At ages 104 and 84, these women are looking to break skydiving records: ‘This is a good sport for retired people’

It’s not every day that you hear about a centenarian jumping out of a plane, but at 104 years old, Dorothy Hoffner took a leap of faith and went skydiving.

“It’s fun, and it seemed so nice and peaceful, coming down with a parachute on top of you,” Hoffner tells CNBC Make It. “You can see the whole countryside; it was so beautiful.”

Nearly four years ago, Hoffner had her first skydiving experience on her 100th birthday. But the Chicago native wanted a re-do because she was pushed out of the plane when she really wanted to jump.

This October, her wish came true: “When we got to the altitude [and] we were going to go out, we all stood up, went by the door and just put our feet out and left the plane. It was wonderful.”

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Hoffner may soon be declared the oldest person to do a tandem parachute jump, according to a representative from Skydive Chicago, where Hoffner had her skydiving experiences.

Organizers at Guinness World Records are currently working to certify her jump before giving her the title of the world’s oldest parachutist, which is currently held by a 103-year-old woman.

“If you ever get the chance, do it. It’s not frightening,” Hoffner encourages. For her next adventure, she’s looking to try a trip in a hot air balloon.

But Hoffner isn’t the only woman defying odds at an incredible age.

Kimberly Knor, 84, has skydived 598 times in her lifetime, but her goal is to reach 1,000.

Knor, who goes by Kim, knew she wanted to try skydiving since she was five years old because her uncle’s military parachute fascinated her.

“I was like ‘Oh my gosh, I want to do that. I wish that was me,'” she tells CNBC Make It. “I don’t know why [but] it just really set it off. So, from that time forward, I was always looking for an opportunity to parachute.”

Knor didn’t take her first leap until she was 20 years old, and at the time, it was called parachuting, she says. She’s able to enjoy skydiving a lot more now at 84 because it’s much safer and easier than it was when she started in 1959.

“They didn’t have skydiving centers or anything like they have today. We just had to find a pilot that would fly us, and that was hard to find,” Knor says. “We wanted them to take the door off the right side of the plane, so we could get out; they didn’t want to do that, and they were kind of concerned about flying.”

She decided a long time ago that she wanted to hit 1,000 jumps, but it was a lot more difficult then because she was often only able to do one jump at a time.

Now, she can skydive multiple times in one day without a hassle.

“I make three jumps a day, and I have [when] training for competitions made four, five jumps a day. But not at this age,” says Knor.

When asked if she has any fear about skydiving, especially at her age, she says, “It’s safer than driving your car out to the drop zone to make the jump.”

And statistics support Knor’s claim. The odds of having a fatal car crash are one in 93, according to the National Safety Council; that’s around 1%. The average fatality rate of recreational skydiving is 0.0011%, according to a systematic review published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health.

“This is a good sport for retired people,” says Knor, especially “if it’s on your bucket list or it’s always been of interest to you.”

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