Parachute

No one was skydiving above Cross Keys Airport yesterday. Gray skies grounded the planes, leaving routine jumpers to grieve and wonder what caused veteran skydiver Denise Daddio to plunge to her death Sunday afternoon. Friends said Daddio, 43, of Hamilton Township, was on her first jump of the day when her parachute failed to open. An unidentified friend who jumped with her said she appeared to pull the two cords needed to deploy a small pilot chute and main parachute before plunging 13,500 feet into a wooded area in Washington Township.

Tucked inside a Cabbage Patch Kid shoe and suspended by a plastic-bag parachute, Rafiel Williams' egg landed on the grassy patch just outside the front door of Nether Providence Elementary School. It didn't break. It didn't so much as crack. Hillary Turner's egg, wrapped in tissue paper and secured in a plastic margarine cup, also survived the drop from the second-floor window with its shell intact. But a wrapping of toilet paper and Ziploc bag failed to soften the landing of Brian Sakers' egg, which cracked on contact.

Dale E. Nelson certainly knows how to make an entrance. With a parachute strapped to his navy business suit, Nelson jumped 3,500 feet from the sky, circled a few sprawling trees and glided softly to the ground. All in the name of charity, of course, and all to satisfy a nagging urge: to break a world record. Nelson, a 38-year-old Bryn Mawr contractor and father of two, performed the jump Monday for a crowd of about 100 outside the Du Porte House in Chesterbrook. The jump was an effort to draw attention to his attempt next month to beat a record for the number of sky-diving jumps performed in a 24- hour period.

Parachute jumping off buildings is dangerous, and most sky divers don't approve of it, according to several Main Line area parachutists. Last Sunday's jump by a parachutist off Philadelphia's Mellon Bank building resulted in the death of Robert Morris Jr., 25, a house painter and sky diver from Mount Joy, Lancaster County. He died when his parachute failed to open after a dawn jump off the 750-foot-tall Center City building, which is under construction. "I really condemn that kind of thing," said Dale Nelson of Bryn Mawr, a tandem instructor for Freefall Adventures Inc., at New Hanover Airport in Gilbertsville.

Barry Shellington doesn't look like a maniac. Still, at least three or four times week, Shellington straps himself into something that looks like part of a dune buggy attached to half of a parachute, turns on two little 15-horsepower engines and takes off. That's takes off - as in airborne. It's called a ParaPlane and to hear Shellington describe it, the skies don't get any friendlier. "It's just the most unbelievable sense of freedom," he said. "You get up there, and all your problems, everything you were worried about, just go away.

As the single-engine plane climbed to an altitude of 2,200 feet last night, Dale Nelson bade farewell to a pilot for the 56th time in slightly less than four hours. Wearing a parachute over a blue cycling outfit, Nelson, 38, gave last- minute instructions to pilot Charles Albright, flashed a quick wave and jumped out of the small plane without so much as a "Geronimo. " Moments later, Nelson was on the ground at New Hanover Airport in Montgomery County, strapping on another parachute and preparing to climb into a different plane.

A skydiver was described yesterday as a "special kind of person" for plunging head-first more than a mile to reach and save an unconscious free- falling woman, opening her parachute 10 seconds before she hit the ground. Gregory Robertson, 35, an instructor for the U.S. Parachute Association, went into an accelerated dive at about 180 m.p.h. to help Debbie Williams, who was falling about 150 m.p.h. Williams, 31, of Andrews, Texas, had been knocked unconscious after colliding with another skydiver at 9,000 feet, and she had fallen helplessly for more than a mile.

When a mysterious box attached to an orange parachute was discovered in a backyard here yesterday, concerned residents called police. The police looked at the unmarked Styrofoam box - with antenna, wires, a battery and what looked like a grenade pin - and called the Camden County bomb squad. It was taking no chances, either. It evacuated seven homes before blowing up the object - which may have been a harmless weather monitor. The device was found about noon behind the home of Scott and Kathleen Hannum on Holly Road, said neighbor Bucky Cornwell.

The well-known mayor of tiny Rutledge Borough in Delaware County was killed Friday afternoon in a skydiving accident at a popular South Jersey facility. The accident that killed C. Scott Shields, 45, also an attorney who practiced law in Media, took place at Freefall Adventures, a busy parachuting center in Williamstown. Detectives with the Gloucester County Prosecutor's Office said Friday night that their preliminary investigation showed that Shields' main parachute failed to open during his jump with other divers at roughly 4:25 p.m. The prosecutor's office said that Shields apparently did not deploy his main parachute, and witnesses said his emergency chute, which opens automatically, never fully inflated.

Lynn L. Elsenhans, the former Sunoco Inc. chief executive, stands to bank $37.4 million for dramatically transforming the Philadelphia oil company that is being sold to a Texas pipeline firm. Elsenhans will receive a severance benefit of $6 million, according to papers filed Thursday - her last day as chairwoman - with the Securities and Exchange Commission. And, she will receive an additional $17.1 million if the $5.3 billion merger that was announced Monday with Energy Transfer Partners L.P. is consummated.