Jump marks Bush's 80th year

The jump Sunday was the fifth for the former president. He did not jump solo.
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
COLLEGE STATION, Texas -- Someday, maybe, age will catch George H.W. Bush.
If it's willing to jump out of an airplane at 13,000 feet.
The 41st president of the United States fell from the sky at 120 mph on Sunday. After a minute in free fall, his gold-and-black parachute opened and caught the wind. Several thousand spectators, shielding their eyes from the glaring sun, pointed to a dot against the white puffy clouds.
"There he is!"
Down came the ex-president, rocking slowly, gently.
When Bush voluntarily bailed out of an airplane five years ago to mark his 75th birthday, his wife, Barbara, jokingly wondered, "This was the man who was head of an intelligence agency?"
She meant the CIA, which Bush briefly headed in the 1970s.
On Sunday she declared: "This proves at 80, you still don't grow up."
President George W. Bush's father didn't get to jump solo, as he'd planned. Clouds and wind made the jump too risky for a student parachutist. This was only Bush's fifth jump, including a practice plunge Sunday morning.
He made his first out of necessity in 1944, when his Navy torpedo bomber was shot down over the Pacific. And the last thing the Secret Service wanted was for a former president to land where he shouldn't, like on top of the Barbara Bush Parent Center or in someone's back yard or off-course in the nearby town of Snook.
How the jump went
Bush had a partner, Sgt. Bryan Schnell of the Army's Golden Knights, who are to parachuting what the Flying Wallendas were to circus trapeze acts.
Bush punctuated his birthday with an exclamation point when he landed, legs stuck out in front of him like a kid playing in a sandbox, and slid to a stop on his backside.
"Life is good," he declared afterward.
Dressed in a black jump suit, an altimeter strapped to his left wrist, the former pilot recited an old slogan from his days in the cockpit.
"Ceiling and visibility unlimited. That's where my life is today."
Bush invited former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to jump with him, but Gorbachev watched from the ground.
He was asked whether he was afraid to jump or just didn't want to.
The interpreter translated Gorbachev's one-word answer.
"Afraid."
After a week of bowing its head in mourning and respect for one former president, Americans looked up in smiling admiration at another.
"I think President Reagan would have loved that this event went on," said D.K. Williams, 66, of College Station. Reagan, Bush's predecessor in the White House, died June 5 at 93. "Life goes on."
It's history
Bush is the only president in U.S. history to jump out of an airplane at altitude. Twenty-one other presidents never sky-dived, largely because they died before the parachute was patented in 1914.
Teddy Roosevelt was the first president to fly when he went up in a biplane at an air show in St. Louis in 1910. The craft flew for four minutes and reached an altitude of 50 feet.
Our heaviest president, 300-plus pound William Howard Taft, also passed up the opportunity to sky-dive after he left office.
The reason why Bush is the only sky-diving president seems fairly obvious.
"People have an innate fear of falling," said Chris Needels, the president of the United States Parachute Association, who attended the presidential jump. President Bush is a dues-paying member of the organization.
A novice sky diver once asked his instructor if his chute didn't open and the reserve chute didn't open, how long did he have before he hit the ground.
"The rest of your life," he was told.
Sky diving averages one death per 100,000 jumps.
An average of 32 people die each year jumping out of airplanes on purpose.
In 2003, 25 sky divers died.
"It was a good year," Needels said. "If you can call it that."