's saved lives.

Some people (including me) prefer that their flaps are not opened again when they've only just checked their pins and put their rig on, but at least the question is asked and it's a reminder to have someone else check your pins if you haven't just done it.

[Lsebek1 0]

I suspect that the pilot chute snagged on something as I was making my way to the door (at least that's what one of the other jumpers on the load claims).

Whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger!

L.S.