A first-time skydiver recalled narrowly cheating death after his airplane crashed shortly after he dove from its open doors.
Jeffrey Walker told CBS affiliate WIVB that he wanted his first skydiving experience to be memorable, so he booked a trip with upstate New York company Skydive the Falls, which takes adventurers for a scenic tour above the Niagra Falls before each jump. When he arrived on the morning of July 20, everything seemed routine.
“Everything was great,” he recalled. “It was great weather, very calm winds. Everybody was excited. Everybody was in a good mood.”
Walker felt comfortable with his pilot, 26-year-old Melanie Georger, and miraculously didn’t feel nervous in the lead-up to his big jump. “I never even got nervous at the door ready to jump,” he said. “I didn’t know what to expect.”
Walker made the plunge with no issue, but just 30 minutes later, local 911 operators were bombarded with calls reporting a plane crash. Georger’s aircraft had gone down near a busy soccer field in the Town of Porter as she was “heading back to land,” tragically killing the young pilot. She was the only person on board at the time.
“At approximately 11:40 a.m., we started receiving multiple 911 calls of a plane crash just east of Fort Niagara on the Niagara Scenic Parkway,” Niagara County Sheriff Michael Filicetti told the outlet. “Upon response, we located one plane [that] crashed. Unfortunately, one fatal. One pilot was on board, and it is a confirmed fatal.”
Filicetti added: “Where it landed was just off the parkway. We look to the west near Fort Niagara, it’s full of soccer players today. We’re lucky where it landed, but it is an unfortunate incident.”
In the wake of the tragic incident, Walker was left to question why his life was spared. “It’s not like skydiving planes once a week fall out of the sky and you just kind of dodge it,” he said. “This is a fluke accident. Something went wrong.”
Walker continued: “For some reason, God left me on Earth and I’m just blessed to still be around. It’s just an eerie feeling that I was on that plane literally a half hour before it crashed. Why didn’t it crash with us on it? Why didn’t it crash with more people on it? It’s surreal.”
The pilot’s father, Paul Georger, posted a heartfelt tribute to his daughter on Facebook in the wake of the accident that took her life.
“Friends and family, my life as I know it ended today. My beloved daughter, my best friend, and one of the two lights of my life passed away suddenly today,” Paul Georger wrote, via The New York Post. “Melanie was a pilot, on the cusp of realizing her dream to fly for the airlines. She was doing what she loved.”
The Niagara County Sheriff’s Office confirmed that the crash site has been cordoned off until the Federal Aviation Administration and the National Transportation Safety Board arrive in the Town of Porter to investigate the incident.
