Daunting Daredevils Nearly Gave Up Ghost

Everett Weniger is a ghost.

He earned that nickname by becoming one of only two smokejumpers to lose both his main and his reserve parachute - and live.

Weniger didn’t even suffer a sprain.

The calamity unfolded during the summer of 1995. Weniger, training foreman at the U.S. Forest Service smokejumper base here, was leading rookies on their third training jump.

He dove out of the airplane using an experimental parachute, followed four seconds later by jump partner Michael Hill.

Weniger’s main chute should have been triggered by his exit from the airplane. A ball of nylon and lines emerged instead of a billow of material.

Free fall is about 90 feet per second. Ideal landing speed is 17 feet per second. Weniger was somewhere in-between, somewhere still lethal.

For a moment, Weniger was terrified. “And then all of my training kicked in,” Weniger said.

He pulled his reserve chute. It dropped like a rock between his legs but wouldn’t open.

Weniger pulled his reserve chute back up, fiddled with it and threw it out, hoping it would open. It blew back in his face. He tried again. And failed.

By now about half of Weniger’s main chute had opened. Hand over hand, he pulled his reserve chute back and held it between his legs. Brand-new trainees, packed into the jump plane, watched in anguish.

“When we looked out of the plane, we saw a chute dangling and assumed it was Michael (Hill), because he was the rookie,” Ed Lynn said.

Weniger, nearing the end of his 40-second dive, drifted toward a stand of trees. “I had about half a chute, I thought, ‘OK, I’m going to get busted up, but I think I’ll be all right,”’ he said.

At the last second, his chute fully opened and it caught the trees. The men on the ground yelled. Weniger cut himself loose and rappelled to the ground. Six months of studying the video tapes showed the main chute failed when the steering lines used to maneuver it became tangled. Weniger just wasn’t falling fast enough for his reserve chute to work.

The jump plane circled and then dumped the rest of its load. “We knew that Everett had just won the lottery,” Lynn said of their decision to go.

Weniger gathered the rookies for a pep talk afterward.

“The next morning we went out and jumped,” Weniger said. “I was the first one out of the airplane.”

He shrugs. His colleagues call him a ghost.

The other ghost - Floyd Whitaker - lost both of his parachutes during a jump near Silver City, N.M., in 1973. He went into the ground at 60 mph and bounced down a steep slope, his fall somewhat cushioned by brush.

Whitaker suffered some broken bones, but legend says he was leaning up against a tree, smoking a cigarette, by the time rescuers reached him.

Even before his near miss, Weniger had seen the dangers of jumping first hand. Six years ago he was videotaping friend Billy Martin who was using an experimental chute. Martin plummeted into the ground and died, 50 feet from where Weniger was standing.

Even considering this, Weniger and his fellow smokejumpers hate to be called elite. “There is a fine line between cocky and confident,” Lynn said.

, DataTimes