Members of a suburban skydiving club have posted a video tribute to an instructor who died last weekend while performing a particularly daring type of jump called "swooping."
Kenneth Ryan Bernek: May 23, 1979 -- Oct. 12, 2013 (Facebook photo)
Kenneth Berrnek, a 34-year-old Waterford Township resident, was killed Saturday at a northern Macomb County grass airstrip. The five-minute video (below) has helmet camera skydiving clips shot by Bernek and others in the Midwest Freefall Sport Parachute Club.
"Ken was a great skydiver and an amazing friend to everyone! He will be missed," says a Facebook post by the club.
The video was created by Nick Perariso, an automotive prdouct development engineer in Auburn Hills, who says in the description: "Ken taught me so much -- not only about skydiving, but about life."
A cliub leader gives Jameson Cook of the Macomb daily an account of Saturday's tragedy:
He was unable to pull out of his vertical dive and his parachute caught on tree branches, causing him to strike the ground along the graveled Kunstman Road, according to Randy Allison, the club’s general manager.
Bernek, who also was an instructor, was performing a stunt formally known as high-performance canopy piloting, Allison said. A typical practitioner manipulates parachute lines to go faster than normal then flies horizontally for 100 feet or more, he said. Bernek, a 15-year skydiving veteran, ended up about 50 feet from the landing zone.
“Something happened in the way he set up that prevented him from pulling out of the dive,” he said. “The parachute line on one side snagged some branches that caused him to turn into the ground. . . .
Bernek was the only one in his group of 16 to jump from 5,000 feet, instead of the typical jump from 14,000 feet, he said.
The Oakland resident and his 29-year-old wife, Kimberly Bernek, met through the 60-member club. He's also survived by his parents and a sister.
Visitation is from 6-8 p.m. Thursday at O'Brien Sullivan Funeral Home, 41555 Grand Rive Ave., Novi. and again from 11-noon Friday before his funeral service there.
Earlier coverage: Oakland Man, 34, Dies And Woman Is Hurt When Recreation Goes Wrong, Oct. 13
