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Dorothy Hoffner, a 104-year-old Chicago woman whose recent skydive could see her certified by Guinness World Records as the oldest person to ever jump from a plane, has died. Hoffner's close friend, Joe Conant, said she was found dead Monday morning by staff at the Brookdale Lake View senior living community. Conant said Hoffner apparently died in her sleep on Sunday night. Conant, who is a nurse, said he met Hoffner — whom he called Grandma at her request — several years ago while he was working as a caregiver for another resident at the senior living center. He said...

A licensed skydiver died while skydiving in Fentress, Texas on Friday. On Friday, April 28, an experienced 31-year-old skydiver died while skydiving solo in Fentress, which is around 15 miles outside of San Marcos. According to Skydive Spaceland San Marcos, the skydiver has been licensed to skydive solo for the last four years and has completed multiple, successful skydives at the same location in the past. The skydiver, who has not been identified as the family is still being contacted, used their own parachute for a "self-supervised skydive." The company stated that the equipment was appropriately sized for the skydiver,...

“It felt like forever, just looking at him … We stood there in, like, shock just going, ‘He has to be dead,'” said Amber Sweet-Smith, who saw the injured skydiver in her yard in Oceanside moments after he fell last week. “We usually hear the screaming or, you know, people laughing — just in the air, and he heard like an unusual scream, looked up, saw the guy and went, probably in his head, ‘Oh ****, he’s going to hit our house,'” “It felt like the whole wall shook. … It was scary,” “One of the other parachuter guys said...

A Tennessee grandfather fell to his death during a skydiving accident at a high school football game Friday evening as startled onlookers watched, according to officials. The 55-year-old experienced skydiver was participating in a pregame ceremony event for the annual "Musket Bowl," a football game between David Crockett High School and Daniel Boone High School when he was injured upon landing, said Washington County Schools Superintendent Jerry S. Boyd. The victim was airlifted from the David Crockett High School football stadium to an area hospital where he was pronounced dead. Boyd would not identify the 55-year-old, but said all the...

A TikTok influencer and beauty queen from Toronto, Canada, died after skydiving in her first solo course last weekend. Tanya Pardazi, 21, fell to her death on August 27 while completing a jump at Skydive Toronto in Innisfil, Ontario. The skydiving school requires students to finish a day of ground training before attempting a solo dive, CTV News Toronto reported. Pardazi, a philosophy student at the University of Toronto, had opened her parachute too late during her dive. Skydive Toronto said in a statement posted to Facebook that Pardazi "released a quickly rotating main parachute at a low altitude without...

The skydiving pair was spotted midair struggling to deploy their parachutes, local resident Alex Arias, who witnessed the incident, told KPRC. The male instructor was reportedly unconscious after hitting the ground while the female student was awake and calling for help. “He let off his primary and then the secondary shoot like opened halfway up so he didn’t fall like a straight fall, he was like 50 percent shoot, like a corkscrew,” Arias said, KPRC reported.

An apparent skydiver whose parachute became entangled in power lines about 30 feet off the ground in Lake Elsinore has been taken to a hospital after being rescued on Tuesday... The incident was reported around 11:10 a.m. at Mission Trail and Vine Street...The area is near a local skydiving center, though it’s unclear if that was where the flight originated. In addition to firefighters, Southern California Edison and the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department responded to help get the individual down. Crews cut power lines and used a safety basket to get him back on the ground a little more than...

Yet another skydiver has died at the Skydive Lodi Parachute Center. The skydiving school in San Joaquin County is now the site of 22 recorded deaths since opening in 1981. Nine of those deaths have occurred since 2016, according to the FAA. The woman, identified as 57-year-old Sabrina Call of Watsonville by the San Joaquin County coroner, died on Saturday afternoon, officials said. A parachutist who jumped with her called the sheriff's office reporting that the victim's parachute became tangled. "We're sad, but it's just like a car wreck or anything else. You have to go on," owner Bill Dause,...

“What was reported to us from someone who witnessed the (incident)… was that the chute failed to fully open as she was coming down and it was heavily tangled around her,” the San Joaquin County Sheriff’s Office said. They said the woman was “very experienced.” The FAA said they are investigating the incident, but focusing on the parachute rigging.

