High-Speed Malfunction

The stadium was a mile below as Wheels and I stepped into the night air and dropped away from the Cessna 182. We both had smoke canisters and streamers, and I had a football strapped to my rig.  Slyde and Kivett were already 1,000 feet below us, their parachutes deployed and towing American and Indiana flags.

The plan was for Kivett and Slyde to glide their banners toward the high school football field as the National Anthem played across the crowd.  Wheels and I would deploy 500 feet above the flags, pulling the pins on our smoke canisters and dropping them below us on a length of paracord.  Then we’d each unfurl a 50-foot Mylar streamer and commence an artful spiral around the flags as the four of us all came in to land just as (if we timed it right) the crowd sang along with “… O'er the la-and of the freeee, and the home… of the… braave.”

Ash Dive

Slyde arrived at Franklin Flying Field, right on schedule. He sat in the grass as his friends gathered in a circle and plotted how best to dump him from a Cessna.

“How about me and Ed hold him from both ends and you let him go?” 

“We could get under canopy and then drop him.” 

“Cathie, you were married to him. You should do the honors.”

It was a hot Saturday in August and weather threatened from the west. Cathie and Ed and Kivett and Ralph planned Slyde’s final skydive as Slyde sat patiently by –  in a box and all five cremated pounds of him.