A dramatic sport parachuting high-speed landing maneuver known as "swooping" apparently caused the death of an experienced Canadian skydiver at a Southern California drop zone, authorities said Wednesday.
Michael Ungar, 32, of Ontario, died Tuesday afternoon at Perris Valley Skydiving after landing hard at the Riverside County sport parachuting base about 70 miles southeast of Los Angeles. His hometown was not immediately available.
Witnesses told Perris police and reporters that Unger's parachute was open as he made the difficult maneuver and landed hard in a shallow pond at 2:01 p.m. Tuesday. Friends pulled him out of the water, the Riverside County coroner and Perris police said in a news release.Ungar's death was the sixth skydiving fatality at the popular Southern California facility in the past 15 months.
Skydiving centre manager Dan Brodsky-Chenfeld said the Canadian sometimes worked as an instructor at Skydive Hollister on California's Central Coast.
Ungar, who had 2,000 jumps to his credit, was visiting the Perris Valley area and had rarely, if ever, jumped at the facility, Brodsky-Chenfeld said.
Perris is regarded as one of the world's foremost facilities and has more than 140,000 jumps per year, Brodsky-Chenfeld said, which is about five per cent of the three million jumps nationally in the United States.
It has been particularly difficult year at the facility.
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