Retired Air Force Lt. Col. Jim Akin carried an estimated 10,000 paratroopers as a pilot, and when he skydived at 99 years old over the summer it was in their honor.

“I thought, ‘Boy, I hope I got the guts to do it,’” he said.

The somersault in the air, the 40 seconds of free fall and hitting 120 mph — he loved all of it. He hopes to do it again to mark his 100th birthday in April.

“Finally, after all these years, I’ve seen where the eagles live, and I’ve seen what they see, and it’s absolutely fantastic,” said Akin, who served in World War II, Korea and Vietnam. Akin recounted some of his war stories at home in Colorado Springs with black-and-white photos of his time as a pilot behind him and his war bonnet on.

While he has flown all over the world as both a commercial and Air Force pilot, skydiving was different. The air was quiet and beautiful as he fell toward the ground near Penrose in June from 15,000 feet.

While most pilots will tell you it’s crazy to jump out of a perfectly good airplane, and Akin has always considered the ground his enemy while flying — he also always admired and respected the men who jumped from his plane into combat.

“I thought, the least I could do is make one parachute jump,” he said.

As a young child growing up in Chattanooga, Tenn., Akin dreamed of being a soldier and overcame a serious knee injury to pursue that career. When he was about 10, Akin was hurt when a pair of dirty scissors went through his left kneecap, and it got infected with gangrene.

He was lying in bed when he heard the doctor tell his father they might have to take his leg off.

“When I heard that I got out of the bed and ran out of the hospital. Well, they caught me at the front door, and (the doctor) said, ‘You just ran on that leg.’ And he said, ‘Well, if you can do that, we’ll save that leg,’” Akin recalled.

When he went home, Akin would walk at night after his family had gone to bed to get stronger and fulfill his dream of serving.

As a senior in high school, Akin enlisted with others on his football team in the Army Air Forces in 1944 and was assigned to fly B-24 bombers as part of a planned invasion of Japan that was unnecessary after the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

His career stretched 23 years through 1967, spanning three major conflicts and missions he said he still can’t say much about.

On one of them during the early 1950s, he was flying west of Alaska and got lost in clouds above and below the plane. Akin unknowingly flew over Russian territory, where his plane was caught by two Russians fighter jets on patrol. Initially his copilot thought the first plane was an American F-86 Sabre, but Akin saw the Russian red star on the plane.

The first plane dropped the landing gear several times to indicate Akin was under arrest and should follow. But the second pilot made a mistake that allowed Akin to run. He turned left and dove straight down.

“I thought the airplane was going to come apart,” he said. But the sound of gunfire was absent.

The next day while going over the close call with a general, Akin drew a picture of the plane and that helped determine it was MiG-17, a brand-new fighter jet. So new, the radar likely wasn’t hooked up yet, keeping Akin from getting shot down.

He had another close call in Vietnam when his C-7A, a resupply plane, was hit four times and injured his left leg.

He was taken to Saigon by helicopter and then by air ambulance from Saigon to Sacramento. On the plane he was thrashing from the pain in his leg that had been placed in a cast, when it landed in Guam.

When medical personnel cut off the cast, his leg ballooned and it was clear gangrene was setting in. But his leg was saved again, which could have been impossible if the care had been delayed until he reached California.

After he healed, Akin asked to go back to Vietnam to support the ground troops, many of them only 17 or 18 years old.

“I just thought the world of them,” he said, and he thought they needed quality air support.

“I’m not blowing my bugle here, but I consider myself pretty damn good,” Akin said.

But after receiving some criticism for his request from inside the Air Force, Akin ended up retiring and went on to serve as a commercial pilot flying Learjets for Sinclair Oil and running a crop dusting business one summer.

Among all the planes he has flown, the C-130 is likely his favorite. It allowed him to see a large portion of the world.

“I can have lunch in France and dinner that night in Greece,” he said.

He also tested its limits as a member of the Four Horsemen, a C-130 demonstration team that flew in formation between 350 and 500 feet from the ground at around 340 mph.

Flying about 15 feet behind the leader’s tail in a plane that weighed 125,000 pounds left no room for error, he recalled. The team was active in the late 1950s and performed largely overseas, he said. But it disbanded because a new C-130 model came that made formation flying too dangerous, because it lacked the instantaneous response needed.

Even in retirement, Akin kept flying. For his 80th birthday, his wife gave him an ultralight plane that he could fly sitting out in the open wearing a helmet and white scarf, similar to the one he wore as a cadet. He used to fly over the Gulf of Mexico near his home close to the border of Alabama and Florida. He gave up flying when he was about 85 and moved back home to Colorado.

After he had to give up flying Akin bought a virtual-reality headset to replicate the experience. His granddaughter, Air Force Col. Elizabeth Mathias helped him set it up and once she explained where to put his hands on the “throttle” and “stick,” he had no problem flying in the game, she explained, although he would typically fly for too long and get headaches.

Mathias said her grandfather is driven by an “innate stubbornness” and also an indebtedness to those he served with, many he’s kept in contact with over the years.

While he had to move from his cabin near Westcliff into a Colorado Springs senior living complex in recent years, he’s maintained his independence. He still drives his supercharged 2017 Mustang, and Mathias has twice helped him replace the car’s navigation system.

He’s also inspired some of the others at Revel Province along Powers Boulevard in Colorado Springs to push their own limits. The complex’s concierge, Linda Word, went along to skydive with Akin in a separate plane.

“It was peaceful all the way to the landing,” she said.

While Akin is fairly healthy and looking forward to skydiving again, he has also thought about his own funeral, when he goes on to what he described as his “next commitment.”

He’s asked Mathias to read “High Flight” by John Magee Jr., a tribute to flight and reflective of some of Akin’s own experiences such as flying at night across the South Pacific, under a full moon or across the top of a thunderhead — “touching the face of God” — as the poem says.

Contact the writer at mary.shinn@gazette.com or 719-429-9264.

This story has been updated to correct Akin’s hometown and clarify that he bought a virtual-reality headset to replicate flying.