PARACHUTISTS KILLED

Greymouth Evening Star, 10 August 1935, Page 9

PARACHUTISTS KILLED

SOVIET OFFICIALS SENTENCED MOSCOW. June 24. Three aerodrome officials have been given exemplary sentences by the regional courts. They were held responsible for the death of one girl and two men, all parachute jumpers, either through slackness or through tolerating “air hooliganism"—in other words, dangerous stunts. One of the accused, president of the Aero Club of Magnetogor.sk, the great new metal town in the Urals, allowed tempt a record by jumping, from a a local professional instructor to atheight of 9,500 feet and opening his parachute only 80 feet from the ground. He was killed. The. second man accused allowed a girl pupil to jump without fixing the ring of her ripcord properly. The- parachute failed to open and she was killed instantly. Tira third man, a parachute official in Tashkent, allowed another man to jump without tying on his parachute, thus letting him be killed instantly. “Soviet parachutes are absolutely reliable, but when our parachute sport is invaded by air hooligans and when fools are in charge of it, such distressing accidents are sure to happen.” writes the “Komsomolskaia Pravda.” Comrade Babitski, chief of the parachute section in Smolensk, yesterday again heat, the world record for a jump without an oxygen apparatus with a leap of 24.277 feet. This record was mad? by night, when there was nearly a full moon.