Others have not been so lucky.
A long time ago, I flew into an airport where there was a skydiving operation. As I was taxiing out, a whole lot of skydivers began landing. I pulled the mixture, shut down, and waited for them to finish. One landed close enough to my airplane that it might have been interesting.
I set a new rule that day: I won't fly into or near an airport with an active drop zone.
4 comments:
I don't get why anybody jumps at an airport where there isn't some coordination between the jumpers, the non-parachute airplane pilots and the control tower (or, in the case of one airport I can remember, an old lady sitting on a beach chair with two flashlights in place of a control tower.)
I mean, if jumpers want to make it extra-risky, why don't they keep innocent pilots and passengers out of it and save themselves the trip to the airport, the cost of a seat on the jump plane, and the price of a parachute? Instead, just go jump off a tall building.
Yours very crankily,
The New York Crank
The cops don't like it when the skydivers jump off buildings. Anyway, most of them jump at airports that don't have towers. Someone passing by at 8,500' might not be tuned into the airport's announcement frequency, as it's shared by a lot of others and, on a nice weekend when you're high up, all you hear is noise.
Airports with a lot of jumping are marked on the charts. Good jump operations call in a Notice to Airmen in advance of busy days.
Skydivers ought to have their own special airspace. Over the middle of the Atlantic Ocean works for me.
Two personal experiences:
1. If you think airplanes and parachutes don't mix, a couple of times I flew into a (then) local airport, Clow International (yes, "international" is part of its name—1C5, you can look it up), in Bolingbrook, IL, a southwestern suburb of Chicago. Not only are there skydivers there, but it's a glider hot spot, too. Parallel runway operations—one paved, one grass—and parachutes wherever the hell they wanted.
B. Another local airport, Sandwich, IL (used to be C48, but it's since changed), got taken over by skydivers and since it underlaid V10, a primary arrival route into ORD where we had lots of jets descending to 11,000' and props at 7,000, they wanted to establish a procedure whereby they could alert us that they had jumpers going up (most of the time they were letting out at 4,000 or 5,000, which didn't concern us much, but when they wanted to get up to 15,000 for that one minute of free fall, we kind of thought they ought to keep clear of the intakes of CFM-56es. So we worked out a procedure, and it was basically pretty good once we got the handful of stupid controllers on board. There were actually some who figured if an airplane was VFR it didn't exist. That operation has since moved to Ottawa, IL (used to be C13, but I think it, too, has changed), which is not only farther from ORD, but off-airway, as well.
We had glider ops at Hinckley, too, but they were far enough west, and off airways enough, that they never really bothered us. It was in the departure sector, and off our southernmost track, and the jets were out of 15,000 or more by the time they got anywhere near it.
But, yeah, I avoided 1C5 like the plague.
LRod
ZJX, ORD, ZAU retired
We have the joy of several PAJA Ops in our arrival and departure streams near DFW. One of the arrivals has a dogleg built for use when they are jumping and the ops almost all have LOAs (Letter of Agreement) worked out on procedures. It works OK when the controllers and pilots follow the LOAs, but when people (on both sides) get sloppy and take the easy way out, it can get sketchy.
At GVT (Greenville-Majors) there was open fighting between the jumpers and pilots with pilots deliberately trying to disrupt the ops for a while, but we got that worked out. I never understood what the pilots were thinking, because of the outcomes generally favoring the aircraft crashing after hitting a skydiver.
On the airport name front, I'm a fan of 48U, Greater Green River Intergalactic Spaceport.
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