Sky Diver Saw Nothing Until Seconds Before Fatal Collision

WESTFIELD, Mass. —  A sky diver who crashed into an airplane said he tried at the last second to steer clear of the collision that killed four people.

“My first impression was, ‘Oh, my God, what’s he doing there?’ ” Alfred Peters said Friday. “I dipped one shoulder; I thought I was going to sail right over the top. The next thing I heard was a thud.”

Peters, a former Army paratrooper, suffered a broken ankle while all four on the plane were killed earlier this week. Peters said he saw “nothing at all” in the sunny sky before leaping from a Cessna 206 about 8,000 feet over Northampton Airport.

Within a few seconds, he spotted another single-engine plane, a Piper Warrior II, heading straight for him. Peters, 51, said his foot smashed into the tail, apparently knocking off the vertical fin and sending the craft into a nose dive for woods below.

“It was just one of those two-second things, and it was over,” Peters said. He left a Northampton hospital Thursday.

Killed were pilot Elliot Klein, 49, of Rhinebeck, N.Y.; his son, Jonas Klein, 18, of Boston; Christina Park, 18, of Auburn, Wash.; and Jean Kimball, 45, of Pine Plains, N.Y. They were en route from Poughkeepsie, N.Y., to Boston.

Peters, who only recently returned to parachuting, managed to open his chute and land safely at the small airport.

About 140,000 U.S. sky divers made an estimated 2.5 million jumps over the past year, the U.S. Parachute Assn. in Alexandria, Va., said. In only one other past instance was a parachutist hit by a plane on a completely unrelated flight in San Diego in 1980, the association said. The plane came down safely. Since 1982, parachutists have been hit by their own planes 14 times, according to the Air Safety Foundation in Frederick, Md.

Peters, from Westfield, was in an official jump zone. The Federal Aviation Administration said a pilot who intends to pass through such a zone will usually call into an automated FAA system for general cautions before a flight or tune in to the frequency of the nearest air traffic control station during the flight.