State’s aviation community mourns after 12 die in plane crash in western Missouri
Sutton Parker
COLUMBIA MO. (KMIZ)
After a skydiving pilot and 11 skydivers we killed after their plane crashed after takeoff Sunday in western Missouri, skydiving businesses and pilots across the state are providing there reaction.
Jake Strain, co-owner of Skydive STL, says the accident hits home.
“It is deeply tragic, most things are a lot of time unpreventable. It is super sad because we know a lot of those people that died,” he said.
Additionally he added the most common aircraft used for skydiving across the state are the Cessna 182, a single propeller plane that can carry up to 5 people on skydiving trips.
Strain also said at Skydive STL experiences usually last around two-to-two-and-a-half hours from start to finish. With the customers arriving and completing required paperwork, then going through mandatory safety and emergency procedure trainings, following by instruction on how to skydive properly.
In addition to customer safety, Strain said all planes before takeoff go through a structured pre-flight inspection before leaving the ground.
The crash over the weekend comes two years after another skydiving incident occurred near the same location.
According an NTSB report, in May 2024 a Cessna U206 crashed during a skydiving flight after a jumper’s emergency parachute accidentally deployed after its handle caught on something pulling him into the airplanes horizontal stabilizer causing him serious injuries.
The report says the pilot was able to maintain control of the aircraft until all of the divers were able to exit, after which the damaged aircraft went into an uncontrolled decent, allowing to pilot to safely escape via parachute before impact. One passenger sustained serious injuries, while the remaining six individuals on board escaped safely, according to the report.
Daniel Southerd, a flight instructor at the Columbia Jet Center, said while the NTSB has not released an official cause of this weekend’s crash, he suspects the plane lost power during its climb, and as the aircraft slowed down, any attempt by the pilot to hold altitude would have dropped the airspeed, causing the fatal crash.
“When you are at a low altitude, stalling like that in a plane that is loaded to bear with skydivers, enough fuel for the flights, and skydiving packs. Once you stall right above the ground there is no recovery from that,” he said.
When it comes to FAA regulations for skydiving, Southerd said there are not many technical differences outside of modifications allowed to the aircraft.
“So you can take the seats out of the aircraft and use the floor as a seat, as long as there is a seatbelt for each skydiver to use,” he said. “And then you have to have an altitude transponder for a flight that is above 10,000 feet.”
While regulations are very similar between regular and skydiving aircraft, the build can be very different.
Southerd said most planes are approved to take off doors or have special jump doors added to them.
“Usually those planes are more stripped down, taking out extra seats. If the plane has wheel pants, they will take the streamline wheel pants off, just to make the plane as light as possible — as empty on the ground as you can — so you can put more equipment and people on it,” he said.
He added that no amount of modifications can prepare a pilot for every emergency, “there is no higher pressure than losing power with a plane full of people a couple hundred feet above the ground.”