"It was louder than anything you can imagine," said Doug Scofield. "Take the loudest thing you've ever heard and make it even louder, that's how loud it was."

"The airplane was a virtual rocketship," Ron Murrock said.

In April 1981, a sky diving plane collided with a commuter craft in Loveland, Colorado, killing 15 people. Four parachutists bailed out and survived.

But there it was, engines roaring, dropping like a stone, upside down, then twisting, gaining speed, the noise from the twin powerplants echoing for miles and miles in the valley near Silvana, east of Stanwood, north of Everett, August 21, 1983.

When it hit, the sound waves from the roaring Wright 1820's suffocated the lesser noise of the explosion itself. Then the silence seemed merely deafening, broken only be the crackle of flames from the small fires the crash had ignited.

Of 26 people aboard Landry Aviation's modified Lockheed Lodestar that Sunday evening, 11 died. The others, all veteran skydivers including several champion team members from the Issaquah Parachute Center, survived because they got out in time.

It was the third worst accident involving skydivers in history, and the worst ever involving an aircraft dropping jumpers.

In the year since, the federal National Transportation Safety Board established the probable cause of the accident: "Failure of the operator and the pilot-in-command to assure proper load distribution during the jumper exit procedure."

The Federal Aviation Administration was also faulted for approving aircraft modifications that were contrary to its own regulations, and which led indirectly to the crash.

Of the 15 surviving skydivers, all but one are still jumping. And the survivors of "the Bounce," as some call it, have become something of a group within a group, Those Who Made It as distinguished from those who just like to jump out of airplanes for fun.

It is no coincidence that many of those on the plane – both living and the dead – had combat experience in Vietnam. One, Bellevue lawyer Terry Cafferty, was a Green Beret; another, Dean Bushong – "Bushy" to the other jumpers – was a Marine reconnaissance force veteran. Both died in the crash.

Among Those Who Made It were others who likewise had seen something of life and death – Jim Boling, a seven-year Marine veteran, John Moinette a Ranger from Fort Lewis; Monty Stephens and John Krumnvita, Mike Metcalf and Bob Grover. All were veterans of the war. Grover, in fact, was a paratrooper to whom wartime jumping "was just a form of transportation."

These jumpers were mixed with others of varied experience when the crash occurred. The mix, as well as the recollections of who was where when the aircraft turned belly up, remains today a subject of discussion and speculation whenever two or more of Those Who Made It gather.

Sometimes at night Ron Murrock – called "Ron Rock" by some of the other jumpers, as much for his disciplined mental attitude as his physical condition –sits awake and replays what happened.

"It's not like I have nightmares, or wake up in a cold sweat, or anything like that," he says. "I just find myself going over it, wondering why some made it and others didn't."

Why some made it and others did not is almost certainly due to the luck of the draw – who was where when the plane stalled, which way it rolled when it fell, who was closest to the door on the way down.

The Sunday of jumping over Silvana represented Landry Aviation's effort to build a market for the Lodestar.

The plane's pilots, Mike Peterson, Pat Palmer and John Eric, hoped to attract enough skydivers to make the jumper-ferrying profitable.

The plane – whose large engines made it capable of carrying lots of jumpers to high altitudes quickly – could bring in just over $300 a flight when filled with 24 jumpers.

But to get a fully loaded Lodestar off the runway, the passengers had to sit three abreast in the front half of the plane, leaving some of the 24 seatbelts behind.

But according to FAA regulations, the aircraft was not supposed to carry more than 17 people, including the two pilots, because of the limited number of emergency exits.

Nevertheless, the FAA gave routine approval to the 24 seatbelts, and to other minor modifications useful for jumping.

In retrospect, said the NTSB in its report, a more thorough FAA inspection of the airplane would have reduced the number of skydivers allowed on the plane. With fewer jumpers, the plane might not have entered its fatal stall, the NTSB said.

The surviving skydivers aren't so sure. "It seems to me," says Tom Classon, who was on the plane and is the U.S. Parachute Association's area safety officer, "that the thing the NTSB mostly came up with was that there was an accident and that it wasn't clear what the cause was."

