Teacher, Student Plunge to Deaths While Sky-Diving

A veteran sky-diving instructor and a woman student on her second jump plummeted 10,500 feet to their deaths in a farmer’s field Wednesday after taking off from Yolo County Airport near Davis.

The names of the victims were being withheld several hours after the incident, as Sheriff’s Department investigators and the Federal Aviation Administration tried to determine the cause of the accident.

“It was a perfect day for diving,” said Jane Ferrell, a free-lance writer whose husband, Ray, is co-owner of Skydance Skydiving. “It’s been terrible. (The instructor) was like a member of the family. It’s been horrible for everybody.”

Second Fatal Accident

Both the male instructor and the student were in their 30s, Ferrell said. The incident was the second fatal accident since the school was started more than two years ago, Ferrell said, and the first involving a student.

In 1987, shortly after the school opened, a member of the Danish national team, which was preparing for a world parachuting meet, collided with a teammate during free fall and crashed to his death.

Last year, 20,000 jumps were made at Skydance without a fatality, Ferrell said.

The Skydance school employs a commonly used technique to teach beginners to sky-dive. In this method, the instructor and student are locked and cinched tightly together for a tandem dive, the instructor on the student’s back. The instructor wears two parachutes--a main chute and a reserve--only one of which is needed to support both divers on their descent.

The pilot of the plane that took the two up reported that the tandem divers left the plane without a problem. If all had gone as planned, the pair would have dropped about 6,000 feet and would have parachuted the remaining way down.

Tangled Chutes

Those at the scene of the crash reported that both chutes had opened but were tangled together, Ferrell said. Investigators were “still trying to figure out the sequence of events.”

The instructor was a full-time employee of Skydance, who lived in the area. The student was from another county.

Ray Ferrell and his partner, Dan O’Brien, were both members of the international team of 30 sky-divers who joined hands to form the Olympic rings at the Summer Games in Seoul last year.