Maybe the "Real captain" should have skipped this flight ...

You know, last I checked, this was about an airplane...

Anyway, this is some serious irony; how sad!

He sounded like a risk taker. He was a real man alright, but I'm a living man.

This should be the next thing to ban in Illinois. The pilot tried to kill 12 people but missed. The governor will next call a ban on small airplanes along with assault weapons.

@Cristopher Haslett - Living is not merely the presence of life, but living the life you have to the fullest.

As Teddy Rooosevelt put it: It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

Stay safe at your keyboard - knowing neither victory or defeat.

Being that he didn't have his own chute, where else do you think he is going to go? Gravity is a bitch and is a lot harder to fight in the air than in the water.

Actually, he did have his own chute but made the decision to give his life to save others.

Well Keith these parachuters did not jump out of a perfectly good airplane now did they?

The airplane might have been perfectly good, maybe the pilot wasn't doing good healthwise.

At Ralph....there was no health problem. It was mechanical. He was smart enough to dump the fuel to avoid an explosion on impact, and crashed it in a backyard/alley so as not to hit any houses and cause further loss of life.

Just guessing but I doubt if a Beech 18 would survive something like a "near verticle" descent. These days most skydiving turboprops are newer aircraft like Cessna Caravans. They do do steep descents but in this case only the NTSB will be able to determine the crash outcome unless the pilot was able to discuss details of his emergency over the radio. It could have been a medical issue or maybe the old gal had been stressed too many times and suffered catastrophic failure. Any number of speculations are possible. Thankfull all the jumpers got out. In an incident some years back over the great lakes another craft went down taking the jumpers with it.

PS....doing my third tandem this October just south of Detroit from 18,000 feet. Previous tandems were from 10,000 and 9,500. 18k freefall for 90 seconds. Thankfully it will be out a door from a turboprop rather than clambering outside a Cessna 180 (almost pulled a hamstring trying to get my left leg out onto the step). If you are ever going to do this please don't think about it at nigt before going to sleep. Doing it with my son. We did a tandem together last August. He's 24 and I'm 68. Did six static line drops from 2,800 feet late seventies with crude equipment. The equipment these days is far superior.

>>>>>>see you on the ground<<<<<<<

Blackbird, love your comments, we have the same story except for i'm the son and jumping with my dad is a very treasured memory of mine that i'll never forget ... I also wanted to say the Beech 18 is a beautiful plane and built like a tank, so it had to have been either something catastrophic or human error but you're right, all we can do is speculate until more info comes out, it's a sad story that couldve been worse ... on a higher note i wanted to post this video of a Beech 18 i saw at Osh Kosh ... ...

so i'm new to posting things on here, apparently you can't post links on here, if you'd like to watch the video, just y o u t u b e "Beech 18 Aerobatics by Matt Younkin at Oshkosh 2011" it's pretty amazing what he can do with that aircraft ...

Thanks ChiTown. Will look it up. Meanwhile this past week at Beiseker just outside Calgary a jumper was critically injured in his first jump. The British military use this facility to train their troops and he was on his first jump from 4,000 feet (the criteria must have changed since my first static line drop from 2,800 whereby your chute opens automatically after you leave the aircraft).

Anyway the instructor was talking with him and told him to do a turn. This as you know is accomplished by pulling down on the lanyard. He turned but then kept turning at least 4 times. This causes the chute to spin and descend faster than normal. The actions must have been close to the ground as he hit hard and is in hospital. The facility was closed for the day after this but opened next day as it was no fault of theirs and is attributed to "human error" and in parachuting there is little margin for that.

Chuck Yeager is an OLD, BOLD PILOT!

Yeager actually coined that phrase. Although Chuck (still alive & kicking) did some momentous things like break the sound barrier and somehow survive an F-104 flat spin, he was referring to reckless risk taking pilots when he stated the phrase. He was a thorough pilots pilot. A premier test pilot who cheated death numerous times. He celebrated his eightieth birthday by flying an F-15 supersonic. Quite a guy.

Yeah, it's not uncommon for the jump plane to be on the ground before the skydivers.

What the hell is wrong with you?

A lot, obviously.

Are you for real? It's bad enough you believe in someone that dosen't exist but your line of thinking scares me even more... The God you believe in would allow someone to die so 12 others could live, seems to me if he was really the miracle you think he is he would have been able to fix the plane.

In a perfect world, God would save everyone and nobody would die and we would have run out of room on earth centuries ago. Oh wait, there is a plan in place for all of that. Plenty of room in heaven for those that do believe. Those that don't try to persuade others that God doesn't exist.

If you don't believe, that is great. But the fact that you and everyone else that doesn't believe in God, jumps on everyone that does, gets old very quickly. I don't know what you believe, nor do I care. But I would not jump on any of your posts if you mentioned it. Geez.

I have also been in the medical field for 24 years and have seen a great number of people who never believed in God change their line of thinking completely when faced with a visit from the angel of death. Lucky for them, even though God has been kicked out of a lot of places, it's not too late! I have firmly believed and said if people were around death a little more, (not cartoon and movie death) but real, gritty, non-sugar coated death, they would change their perspective on a lot of things.

Oh my... another one of those people who believe in talking to an invisible man who lives in the sky, who *could* help but never does, who is supposed to love all the people on the earth as if they were his own children, but who looks the other way when there are famines, droughts, wildfires, sicknesses of epidemic proportion, and...

...wait for it...

...is supposed to be so all-powerful that he could change any of these things on a whim just by thinking about it and saying it so!

Yes, this all-powerful, invisible man who lives in the sky and loves us all more than everything, is the same one in whose name BILLIONS of people have been killed throughout the centuries. And they want all of us to believe in the same things!

And furthermore, they think WE are the weird ones, the ones who need their help, and the ones who are wrong, when we say something about it?

Where I come from, when you talk to invisible people, you get put in a rubber room with blunted scissors.

I don't know where you get off claiming that it is the rational among us who are the ones who attack the religious. Apparently, you don't spend time on Newsvine very much, because I see all these religious fanatics on Newsvine attacking mercilessly those who are more rational and critical-thinkers.

If you don't think that the religious are far more fanatical in their attacks on the rational, then you move to South Carolina, or Mississippi, or one of those other weird bible-belt states. They'll string you up in a heartbeat for saying anything at all about their invisible magical man...

Sound like there could have been a medical problem. with no one else on the plane, not much could be done. Anything wrong with the plane, he likely would have been on the radio.

Baseless speculation seems to be your forte.

Had there been an extra chute, chances are he wouldn't have taken it. I suspect he actually had one, but stayed with the plane to make sure only one person died that day.

Rick Carter & Studio Steve,

Sometimes I think the word "Hero" is bandied about too freely - versus a truly heroic action. He was basically a guy who was doing what he loved doing and the "sand ran out of his hourglass". The story does not state any heroic action, as the plane came down in a residential area. May he Rest In Peace.

If this day gone bad happened as quick as you all say parachute or not getting to the door from the left seat in the Beech-18 is a bit of a time consumer its tight up in that cockpit, and most have a wall between the flight deck, and the cabin with a small one man hatch in, and out, and in a nose down, or a dive getting to the door is a feat of super proportions.

A pilot is a thrill seeker? Never really thought it was myself. Are ship's pilots and truck/car drivers thrill seekers too?

Sympathies to his family and friends

Freefaller, hmmmm, yep thrill seeker. Big head, small brain.

Yes I do recreationally skydive. However the question was how does this incident make the pilot of the plane a thrill seeker?

what is that rant ? hello ?