A group of skydivers loaded into a plane at a Wisconsin airport Sunday afternoon, expecting to jump from about 14,000 feet in the air.
But before their plane took off, they saw another plane in the distance fly behind a group of trees. They waited for the plane, a white Beechcraft Debonair, to reappear. It never did.
They suspected the Beechcraft Debonair had crashed.
“Your heart drops real quick,” said Jonah Johnson, pilot of the plane carrying skydivers. “But at the same time, you’re not thinking about yourself. You kind of just go into a mode of, ‘Okay, it happened. Let’s go make sure everybody’s all right.’”
Johnson flew the Cessna Caravan above the trees and circled the area, looking for the downed plane. They spotted the Beechcraft Debonair, which had crashed in a cornfield and created a gash amid the cornstalks.
With Johnson’s help, three skydivers looked for a safe spot to jump so they could assist the people on the crashed plane.
“There really wasn’t much of a discussion about it,” skydiver Sean Plastine said. “It was just, ‘People need help. Okay, let’s go.’”
Johnson reported the crash, in Walworth County, to an air traffic controller.
“I can drop a load of skydivers right over them to potentially help aid,” he said, according to air traffic control audio.
The controller gave permission. Plastine and his two friends, John Bechtel and Kevin Flynn, parachuted about 3,000 feet onto a bean field near the crash.
“Three skydivers are down,” Johnson, 24, told the air traffic controller.
Bechtel and Flynn dropped their parachute equipment and ran into the roughly 10-foot-tall cornstalks toward the crash site. Flynn, a former paramedic, said he helped a woman who was bleeding from a head wound, ensuring she was alert. Her injury did not appear to be life-threatening, Flynn said.
Meanwhile, Plastine, 38, ran to a road to help first responders find the crash site. Paramedics arrived a few minutes after the skydivers got there.
“It was like the ‘Field of Dreams,’” said Flynn, referring to the 1989 baseball movie set in an Iowa cornfield. “They just started appearing out of the corn.”
Three of the four people on the Beechcraft Debonair were transported “for medical evaluation,” while the other was evaluated by first responders on the scene and released, the town of East Troy said in a statement.
The Federal Aviation Administration said in a preliminary report that a passenger suffered a minor injury, but the others were uninjured. Engine issues contributed to the crash, the FAA said in the report, but the agency is still investigating the cause of the crash.
While emergency crews assisted the downed passengers, Johnson landed his plane at the East Troy Municipal Airport. Later that afternoon, Johnson took more groups of skydivers into the air, keeping an eye on the crash site to ensure there weren’t more issues.
The skydivers went home, they said, and prepared for their workweeks.
“It’s very surprising to do that on a Sunday and then go to work on Monday,” said Plastine, a mechanical engineer. “But I guess that’s what all emergency responders do.”
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