Other survivors are more specific. Some contend the crash was the result of pilot error. "That guy (one of the pilots) didn't have a bad bone in his body," says one of the Vietnam vets, who doesn't want to see his name in print. "He was just bein' nice to the skydivers… he wanted to make sure everyone was havin' a good time."

This jumper contends that the jumpers were lined up correctly, but just as the jump was getting under way, one of the pilots cut the power on the portside engine. Without the power the aircraft lost its aerodynamic stability, rolled over to the right, and then fell upside down.

Another theory, which the NTSB could neither prove nor disprove, was that one of the aircraft's two engines failed momentarily – at a critical moment, however, when the aircraft was just above stall speed and the jumpers were in the process of exiting. The engines were destroyed on impact, although there was evidence that both were turning at maximum revolution when they struck.

The NTSB in its report theorized that there was simply too much weight from the skydivers waiting at the back of the plane. That was enough, said the NTSB, to tip the tail down, which changed the wings' angle. That slowed the plane still more, below its stall speed.

To a person, the surviving skydivers reject this notion.

"We all knew about that particular airplane's tendency to stall violently," recalls Classon. "We knew it was important to stay as far forward as possible." Another survivor said the running joke about the Lodestar was that it should have been called the Loadstall, or even Leadstall.

The fatal flight was the aircraft's fourth (sic) trip of the day. Palmer, who had flown two of the first three flights, got out of the plane at Arlington airport and turned his seat over to Eric. Shortly after 6:10 PM the plane took off; it reached its drop zone over Rick McGuire's dairy farm in the Silvana area just before 6:30.

Mike Metcalf organized the jump progression. The jumpers hoped to exit the aircraft in a continuous stream, then rely on their freefall abilities to form a 24-person circular linkup called a "megablot."

Metcalf knelt in the plane's doorway and relayed approach directions to Peterson and Eric through the opening into the cockpit. Once the plane was lined up, Metcalf stood up and returned to the middle of the plane.

Two skydivers, Tim Davis and Doug Scofield, climbed outside the plane now traveling at just over 100 knots, and hung onto the handles placed there for the purpose. First Sgt. Moinette stood in the doorway, braced with his hands at the top of the frame. Five others stood in a line near the planes rear bulkhead: Kris Stephan, a 20-year-old WSU student; Owen McCarran; Coral DeWilliam-Langlow; Dave Ferruli; and Grover.

Farther back, along the Lodestar's right side, eight others made ready to follow the first eight out. They were Metcalf, Jim Langlow, Classon, Boling, Cafferty, Bob Lockwood, Bob Bandes, and Mark Leverenz.

Along the aircraft's left side, the final eight were arrayed to follow the second eight out. This group included Stephens, Krumnvita, Ken Newman, Jim Schill, Jamilee Kempton, Murrock, Bushong and finally Marilyn Bushong, who would have been the last person out.

Murrock recalls Metcalf giving the "cut" signal to the cockpit to indicate that the drop zone had been reached. "Ready, Set," said Metcalf, "go!" The first eight pushed through the door, but the plane was already moving up and down in the tail section, an indication that a stall was imminent. At the same instant, Metcalf and Langlow were out, Classon just behind them.

For an instant those farther back in the plane began to lose their weight, just like in a falling elevator. It took that instant for the jumpers to perceive what was happening. Bushong yelled, "Get out, GET OUT!" Murrock also started shouting to get out, as did Classon. Just as Classon launched himself through the door, the plane rolled 90 degrees over on its right side, twisting Classon at the knee, then throwing him out.

As Classon, Metcalf, Grover and the others assumed their free-fall positions, they were horrified to see the airplane flip completely over on its back and start to slide down, picking up speed all the while. The engines roared without apparent effect.

"It was just like a car with the drive train cut," said one of the three, "making all that noise and going nowhere."

Then the plane began to pick up even more speed as the propellers pulled the plane into a power dive, still upside down, rolling through a couple of vertical twists; during these turns, Stephens, Krumnvita, then Murrock, Boling and finally Leverenz fought their way to the door and out of the aircraft. Both Boling and Leverenz were hit by the plane's tail and stabilizer.

Murrock saw the plane trailing white smoke from one of the engines. He recalls thinking that the plane was going to crash. "How many war pictures have you seen when smoke comes out of the engine?" he said. "When you see smoke you know that's what happens.

