Each year, the National Aeronautic Association selects what it considers aviation's most memorable records from the previous year and honors those records at an event near Washington, D.C. 

Welcome to the front office! This new bimonthly column will take you behind the scenes of jump piloting to give you insight into the job and why your pilots do what they do. Author Chas Hines, C-41147, is an airline pilot and certified flight instructor who spent five years as a jump pilot at various drop zones. He has logged more than 5,000 hours of flight time, 500 of those instructing other pilots. He’s also been skydiving for 13 years and has more than 1,500 jumps. He can often be found load organizing at Skydive Arizona in Eloy. 

"Over 18 years, through profound changes in skydiving equipment, procedures, and methods of instruction, Jim has worked hard to produce the dramatic decline in serious accidents in our sport."

While her skydiving accomplishments were incredible, it was her humanity and her love of friends and family that made her such an icon in the skydiving world.

Canopy collisions are a fairly common cause of skydiving fatalities. The sport has seen improvement in recent years because drop zones have become more diligent about separating high-performance and standard landings and have also spent more effort educating jumpers on the importance of proper landing patterns, exit separation and separation during deployment.