Jump Club Follies

We had a jump club that operated out of the Olney-Noble Airport on weekends. These guys were hard partiers, and lived life on the edge, to say the least.

They were, for lack of a better term, practical jokers. Practical jokers who sometimes took things to far. For example, they thought it was funny for the last one out to turn off the magnetos to give the jump pilot a scare when the engine quit. Things like that.

Well, they did it one time too many, and to the wrong pilot. Gary had flown them before, and he knew what to expect. This time, he was going to turn the tables on them.

It was springtime in southern Illinois, which means we had a lot of rain recently. Fields were soaked and muddy, even more so the closer you got to the river bottoms.

Gary deliberately kept the airplane low on the way to the jump zone. High enough they’d have time to open their parachutes. Low enough they wouldn’t have any time to freefall and pick out a nice dry patch of ground to land on.

The jumpers were talking amongst themselves, paying no attention to Gary as he leaned the mixture back over a muddy field far from the nearest road. As the engine began to sputter, he said, “Get out! It’s gonna quit!” One by one, out they went. Clear of the airplane they opened their chutes and drifted down to the soggy field below.

As the last one went out the door, Gary pushed the mixture back in, circled them once, rocked his wings as if waving goodbye. He parked the Cessna on the airport ramp and came inside to enjoy a nice warm cup of coffee while the jumpers were carrying their parachutes out of a muddy field. That put a stop to them turning off the magnetos.

They also were strapped for money, and my boss, Earl Smith, wisely kept them on a cash-only basis when they needed to fuel their old Cessna 182. And when it came time for an annual inspection or any other maintenance on the plane? They had it signed off by a mechanic named Felix Schroeder. One thing, though, there was no Felix Schroeder. They just signed the name and entered a bogus certificate number.

A couple years later, I come along and work at the airport as a lineboy. I was a low-time pilot, looking for any way I could to build flying hours. I was young and dumb, a mere 20 years old. I didn’t know anything about what had happened in the past, or Felix Schroeder. I just wanted to fly. I knew they were always looking for someone to fly the jumpers, so I struck up a deal with the jump club.  I would fly them for one day for free in exchange for them showing me what I needed to know to make a static line jump. Like I said, young and dumb …

They readily agreed, and I showed up on a Saturday morning to fly the jump plane. I was newly married, and my wife and I had plans in the afternoon. I told them I could fly half a day that day and the other half another day. So I built up a couple hours that morning, left the airport to spend the rest of the day with my bride.

A few days later, the jumpers came back. I was working that day so I couldn’t fly them. That wasn’t a problem. One of the jumpers was a pilot, so he would fly the plane. Before they left, I told them, “Hey, the fuel gauge was reading pretty low when I finished up the other day.”

As I mentioned before, they were on a cash-only basis, and apparently they had little or none on them. One of the jumpers said, “Oh, yeah. We checked the tank and it’s half full.”

So that was that. They took off and flew a couple of runs before we heard, “Mayday, Mayday! Cessna 23Golf engine failure!”

Earl’s son, Ed Smith and I knew about where the jump plane had been when it went down, so we hopped into a Cherokee and went up to look for it. It didn’t take long, we found it about half a mile from the end of the runway in a corn field.

Fortunately, the pilot was the only one still in the airplane, and he was not injured.

The airplane never flew again, and the jump club never operated out of Olney-Noble again.

I’m glad that I didn’t have them teach me to jump with a static line. I probably would have gotten killed due to incompetent instruction. I’m also glad I wasn’t flying the plane that day. I hope that if I was, I would have checked the gas myself rather than trust someone else whose only interest was in going up so he could jump out. Always. Always. Always do a thorough preflight!