Riding the jump aircraft down

[lodestar 0]

I was reading the post about the history of parachuting and just happened to see the thoughts of No Phear: Anyone who asks: 'Why would you jump out a perfectly good airplane?' Has obviously never been to a drop zone.... and seen the plane. ©No_Phear 2001
It made me flash on a Jumper Paul Healy, a big fellah who used to jump at zhills.
Paul was huge, weighed probably 350 lbs plus and was a favorite base for quite a few group jumps.
He was a prodigious eater, I can remember going out to breakfast with him and being astounded at the huge breakfasts he would eat, and then, when everyone was through, he would ask everyone at the table if he could finish off the food they didn't want.
But, I digress, as I came to find out, Paul was deathly afraid of riding the jump plane down. I found this out one day when we took off in very cloudy weather in the 182 with a load "looking for a sucker hole" or a break in the clouds so we could get enough altitude for a jump.
We flew around for half an hour looking and were unsuccessful in getting enough altitude for even a hop and pop so I decided we needed to get back on the ground and quit wasting gas and turned around and told the guys I was going down.
As I cut the throttle back and was coasting down when I felt this incredibly obvious shaking in the aircraft, I though maybe the engine had a bad cylinder, maybe the prop was dinged or some other huge imbalance was going on with the airframe. The shaking continued and had me baffled. I turned around to see if I could find anything wrong visually and at that time saw Paul, literally shaking in his boots, hanging on to the back of my seat, fear plastered all over his face, sweat pouring from his face shaking uncontrollably and an expression that left no doubt that he was deathly afraid of landing in the aircraft.
We got back on the ground and paul was literally almost in shodk. He rolled out, crawled away from the aircraft on his hands and knees and collapsed about fifty feet from the plane. Other jumpers gathered around him while he recovered and got back to normal.
Later on, we talked and he admitted he just didn't like to land and was deathly afraid of doing so.
Bob Sprague and Paul became instant buddies when Bob showed up, Paul followed him around like a puppy, begging him to jump with him....they did and went on to become a rock hard base for a lot of skydives.
I think Paul passed away some years ago from what I heard, a heart attack.
Funny how you remember little things like that.

[patmoore 14]

One of the toughest feats in the sport was to catch Paul in free fall. I did it on my 500th jump. It was out of a DC3 and we exited last. I caught Paul and he immediately did a barrel roll. When he did one, you did one. I felt like a rag doll. When we opened we look edup to discover we had passed everyone else on the load.

He always answered the phone with "The fastest man alive - straight down!". He was a big rig truck driver and a hell of a nice guy. Opening shocks were so brutal on his PC that he had me sew velcro right into the canopy.

I never saw him on roller skates but I heard he was very graceful on them.

Paul had a motorcycle with a beefed up frame and loved riding.

I heard he collapsed in his bathroom when he died - his heart just gave out.

The only photos I have of him are on color slides. One of these days I'm going to digitize those things.

DZGone.com
B-4600, C-3615, D-1814, Gold Wings #326, Diamond Wings #152.

If you're not living on the edge, you're taking up too much room!