The weather was perfect for a skydive, Gloria Shanahan told her son Michael as he headed out the door Sunday — mid-70s and the kind of deep-blue skies longtime skydivers love.
Michael Shanahan, 54, had taken up skydiving over a decade ago when his sister was stricken with breast cancer, and he became determined to live his life to the fullest, his mother said.
Gloria was mindful of the danger — she and her husband had already lost one child and didn’t want to lose another. “Now we feel like it is a nightmare come true,” she said.
Michael was among 11 mostly experienced skydivers on board a Skydive Kansas City aircraft that crashed Sunday on the grounds of a small airport in Butler, Missouri. All 12 people on the plane, including the pilot, were killed.
The catastrophe ripped a hole in the close-knit community of skydivers in this area of the Midwest, adventure-seekers who bonded over a shared love of flight and the rush of adrenaline they get with every jump.
On Monday, investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board arrived at the crash site about 65 miles south of Kansas City.
NTSB Vice Chairman Michael Graham said at a news conference Monday that investigators are just beginning their work but will be examining avionics, weight distribution and statements from witnesses who described hearing an engine failure at the time of the accident, among other factors.
Graham said it was too early to speculate on the cause of crash: “We’ll see where the evidence takes us.”
The pilot and the 11 skydivers had just taken off Sunday around 11:30 a.m. when the plane banked sharply to the left and fell to the ground, erupting in flames, authorities said.
“We still don’t know why that happened, whether the pilot did it or the plane did it,” Dennis Jacobs, the director of the Bates County Emergency Management Agency, said in an interview Monday. The plane did not take the usual pattern of heading straight out until 400 feet in the air, then beginning to ascend to 13,000 feet, he said.
One witness told a local news outletthat the impact felt more like a “wave” rather than hearing the loud crash.
The atmosphere at the tiny airport suddenly shifted from joy to horror as family members expecting to cheer their loved ones on instead became eyewitnesses to a fiery tragedy.
Skydive Kansas City has been instructing fledgling and more experienced skydivers in the Kansas City area since 1998, according to its website, but later sold it to a Midwestern-based investment firm in 2024. The company called the crash “a devastating loss,” in a Sunday statement.
The plane is owned by SkyHi Aero, an aviation company based in Jasper, Tennessee. Justin Silvia, who is listed as a company contact, said Monday he had no comment.
Graham said Monday that investigators will be trying to determine whether less stringent safety rules that often apply to skydiving planes — something the NTSB has been trying to get changed for years — played a role in Sunday’s crash.
The safety standards for skydiving flights are more relaxed than for other commercial operations, such as air taxis or charter flights — and far weaker than the rules governing the nation’s major air carriers, said Jeff Guzzetti, a former FAA and NTSB accident investigator.
It’s a loophole the NTSB has been trying to close since 2021, when it released a report on ways to improve the safety of these flights.
The 2021 report noted there was “a long history of concerns about safety” because these aircraft “are not held to the same maintenance, airworthiness, and operational standards” as many other air carriers.
In June 2019, a plane full of skydivers crashed shortly after takeoff in Hawaii, killing the pilot and 10 passengers.
In a scene that Guzzetti said recalled the early reports of what occurred in Missouri, the plane in Hawaii barely got off the ground before nosing into the ground. The follow-up NTSB report called out “the need for an appropriate regulatory framework for parachute jump operations” and the “broader systemic safety issues” with these kinds of flights.
Work to change the rule is just getting started. A committee was created in April and will consider changes to the FAA’s rules on airplane maintenance and inspection programs, as well as pilot training.
Skydiving itself is safer than it has been in decades, but the inherent danger of the sport is a glimmer that’s never quite extinguished among its aficionados, who bond quickly at airports and designated “drop zones.”
“When we’re in the drop zone, political [stuff] don’t matter, the wars and hardship, we can let that go and for a second we can just be free,” said Jen Bradfield, a St. Louis skydive instructor who knew eight of the victims. “It’s in our blood. It’s undeniable the bond we have for one another.”
She was with her husband skydiving in the area Sunday, which began, she said, as “a beautiful day for jumping.”
Shanahan, a union steelworker just a year from retirement, was “a wonderful son, a great dad and doted on his six grandchildren immensely,” his mother said in an interview.
He had taken up the sport in 2016 about three months before his sister Nikki, 45, died of breast cancer, after seeing how she tried so hard to live.
After she died, “he would be jumping out of the plane and, to be up that high, he felt a very strong connection to her,” Gloria Shanahan said.
Haylie Hagan, 24, the daughter of victim Nick Nash, said her father “loved anything adventurous.” Nash, 40, who ran a tree-trimming service in Holden, Missouri, frequently took her and her younger brother, Ayden, on trips to far-flung places like Puerto Rico and Alaska.
“He had this mindset: ‘I’m not going to live forever.’ He always wanted to do things and explore and live life to the fullest,” Hagan said. On the trips, she said, Nash would sometimes stress out making sure all the details were nailed down.
“He just wanted everyone to be happy,” Hagan said.
She recalled that her favorite memory was when her father took her on her first skydive in Texas while she was still a teen. She took off in tandem with a professional instructor, she recalled, but her dad was close by.
He held her hand the whole way down.
Razzan Nakhlawi contributed to this report.
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