For two years, William Paul Robertson Sr. struggled to come to terms with his son's death in a skydiving accident at Cedar Valley Airport.
He decided this: Nothing will bring his son, William Paul Robertson Jr., back. But it may be possible to keep death from unnecessarily claiming other lives."I want a law passed to keep the `one-day wonders' from jumping on a whim," Robertson said. "They'll have to invest time and money if they really want to jump."
Robertson and his son Douglas traveled from Louisville, Ky., to Provo this week to ask local legislators to draft legislation requiring more extensive training for first-time skydivers. They traveled here by bus, following the same route taken two years earlier by Paul Jr.
"I wanted to see what he saw," Robertson said. They even arrived in Provo on the same date: June 20. This year, it happened to be Father's Day.
Paul Jr. came to Provo in 1991 to pursue a college education at Brigham Young University. He settled in with ease - moved into a room in Deseret Towers, signed up for calculus and Book of Mormon classes and got a job as a computer-support technician at the university.
Wanting to be an Air Force jet pilot, he signed up to take ROTC classes in the fall. In his last letter home he worried he might not be accepted in the ROTC.
"I put it in God's hands and he'll decide where he wants me," Paul wrote to his parents.
Those words grace Paul's gravestone in the Rest Haven Cemetery in Louisville.
On July 24, four weeks after he arrived in Utah, Paul drove out to the Cedar Valley Airport to go skydiving. He went alone, unable to persuade several friends to join him.
Perhaps Paul considered it an early birthday present to himself: he'd celebrate his 18th birthday on July 25.
Paul took a four-hour ground training class and then boarded a plane with two instructors and another employee who would videotape his maiden jump. The foursome jumped from the plane as it passed over the airport.
Paul apparently mistook a signal from one instructor to pull his ripcord as a sign to wave at the video camera. The instructor had to reach over and pull the cord for him.
The main chute deployed but somehow the automatic activation device triggered too, releasing the reserve chute. Paul's training class had reviewed what to do in the event both chutes released: If they weren't touching, Paul was supposed to cut loose the main chute.
Instead, Paul, 17, pulled the brake toggles on the main chute, causing it to stall and collapse. The main chute then tangled with the reserve chute, causing it to collapse as well. Paul fell to his death.
Each year, approximately 28 people nationwide die while skydiving. In 1992, 27 jumpers were killed. Eleven were first-time jump students like Paul.
Another 28 people died in parachuting-related aircraft accidents, according to the June 1993 edition of Parachutist. Six of those were students.
The elder Robertson believes the typical amount of training first-time jumpers receive - ranging from three to five hours - is inadequate to prepare them for handling emergencies.
"You lay in bed at night for two years thinking, `What can I do to keep somebody else from having it happen to them?' " he said.
"These kids do this on a whim on a weekend. They go out Saturday morning, are trained and jump the same day. I want to standardize training and prevent first-time jumps unless they have five days of training."
Robertson met with state representatives Chris Fox and John Valentine while in Utah. Valentine said Utah law does not address the amount of training required for first-time jumpers or experience required of skydiving instructors.
Even people who've jumped many times may be unprepared for an emergency because of the brief training, Robertson said. The emergency may occur on the 16th jump, rather than the first.
Valentine plans to review whether skydiving is "something the state should be regulating, and if so, what is a reasonable regulation" as well as enforcement of current and possible new regulations. Then he'll decide if new legislation requiring more extensive training is warranted.
Members of the skydiving industry say it's not.
"I went many years without a malfunction on a first-time student," said Jack Guthrie, owner of Cedar Valley Freefall and a skydiver with 25 years' experience. "Ten years ago, I had a first-time jump student with a malfunction. He handled it really, really well.
"That sold me on the concept that if someone is going to learn this stuff, they're going to learn it. I don't think learning would occur any better with more time."