President Bush's Birthday Parachute Jump

Not only have President Bush and I both jumped with the U.S. Army's Golden Knights parachute display team, but we've both jumped with the same guy -- Tandem Team Leader Sergeant First Class Mike Elliot.

This photo is of Mike and me about 8,000 feet above Wyoming. President Bush's first jump was during World war II into the Pacific ocean as a navy pilot when he was shot down. He has jumped with the Golden Knights on his 75th, 80th, and now his 85th birthday.

Here's the article I wrote shortly after my jump in 2005. Thank you, Golden Knights. And Happy Birthday Mr. President!


"You can tell when the jumpers are leaving the aircraft. They make a swoosh sound that I can hear up in the cockpit,” pilot Alan Aber told me, “When the new guys are trying out for the team, they aren’t used to jumping out of something that goes 105 knots. There’s a blast shield that folds over the rear doors when they are locked back in the open position. Sometimes they don’t push off far enough and they really smack into that blast shield. But generally it’s more embarrassing than anything else,” Aber chuckled. I chuckled too, thankful that I had not collided with anything when I made my skydiving debut the previous day out of Aber’s plane, a Fokker F27, used by the U.S. Army’s Golden Knights Parachute Display team to introduce lucky individuals like me to the sport of parachuting, and to promote the Army’s ongoing public relations campaign. My jump took place over Cheyenne, Wyoming, where I was strapped to Sergeant First Class Mike Elliot, an Airborne Infantryman and tandem instructor on the Golden Knights Gold Demonstration Team to literally hitch a ride on his parachute. Like many people, I have an irrational fear of heights; Standing on the observation floor of the Sears Tower in Chicago, the Eiffel Tower in Paris, and the Royal Gorge Bridge in Colorado have all triggered sweaty palms and the feeling that the great void around and below me would somehow reach up and drag me down into it. I had already decided not to dwell on putting my life in the hands of a stranger while jumping out of a perfectly good aircraft. At least by jumping with the Army I knew I was beginning my skydiving career at the top--no pun intended. Mike and I began by examining the tandem parachute: a 370 square foot elliptical nylon canopy and container which together weigh approximately 60lbs. Next, we reviewed the method by which we would leave the aircraft. “You’re going to look like this in freefall,” Mike explained as he slid belly down, arms and legs extended, onto a convenient coffee table in the Regional Airport building in Cheyenne. He played a short video showing Golden Knights jumpers freefalling in complicated geometric shapes with other team members, popping smoke, and generally having fun while on a collision course with planet Earth at 120 mph, all to the sound of some good rockin’ music designed to get your adrenaline level up. By the end of the film I was not only eager to jump, I wanted to invade a foreign country just for the fun of it! And maybe that’s the point of all this. At a time when many of our soldiers are deployed overseas, the Golden Knights don’t hide the fact that their mission is to promote the Army to the public. It’s called advertising, and these soldiers are wonderful ambassadors both for the sport of parachuting and for the Army.


Our third jumper was Staff Sergeant Joe Jones, who would jump with Mike and me and film our descent for the personalized video tape that all guest jumpers receive; capturing the rare privilege of wearing the Knight’s famed yellow and black jump suit. Joe’s parachute is a 120 square foot elliptical nylon canopy and container weighing approximately 20lbs.


In addition to display jumps at events like Cheyenne’s annual Frontier Days festival, the Golden Knights also field Style and Accuracy teams for both inter-service and civilian (inter)national competitions. In the Accuracy event, the team must touch down as close as possible to a target that is only a few centimeters wide. In the Style competition, the team jumps at 7500 feet and is judged by the number of different formations they can make, requiring that they separate and rejoin for each successful maneuver. Based at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, the Golden Knights unit is comprised of only 86 members: jumpers, parachute technicians, aircrew and support personnel. There are two demonstration teams: Black Team and Gold Team. I made my jump with Gold Team. I asked Mike Elliot the age of his oldest jumping partner: “A ninety-two year old lady,” Mike replied, “and President Bush senior has also jumped with us.”


A typical jump is made from one of the two Fokker F27 twin turboprop aircraft that the team purchased in 1985. Built in Holland, these aircraft were customized with an oversize door on each side of the fuselage, just forward of the tail, and were originally destined for delivery to the parachute regiment of an African army. But when the deal fell through, the aircraft were sold instead to the Golden Knights. “We had to fly them back from Holland in stages,” Alan Aber recalls. “We added fuel tanks inside the fuselage and hopped from Holland, to Ireland, to Greenland, and finally to the East Coast. We had a couple of factory pilots with us, but it still amounted to on-the-job training to get used to them.” The F27 meets some important criteria for the team: It is of the correct size to transport a team and all their gear from one jump location to the next, while being small enough to operate from short runways and fly slow enough (105 knots) for parachutists to exit the aircraft and stay together in formation.


Cheyenne, Wyoming, where I made my tandem jump is 6,000 feet above sea level. We jumped at 14,000 feet above sea level. As the airplane spiraled upwards in the thinning air, we passed around an oxygen bottle. At one point, I found myself getting light headed and took a few extra lungs-full. I had to sit on Mike’s lap in order to get his harness hooked to mine, and then we stood up and duck-walked down the aisle to the rear of the aircraft. As we approached the open door, with the green light above it, I hooked my thumbs into the harness. I looked out of the door and then it finally hit me that I was about to throw myself into the same nothingness that surrounds the Sears Tower. Oh well, too late to back out now. Pride took over and we stood in the door. As instructed, I lifted my feet, hanging in my harness, legs slid backwards in between Mike’s knees, my heels pointed up. I rested my head back against his left shoulder so that he had an uninterrupted view of the ground, and raised my hands in a surrender position. “Ready?” Mike asked.“Yes, I’m-“ Before I could take a breath, we were gone. Whoa! I wasn’t prepared for such fast acceleration. Our combined weight would cause us to accelerate to 170mph if Mike did not release the small drogue parachute immediately after we left the aircraft. The drogue is designed to keep the speed down to a maximum of 120mph. As we fell to earth in the classic horizontal, arms and legs extended position, two other Golden Knights jumpers swooped down and linked hands with me. For a few precious seconds I was part of one of the finest display teams in the world. I was literally jolted back to reality as Mike deployed the parachute. The sudden deceleration gave me the impression we were shooting upwards, rather than down. And then we were floating silently, gliding in a series of lazy figure eights as Mike steered us to land on the airport grass, scant feet from where we had taken off. What a rush. Forget my fear of heights. I’d do this again in a heartbeat.