'Bad landing' hurts sky diver in Calverton
A sky diver in Calverton was hospitalized after what police described as a "bad landing," authorities said Saturday.
The 32-year-old New York City man's parachute didn't malfunction, but he hurt his back when he landed at a shuttered test flight facility that the sky-dive company uses, said Riverhead Town Police Detective Tim Hubbard, whose department handled the case.
"He apparently landed incorrectly," Hubbard said.
The injury happened about 1:50 p.m. The man was on a sky diving flight run by the Calverton-based Skydive Long Island.
The facility, once owned by Northrop Grumman Corp., is now called EPCAL, the Enterprise Park at Calverton.
Rich Winstock, Skydive Long Island's safety and training adviser, said that sky diver error is typically to blame in landing accidents. But he stressed that, because the case is still under investigation, he didn't know what happened here.
Winstock said the injured man had jumped from 13,500 feet in a Cessna Grand Caravan with 15 others and was the only one hurt.
After the injury, the man was brought to Stony Brook University Medical Center. His condition and identity weren't made public.
Winstock said the man, a veteran skydiver with more than 500 jumps to his credit, wasn't tethered at the time and is expected to survive.
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