End of July a weird story hit about a small cargo plane that had a rough landing. Nothing terribly new with that, except that the co-pilot was found not in the plane, but some thirty miles away. He had fallen from the plane and crashed into someone’s yard. “Why/how the hell did that happen” has been the question; finally some new information has come to light to fill in the “how,” but it doesn’t help with the “why.”

“My Copilot Just Ran Out The Back Of The Plane”- Chilling Audio From Aerial Incident Near Fort Bragg

P: “No, the dude literally jumped out the back of the plane without a parachute.”

*Seven seconds of total silence*

RA: “Shady 02, did you need to do something else, circle or something, or-“

P: “No, I need to land. I’m just making you aware you’re gonna have a dead body out where I just called you at. He just jumped out the back of the plane.”

Ok, yeah, that’s pretty fricken’ weird. I would guess he panicked? It’s a strange glitch in the human OS that someone would be in a dangerous situation and decide that the best approach is *certain* death. This would seem to be the “Better to Die Than be Killed” trope. It happened at the World  Trade Center, where people threw themselves out of high windows rather than burn to death… but in this case, it just doesn’t make sense. The plane was damaged – missing one-third of its landing gear – but it was by no means certain that the crew would be killed or necessarily even injured in the forthcoming landing. I wonder if maybe the co-pilot had been responsible for the initial hard landing that broke the gear, and was freaking out? Or perhaps he was on something… or the stress just drove him buggo.