Two Planes, One Fireball, Zero Funerals

Two planes full of skydivers collided over Wisconsin on a Saturday in November 2013, exploded into a fireball, and killed absolutely no one. Everyone on board survived because everyone on board was a professional skydiver and they all jumped the hell out before the wreckage hit the ground. Several of them had helmet cameras running when it happened.

The footage is one of the more genuinely disorienting things I’ve watched circulate online. You’re seeing through someone’s visor—blue sky, the other plane a small shape off to the side—and then the frame goes sideways and there’s fire and chaos and the camera is tumbling through open air, and then a canopy opens and everything goes quiet and green fields are rising slowly from far below. The human brain isn’t equipped to process the distance between what almost happened and what did. All of them floating down into a field. Fine.

What stays with me is the helmet camera detail. These people flew up specifically to jump out and document themselves doing it—a fairly explicit negotiation with mortality as it is—and then the plane exploded, and they documented that too. Not out of bravery or professionalism. Just because the cameras were already on. What. The. Fuck.