The engine noise is getting louder than imaginable, it's tremendously loud, and it's getting higher in pitch. I remember thinking, he's gonna pull it out – then all of a sudden there's a great big orange flame on the road and I'm thinking how can a car blow up? The explosion is like a whoompf, like it was sucked into something, not very loud at all.

Then it's over, it's dead quiet … it's all gone, all the noise, and you start to realize what you've been caught up in."

After freefalling from 12,000 to the lowest limit of 2,500 feet, all of those who made it out began pulling their ripcords. One by one, the 15 landed in the fields near the burning wreckage.

Grover and Metcalf took charge on the ground. Scofield recalls that several of the jumpers were in shock. "Most of us had never seen anyone dead before," Scofield said. "But Grover and Metcalf, they were used to it, they just knew what to do."

Leverenz, critically injured by the blow from the stabilizer, was dying. Murrock looked for Jamilee's parachute. Seeing none, he knew she was in the plane. He screamed. Grover told him to run for an ambulance for Leverenz, to give him something to do.

Stephan was moving around in shock. Scofield sat down with her to calm her. DeWilliam and Langlow said in the field holding on to one another. Schill's dog, a black Labrador who came to all the jumps, began to howl when he couldn't find his master.

Grover and Metcalf pushed through the wreckage to identify the dead from the scraps of parachute that remained. Scofield recalls that Grover later told him that the smells of the wreckage, the burning gasoline, the smoke, the small fires, flashed him back to the war. The same happened to Metcalf.

Classon, whose left leg was severely damaged, began to compile lists of who was on the plane; he was the last jumper to leave the scene hours later. He drove home to Bellevue and discovered the following day that all the ligaments and cartilage in his knee had been torn loose.

In the year that followed, all of the survivors were to jump again. As Boling said two days after the crash, they had to.

Since then, he moved, got a new job, sold his parachute. The rest are still jumping, despite the pain of that terrible day – pain that lingers still.

"Ron Rock" remembers telling Jamilee Kempton's mother about the crash the night it happened. A lump comes to his throat and his chin trembles. "I said, 'There's something I have to tell you. There was a plane crash.'" At first Ms. Kempton would not believe it. "It's hard," he said. "It would be hard for any family. It's like someone is there and then they're gone. It makes you realize how quick death can come."

For Grover and Metcalf, the wreck brought back memories they thought were finished. "He thought he could handle it," Classon said of Metcalf. "He thought that he'd be able, to write off all those friends who had died in the war… that was something that was over. But here it was again, with new friends, and he couldn't do it. It made him angry."

For Grover, who was injured in the war and takes oxygen periodically for a lung ailment, there was something besides the anger. When the Veteran's Administration heard about the accident it questioned why it should pay disability benefits to someone who was healthy enough to jump out of a plane.

Grover felt angry, the other jumpers say, not only because the VA failed to realize that an unhealthy body can fall just as fast as a healthy one, but also because again in his life, so many died so suddenly.

But the jumping goes on.

Scofield, Tim Davis, Dave Ferrulli and Murrock are all members of Eclipse, a parachute team that hopes to raise money to go to the world championships of a spectacular feat of parachuting, canopy relative work, in which the chutists guide their square-shaped airsails into geometric formations – 3,000 feet or higher.

Why do they do it?

The answer has something to do with the personality of the skydivers. They are acutely aware of the difference between themselves and their earthbound cousins – whom they somewhat derisively call "Whafos," a contraction of the question they hear most: "What for you do that?"

"There's nothing like it," says Scofield. "In free fall, you can get up to maybe 125 miles an hour in the standard position. Headfirst, maybe 170 or even higher. You put out a hand and you go this way, swooping out here; or turn your body, you go back. It's freedom that can't compare with anything else."

"Most people," says the Vietnam veteran who doesn't want his name in print, "don't know the joy of trying to overcome fear. That's why I do it… it's not the thrill-seeking bull–."

The sport, he says, is one of the few things that makes him feel refreshed mentally. It makes him feel powerful, in control, most of all, glad to be alive.

He describes a jump near Mount Rainier: "You're hanging there, it's in the morning, and you see the mountain in a way no one else can see it. It's you and it… and man, that will charge your battery."