The below Footage is of Wisconsin plane crash when nine skydivers make emergency jumps from their planes after a collision
Majority of the video taken from the helmet of one of the divers, Amy Polson, who inside the lead plane when it made contact with the second, causing an eruption of flames
All nine realize they are lucky to be alive but said it is safe and they would do it again
Their helmet cameras were supposed to capture a routine skydive- but instead captured the unbelievable images of their own survival as they crash-dived 12,000 feet to the ground following a collision with another plane.
On impact, a few of the skydivers on the bar and in the plane fall off immediately but one holds on as a fireball engulfs the plane.
The plane begins to crash and after a few seconds of holding on desperately, he then lets go.
The two sky-divers preparing to jump from the bottom plane immediately fall out – as they look backward they capture astonishing images of the two planes burning and falling- with the other skydivers still emerging.
Falling at approximately 200 km per hour, all 9 sky-divers activated their parachutes and landed safely.
The pilot of one of the planes used his emergency parachute and abandoned the plane, also landing safely.
The second plane was able to land at the Richard I. Bong Airport with damage to the propeller and the wing.
64-year-old skydiver Mike Robinson told NBC News that “the outcome for us was as good as it could be.”
An experienced skydiver, Robinson told NBC that it was his fourth jump of the day and just one of over 900 skydives throughout his lifetime.
Details and Cause of Accident
A Cessna 185 is seen plowing into the wing of another skydive plane, which then plummets in flames. And yet no one involved—either the two pilots or the nine skydivers—was killed or even severely injured. The skydivers managed to dive safely to the ground. The pilot of the flaming plane landed via his emergency parachute. And the second pilot, Joss Wedan, landed his plane.
According to the Federal Aviation Regulations that govern manned flight, pilots are obliged to “see and avoid other aircraft.” That sounds simple enough, but in the case of the aircraft used for skydiving, it’s not: Recreational aircraft tend to be small and quick, and an unfamiliar aircraft arriving from an unexpected direction can, once in a rare while, wind up in another aircraft’s blind spot, setting up the potential for disaster. And in a general sense, skydive planes have a much higher accident rate than that for aviation as a whole—one of the most dangerous places to fly is in the airspace around a small airstrip, where weekend warriors might be flying, but might also be rusty.
But unexpected aircraft weren’t the problem over Wisconsin. Wedan and the pilot of the other plane had taken off to coordinate a formation jump. They were flying in formation, in other words. As the trailing pilot, Wedan had the explicit responsibility to maintain visual contact with the lead airplane. And he told Lauer this morning that before the impact “everything was exactly as it should have been.”
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Watch: Skydivers who miraculously survived mid-air collision between two planes
But everything was not exactly as it should have been. Pilots training for formation flying is taught that when they lose sight of their lead, they must immediately break off from formation until they are able to regain visual contact. Just before the impact, though, Wedan’s plane can be seen “bellying up” to the 182, meaning approaching from above so that it remains in the other pilot’s blind spot. Apparently, Wedan had lost sight of the other aircraft, and either failed to notice the fact or didn’t realize that it could be a problem.
All pilots make mistakes. I certainly have. But by focusing on the fortunate outcome of this accident rather than its cause, the moral of the story is lost.
Skydiving is an inherently dangerous business, yet most of the 20-some people who die doing it in the United States each year do not perish as a result of the inherent peril of falling from the sky, but from preventable human error: recklessness, carelessness, and bad decision-making. If you want to skydive, and you want to stay alive, you have to be honest about that. And you have to make sure that mistakes don’t happen twice.
Yes, something miraculous happened in the skies over Wisconsin —but only because one man may have made an inexcusable mistake.
