Originally Posted by Carn

Once when I was playing soccer with some friends I saw a sky diver's parachute get all tangled up after he deployed it. He dropped for quite a while before landing in a tree that was on the edge of the airport.

EDIT: btw, I'm a pilot and what I think might have happened is that the pilot realized he had engine trouble, tried to turn around to land back on the runway, stalled as he tried to make the turn, and consequently went into a nose dive.

Of course, I didn't see it happen so I might be way off, but that's one way it could have happened. An aircraft gains a ton of drag going into a turn, so we're trained not to attempt to do a 180 degree turn unless we have gained over 1000 ft of altitude. So if he didn't have enough altitude, he may have kept the nose high in order not to descend too much before he could complete the turn, and ended up stalling the plane. I highly doubt that he was thinking about anyone on the ground though. In that situation he probably didn't even have time to consider them, much less decide to turn away and kill himself.