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It's amazing what the human body can do to an airplane. As a regular weekend "meat bomber" I've seen some ugly things from skydiver strikes on 182s, 206s, twin otters, caravans, and others. We were doing night jumps over Ft Bragg years ago from a Helio Courier. Something came lose in the tail (it wasn't a human that hit it in this case), but the pilot landed the crippled plane with the horizontal tail barely hanging on. He had a parachute on, but since it was night, he couldn't see the tail to know how bad it was. If he could of, he said he would have jumped.
Matt McManus
Quoting Ross Leighton <rossl@mweb.co.za>:
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
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