LORDS VALLY, PA (August 31, 2007) – Helen Coffin boarded the small airplane, rode to 9,000 feet, and then the 80-year-old jumped out.
At 6,000 feet, the skydiving instructor to whom she was attached pulled the rip cord. “It was such a rush!” she says. “It was so wonderful.”
Coffin attends The Church at Hemlock Farms, an Evangelical Covenant Church, and has been involved with several ministries there since 1990.
The recent jump was the first for Coffin, who decided it was the perfect way to celebrate her milestone birthday. She hatched the idea after watching one of her grandsons skydive last year.
“The original plan was I was supposed to jump with another grandson,” she says. He had turned 18 in the spring, so he finally was old enough to jump. He did go up the same day, but in another airplane because the aircraft were too small to carry everyone in the same plane.
Coffin says she wasn’t afraid. “I didn’t look down when I was sitting at the edge of the plane. I just looked straight ahead,” she says. After her departure from the airplane, she didn’t have time to be scared. “It all happened so fast.”
Coffin also had complete confidence in the instructor – a retired British paratrooper who goes by the name Simeon of Kent. He would have let her pull the ripcord, but she decided it would be best if he performed that critical step.
Anyone who knows Coffin would not be surprised by her birthday celebration. “I’ve always been adventurous,” she explains. Those adventures often involve heights or speed.
She has ridden in a hot air balloon and has gone parasailing. Her activities closer to the earth’s surface have included making the bobsled run at the former Olympics facility in Lake Placid, New York, and cycling down the side of a volcano in Hawaii.
“That was the scariest,” Coffin says of her volcano adventure. There was no lava flowing, but the narrow two-lane road had more than 40 hairpin turns, and the buses going up towards the volcano posed a threat.
Coffin’s husband, Don, was “very supportive” of her birthday jump, she says. “He sat on a chair and watched.”
Some friends, however, questioned her judgment. “People wonder why anyone would jump out of a perfectly good airplane,” she says.
Not a lot of people knew of her plans. “I didn’t make a big deal of it beforehand in case I went there and got cold feet,” Coffin explains, laughing.
She hopes other 80-year-olds also will take to the skies and wouldn’t be surprised if that happens. Eighty isn’t what it used to be, she observes and “There are so many more of us now.”
Coffin says she would like to go again next year because this jump didn’t last long enough due to the direct descent. “I would love to do some swirls and spins,” she says. “If I go up next year, I’m going to fly around some more.”
