Sky Divers Back at It After Crash That Killed 16 : Daredevils: Survivors mend and re-form their team. They are practicing hard for national competition this week.
Six months after the plane crash that severely injured them and killed 16 others, the surviving members of Dan Brodsky-Chenfeld’s Air Moves sky-diving team are at it again.
Not only are they jumping out of airplanes, they are getting ready to try for a national championship.
The odds against victory seem pretty long.
Brodsky-Chenfeld--a former champion known in sky-diving circles as “B-C”--still has to wear a collar brace when he jumps, and the two newest members of the team have only recently started training.
The favorites in this week’s four-man competition--the Army’s Golden Knights and a veteran civilian group called the Vertical Speed--have looked awfully good during practice.
“If I was a bookie, I’d have to say our chances are slim,” Brodsky-Chenfeld admitted during a break in the team’s 12-hour-a-day training sessions at the dusty, wind-swept airport behind this remote desert hamlet.
“But being us, I think we’ve got a chance to win the whole thing,” the 30-year-old captain of the Air Moves said. “I think we’re going to surprise a few people around here.”
They have already surprised a few people.
When the twin-engine plane with 22 aboard nosed over and crashed on takeoff at the Perris Valley Airport south of Riverside last April, witnesses were amazed that anyone survived the accident.
Brodsky-Chenfeld was pulled from the wreckage with a broken neck, skull fractures, a collapsed lung and internal injuries. Tom Falzone, 32, suffered multiple fractures. Troy Widgery, 26, broke his hip and collarbone.
Two months later, Brodsky-Chenfeld was in a hospital bed, recovering from the latest in a series of operations to repair his shattered vertebra.
“They told me I’d be in a hospital for six more months,” he said. “I told them: ‘No way, the nationals are in four months.’ ”
It was a predictable response from a man who started practicing for the sport at age 5, jumping off his upper bunk with a blanket for a parachute.
“My mother would have preferred it if I had tried something else,” he said. “But I always knew that this was what I had to do.”
Sky diving by the time he was 18, Brodsky-Chenfeld soon became a major force in the sport, and the team he assembled in 1988 won the national championship last year.
“But after three years of living together in vans, we’d had enough,” the leader said. “We decided to go our separate ways.”
Then, this year, the people at the Perris Valley sky-diving club asked him to put together another team and try for another title.
“I grabbed James Layne, a friend from Ohio,” Brodsky-Chenfeld said. “He had the perfect athlete’s attitude--confident, but not cocky.”
Widgery was picked “because he had the natural ability, even though he wasn’t experienced.” Falzone was selected because, during tryouts at Perris, “he was the best.”
The practice sessions began. Brodsky-Chenfeld, Layne, Falzone and Widgery had completed about 300 training jumps over Perris when they boarded the propeller-driven De Havilland Twin Otter on April 22 for another one.
With them on the plane were the pilot and co-pilot, three jump instructors, two novice jumpers, three video camera operators and two other four-man jump teams, one from California and the other from Holland.
“About 50 feet off the deck, the plane made a hard bank,” Falzone said. “I thought the pilot was trying to avoid something, maybe another plane. Then I looked out the window and I saw the ground coming up. I thought: ‘My God, we’re going to crash.’ ”
Brodsky-Chenfeld, Falzone and Widgery were knocked unconscious when the plane--which apparently lost an engine because of fuel contamination--hit the ground.
Widgery came to as someone was about to pull him from the wreckage. Falzone awoke to find himself lying beside the plane.
Brodsky-Chenfeld did not wake up until several days later, in a hospital bed.
“I was very disoriented,” he said. “I moved my fingers and toes, and everything was normal. Then I felt around my head, and it was screwed into what they call a halo brace. I knew I was broken, but I didn’t know how, or where, or when. I didn’t even remember getting into the plane.”
Layne, 21, the fourth member of the team, was among the 16 who died. His death seemed to mark an end to the Air Moves.
But Brodsky-Chenfeld, although bedridden, decided that if he could replace Layne, the team could still compete. He asked Falzone and Widgery what they thought.
A few days later, Widgery’s father visited the hospital.
“He said, ‘I guess it’s all over for you guys,’ ” Falzone recalled. “I told him, ‘Heck no, we’re going to the nationals.’ ”
“He wasn’t too happy about that,” Widgery said. “But jumping is what we do.”
“You realize that every time you get in a plane, you could die,” Falzone said. “You have to assume that risk. You’ve got to do the things that you want to do. What other reason is there to live?”
From his hospital bed, Brodsky-Chenfeld telephoned Mike Traad, 26, a member of the 1991 championship team. For Traad, joining Air Moves meant dropping out of college, but he agreed to do it.
A month later, the halo brace finally unscrewed from his head, Brodsky-Chenfeld thought it was time to start jumping again. Doctors disagreed, telling him he’d need two more operations before he was ready. For the first time, it dawned on Brodsky-Chenfeld that he might have to find someone to pinch-hit for him on some of the dives.
“So I called Kirk Verner, who’d competed at last year’s nationals,” Brodsky-Chenfeld said.
Verner, 21, said he was on his way.
By the time the Air Moves team had been reassembled at Perris, it lagged far behind some of its toughest competitors.
“The Golden Knights practice all year long,” Brodsky-Chenfeld said. “By now, Vertical Speed’s probably gotten in 1,100 jumps. Our new team will be lucky to get in 250.”
A few days ago, the Air Moves team transferred its operations to Skydive, USA, a major sky-diving center located improbably on the outskirts of Eloy, a shabby little desert community about midway between Phoenix and Tucson. The center is the site for this year’s national competition.
For Air Moves, the day begins about 6 a.m. with exercises. By 8 a.m., they’re out on the tented practice rink, where each man flops belly-down on a little sled, mounted on casters.
Scooting across the concrete floor, the men rehearse the 40 different formations they could be called upon to present during the competition.
After about 20 minutes on the rink, they suit up for the first of their half-dozen jumps of the day. Their plane climbs quickly to about 10,000 feet above the landing zone.
Because they drop like stones, the men cannot jump in sequence, or they’d be too far apart to link up quickly for their formations. So three of them hang outside the door, clinging to the fuselage in the punishing slipstream, until the fourth, in the doorway, gives the command. Then they all jump together. A half-second later, they are followed by a sky diver with a video camera.
“The biggest surprise when you’re falling is how overstimulated your mind is,” Traad said. “After 2,500 jumps, it’s still hard to get my mind into it, because my body knows that it’s falling out of an airplane.”
“It’s scary, but it’s not terrifying,” said Verner, a confessed acrophobe. “When I needed a TV antenna on top of my house, I had to hire a guy to do it. But somehow this is different.”
During the 35 seconds it takes to plummet 8,000 feet, the team moves rapidly from one formation to another. During the competition, judges watching the videotapes will award points for quickness and subtract them if the patterns are not formed correctly.
About 2,000 feet above the ground, an altimeter on Falzone’s wrist sounds a warning. The men separate, pull their rip cords and parachute to a soft landing in the grassy landing zone.
Then it’s off to the cramped team trailer, where they watch the videotape and Brodsky-Chenfeld assesses their performance.
“That’s a good one!” he said with a wide grin. “It was sweet. It’s the fastest one we’ve had. . . .
“You know,” he said, “I think we’re gonna do it.”