As Ivan McGuire boarded the small airplane with his video camera, the experienced skydiver didn’t know this would be his final ever flight.

Ivan worked as a cameraman filming nervous student parachuters taking their first-ever jump. He’d made hundreds of these flights, and any fear of leaping out of a plane from a height of three kilometres had left Ivan long ago.

On April 5th, 1988 Ivan McGuire jumped from a plane with his heavy VHS recording deck strapped to his back and the camera mounted to his helmet. Ivan had already completed two of these filming jumps that day, so he was a little fatigued – which may account for his soon-to-be-discovered forgetfulness.

On this final jump for the day Ivan calmly filmed the student strapped to his instructor as they both went through their free-fall and then opened their combined parachute. Ivan then reached around to open his parachute…. and discovered that he’d forgotten to put one on.

The surviving video footage from Ivan’s camera then goes from relaxed… to frenzied.

How had Ivan forgotten to put on a parachute? We don’t know. Perhaps it was simply tiredness, or maybe he’d mistaken the video pack on his back as his usual parachute. I can only imagine what might have gone through Ivan’s mind as he was free-falling to Earth from ten thousand feet with nothing to save him. The salvaged video footage recorded from his helmet shows Ivan going from matter-of-fact calmness to understandable panic.