Skydiver relives day of tragedy

Plummeting earthwards at 190km/h in a barrage of wind noise, Stuart Bean looked into the vacant eyes of his student and knew something was terribly wrong.

Everything had seemed fine 15 seconds earlier when Mr Bean and his colleague held on to the full-length jumpsuit of an excited 69-year-old William Sills, who nodded to signal he was ready to go.

At the signal, the trio jumped out the side door of a light plane 4000m above Motueka airport.

It was Mr Sills' second escorted skydive - another chance to relive his days as a British paratrooper - and he had been eager to get under way. He had insisted on being on the first flight of that fine Tuesday morning.

But in those first few seconds, as the trio plunged out of the plane in unison and were spreadeagled in midair, Mr Sills' elderly body appeared to fail him. He was struggling to get through the routine of taking deep breaths and putting his hand on the ripcord.

"He started going rigid. He didn't actually get his hand on the correct place, so I was manually trying to manipulate his hand to the right place and he was fighting me. He was trying to hang on to my hand," Mr Bean said.

"I wasn't even looking at his face at that stage. That went on for 10 or 15 seconds and then he went quite relaxed.

"I thought something was wrong, so I looked at his face. He looked very unresponsive...His eyes were open. He looked vacant."

With the ground looming, Mr Bean's instincts kicked in. He knew Mr Sills would not be able to activate his parachute, so he reached over and did it himself.

"You don't even think about it, you just do it. From time to time, we will get a student who loses altitude awareness and doesn't appreciate that it's time to finish the skydive and open the parachute. [Skydiving is] not a falling sensation. It's like a floating sensation. It's not that you feel like you are falling fast and time is going fast... you don't think about it in terms of the fact you are falling at 300m every five seconds."

As the trio became separated and Mr Sills floated away, Mr Bean and his colleague opened their own chutes late in order to reach the ground three or four minutes before their unconscious student.

Mr Bean desperately tried to raise Mr Sills via the radio on his jumpsuit.

"I thought he may have fainted, so I yelled into the radio to try to prompt some response and still didn't get anything, so I dispatched someone to meet him as he landed, because he was landing off the airport."

Mr Bean ran to his car and sped to the site where Mr Sills was landing.

His parachute became caught on a commercial building and he was slumped forward as he hung from the tangled chute.

"We were there within 60 seconds after he landed and he was dead when we got there. It hadn't occurred to me I would arrive and he would be dead. In some situations you do everything you can, but you can't change destiny can you?"

The death sent shockwaves through Mr Bean and the firm he part-owns, Skydive Abel Tasman. They shut down after Mr Sills' death on Tuesday and only reopened on Thursday after police clearance.

"This wasn't a skydiving accident. This was a health issue," Mr Bean said. "There was no problem with procedures or equipment."

Mr Sills was retired and living in Richmond, near Nelson, after emigrating from Britain four years ago.