It is in part this inherent conflict of interest that is spurring a drive to amend the Federal Aviation Regulations in order to give the agency more oversight with regard to skydive fatalities, says Bob Barton, manager of the FAA general aviation operations branch in Washington, D.C. "We're finding now that with some of the accidents, we would like to have more data," he says. "And we'd like to take a closer look and see if we need to regulate the industry a little more closely."
If the FAA wants accident data, one fertile source might be the month of April 1998 at Skydive Palm Beach. On April 9 of that year, four days after the marine rescue boat of the Pahokee Fire Department pulled three Skydive Palm Beach skydivers out of Lake Okeechobee and two days before it would rescue two more, Pahokee Fire Chief Gary Burroughs sat down and drafted a letter to Pat Dodgin.
It has become necessary to address a couple of issues which are impacting the City of Pahokee Fire Rescue as a result of your business. One is a safety issue regarding the wearing of a flotation device for those person(s) that have and may well continue ending up in Lake Okeechobee due to the proximity of that body of water in relation to your drop site. Recently a few more minutes may have cost someone their life due to not wearing a flotation device. If someone does survive a bad landing on the water, they may very well still not survive due to injuries and not being able to keep themselves afloat. I would require the use of a flotation device due to the liability.
Burroughs went on to warn Dodgin that the City of Pahokee was thinking about charging him or his customers for future lake rescues. "You do have the alternative of providing lake pickup yourself if you so desire," he wrote. Today Burroughs says, "We never got any response to that letter. We never heard back from them at all. But after that, the calls stopped coming in -- at least until that last guy, McDonald. I don't know this, but I think they started using their own boat." (By the time this question was put to Dodgin, he said his insurers had instructed him not to comment further.)
The controversy comes at a bad time for Dodgin, who is in the midst of negotiating the possible sale of his business to a Wellington-based holding corporation.
Tom Keesee, president of Halo Holdings Inc., the potential buyer, is careful to emphasize that any purchase would not include legal liabilities. Although it would include the name "Skydive Palm Beach," Keesee says he probably won't use it. Also, he says he plans to use only planes equipped with global positioning systems (GPS) to reduce the chances that a skydiver will be allowed to exit the plane too far downwind.
For his part Dodgin suspects that part of his current problem stems from the fact that McDonald was a cop. The investigator Dodgin's own insurance company hired claims that when one of the witnesses to McDonald's jump was questioned by PBSO Sgt. David Carhart, "The first thing out of [Carhart's] mouth was, 'I want to talk to you about the cop they killed.'"
That investigator, David Miller, declined to answer questions for this article or provide the name of the witness to whom Dodgin spoke. Carhart, meanwhile, says the charge is "wholly untrue. That whole conversation with that young lady was tape-recorded, so I know what was said and what was not said."
Mike McDonald was found underwater, about a mile offshore, tangled in the lines of his chute, the canopy of which was the only thing visible above the waves. According to Carhart, he was not wearing a flotation device, although that was listed on the Skydive Palm Beach jump-log checklist. "He may have inflated it and then lost it," Carhart says.
Captain Boswell of the Pahokee Fire Department doesn't think McDonald's body would have been found if it hadn't been for the PBSO helicopter called in to join the search. "The waves were getting up out there. It was real hard to see anything."
Because he couldn't see a body from the boat, Boswell was forced to maneuver upwind, cut his engine, and drift to the chute. By the time they brought McDonald's body to shore, the TV news stations were there. Footage of his covered body being loaded into a hearse played on the evening news.
By this time Juan de Castillo was on the scene. He'd gotten a call from the Skydive Palm Beach receptionist shortly after McDonald turned up missing and drove up to see what he could do to help. When his friend's body was found, he went back to the airstrip hangar, retrieved McDonald's car keys, and checked the vehicle. There on the front seat was a bottle of champagne, evidently awaiting his own arrival and the celebration that would surely ensue.
Contact Paul Belden at his e-mail address:
Paul_Belden@newtimesbpb.com
