I came across this Cessna 206 at Cape Town international airport today. It is used for parachutist transport (or meat bombing as we call it locally). Yesterday a parachutist deploying at FL090 suffered a premature deployment of his chute whilst still in the doorway of the aircraft. The chute caught in the wind, pulled him into the right hand horizontal stabilizer. The result is as you see in the photo. Parachutist survived with back injuries and the pilot managed to fly a controlled crash approach down to the runway of the airport. Best glide apparently was 130KIAS below which aircraft wanted to fall out of the sky. The plane was losing 1000fpm on the descent. Other than a hard landing with attendant prop strike, the aircraft survived. So did the pilot who clearly is made of the right stuff. Apparently it used to be SOP that pilots of jump planes wore chutes but it fell by the wayside over the years. Guess that will be revisited now.

But just goes to show how resilient aircraft are sometimes.


Ross Leighton
Cygnet Capital
Cape Town, South Africa
Cell: 082 881 3183