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n e w h a v e n b i z . c o m | M a y / J u n e 2 0 1 9 | n e w h a v e n B I Z 13 T R E N D I N G D O W N T I M E Only one way down: Hutchinson 'flying' a mile up in the sky. 'It really takes your breath away,' she says. T hat first step's a long one. Laura Hutchinson started checking off her bucket list early. Still just 34, she's run a marathon, flown with the Blue Angels, ridden a 108-mile round trip bicycle ride from Springfield to Boston, and jumped out of a perfectly good airplane. At 10,000 feet. Hutchinson is co-anchor of Good Morning Connecticut on WTNH-TV in New Haven with co-anchor Keith Kountz. Originally from Hamden, Hutchinson joined the station in November 2015 aer six years at WWLP-TV in Springfield, where she anchored the morning news and worked on the station's I-Team. Being a broadcaster affords ample opportunities to take part in videogenic antics (such as flying with the U.S. Air Force's aerobatic team the Blue Angels). It gets your face on the air, and in her business, the more airtime, the better. Skydiving for Hutchinson wasn't like that. e opportunity to jump The Air Up There out of an airplane was born as an idea for a gi for her then-future husband, Daniel. But as a condition of accepting, he talked his fiancée into going along for the ride — or, more accurately, the fall. "I kind of got roped into it," she says. Like so many things in life, "It doesn't make a lot of sense looking back on it — but it made perfect sense at the time," Hutchinson says. "We showed up [at the jump cen- ter] and thought, 'Oh, this is going to be fun.' But then it got pretty scary as we were going through the training steps — what you do in the plane, what you do when you jump out of the plane, what you do when you're falling, what you do when you're landing." e couple were flown up to 10,000 feet in the jump plane. e view was lovely — just like peering out the cabin window of a 767 on a sun-splashed Saturday. en the aircra's door opened, and it was time to say their good- byes — hopefully temporarily. At that moment, "It became very real," Hutchinson says. First-time jumpers are typical- ly tethered to an instructor who wears the parachute, supervises its deployment and steers it once it is opened and the tandem are floating serenely back to terra firma. But before that, student and instructor are falling for more than a minute at a terminal velocity of 120 mph or more. "But then, when that parachute opens, it's the most beautiful thing you've ever seen," Hutchinson recounts. "You look out and you can see for miles. It's a breathtak- ing view. And it's so quiet" — not even the sound of air rushing by, as you're floating exactly with the air currents. "It's this incredible mo- ment that most people will never experience." Hutchinson is not sure she'll ever "experience" it again, either. Her television career affords her ample opportunity for photogenic adventures. "I usually volunteer for these crazy things when it comes to work," she says. "When something kind of extreme comes up, I tend to take it as a challenge. "You get a thrill from it," she says. Not only that, but "a real sense of accomplishment." "If there's something you really want to do," Hutchinson adds, "you should just make it happen." n — Michael C. Bingham News 8's Hutchinson on terra firma: 'If there's something you really want to do, you should just make it happen.'

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