A student has died after falling from cliffs in Ireland while reportedly taking a selfie. The man in his 20s fell from the Cliffs of Moher in County Clare, in the west of the country. He was studying in Dublin and Irish media say he was an Indian national. Police are treating it as a "tragic accident" amid reports he slipped while taking the selfie on Friday afternoon. A police spokesman said: "The alarm was raised shortly after 3pm when a man was seen falling from the cliff edge." His body was later recovered by the coastguard based at Doolin...

caused the skydiver’s death, according to the agency. The FAA said she was using her own equipment. Usually, FAA probes into such situations are limited to if the chute was packed properly and by the appropriate person. Fellow skydivers said she was experienced in the extreme sport. Meanwhile, the skydiving center itself has a decades-long history of deaths and was investigated by federal agents earlier this year, according to KTXL. Nineteen people have died there since the facility opened in the early 1980s, with six of them between 2016 and 2018. After trouble in 2016, 20 center instructors were suspended...

A San Jose high school tennis coach is missing and presumed dead after a skydiving accident last week in New Zealand, police and high school officials said. Tyler Nii appears to have died last Wednesday after he plunged into Lake Wakatipu in the South Island of the country. Nii, 27, was a tennis coach at Archbishop Mitty High School, according to a Facebook post Friday by the school's department of athletics. "Tyler Nii, beloved coach of our men's and women's tennis programs passed away this week in a tragic accident," the post said. "All of us: players, coaches, friends and...

A skydiving Santa looking to make a grand entrance while taking an Elf on the Shelf to a 9-year-old girl crashed into a tree and light pole before hitting a Florida beach and breaking his leg. News outlets say George Krokus was dressed as Santa Claus during a Saturday skydive to deliver toys to the Tampa Bay Beach Bums Operation Santa Charity Volleyball Tournament. Madison Spiers saw the crash and later found a note from the "elf" named Kristoff who visits her house during the holidays. It said, "As we were about to land this big tree jumped right out...

French wingsuit flyers recently completed an unbelievable stunt following a B.A.S.E. jump from the top of the Jungfrau mountain in Switzerland. Fred Fugen and Vince Reffet, known as the Soul Flyers, caught up with and flew into a plane in mid-air. As part of their project A Door in the Sky, which they had spent several months training for by completing more than 100 test flights in Empuriabrava in Spain, the duo B.A.S.E jumped from the top of the Jungfrau, one of Europe’s highest mountains, and flew into a Pilatus Porter light aircraft in mid-air. Now that's a different way...

TAMPA — Her business card is utterly ordinary. No big titles. No hint of connections with the military and political elite. It lists her address, her phone number and her name in elegant script: "Honorable Jill G. Kelley." But the outsized portrait of herself that Kelley presents to the world will fit on no card. It's seen in her emails to Tampa Mayor Bob Buckhorn and others. She drops names. She mentions lunch at the White House in a casual aside, one of three visits she has made there in the last six weeks. The top U.S. general in Afghanistan...

“I have 18,000 jumps jumping out with a parachute on my back and here I’m gonna do it without anything.” His safety net will actually be a net: 100 feet by 100 feet. It will be about 200 feet above the ground. Aikins will be traveling at around 120 miles per hour when his body hits it. “It’s actually like a big hammock. It kind of cradles you and cups you and it’s really soft in the beginning and it hits a little bit hard at the end,” he said. Aikins will use his own body to position his free...

PINJARRA, Australia, A video was released of a man having a seizure while skydiving in Australia. The incident happened on November 14, 2014. The intermediate-level skydiver had the seizure at an altitude of around 9,000 feet. The man was allegedly unconscious for about 30 seconds. An instructor glided on a collision course and successfully made contact and opened the man's parachute at around 4,000 feet. The man regained consciousness and was able to land safely with the parachute.

For the first time ever, a meteor has been captured on camera falling through the sky after it has finished burning. And that’s not all: the baseball-sized space rock nearly slammed into the man behind the camera.

It sounds like a remarkable story, almost unbelievable: Anders Helstrup went skydiving nearly two years ago near Hedmark, Norway and while he didn’t realize it at the time, when he reviewed the footage taken by two cameras fixed to his helmet during the dive, he saw a rock plummet past him. He took it to experts and they realized he had captured a meteorite falling during its “dark flight” — when it has been slowed by atmospheric braking, and has cooled and is no longer luminous. Norwegian astrophysicist Pål Brekke confirmed to Universe Today that the story is true. “I...

A skydiver in Norway captures the first ever footage of a falling meteorite after it has stopped burning.