Ruby McNally spent the morning of her 100th birthday doing something most people half her age would talk themselves out of. She climbed into a small plane over Davis, California, rode it up to altitude, and stepped out. On Thursday, August 13, 2026, the Roseville woman strapped herself to a tandem instructor and free-fell through the sky while her family stood in a field below, heads tilted up, cheering like she’d just won something. She had. She turned 100 and jumped out of an airplane on the same day.
Her tandem partner was Chris Peterson, an instructor at Skydance Skydiving. Right before the plane took off, Ruby looked at him and said, “Let’s go, let’s do it!” No hesitation, no second thoughts, no big emotional speech about facing her fears. She just wanted the plane to move.
A dare at 80 that she never let go of
This wasn’t a one-time bucket-list stunt. Ruby has been jumping out of planes on her big birthdays for two decades. It started when she turned 80. Her grandson challenged her to try skydiving, probably figuring she’d laugh it off. She didn’t. “My grandson challenged me and, jokingly, I said yes, never expecting him to hold me to it,” she told reporters.
He held her to it. She jumped at 80. Then she came back and did it again at 90. And when she landed after that second jump, she told everyone she’d be back for a third when she hit 100. Most people say things like that. Ruby actually followed through. Three jumps, three milestone birthdays, twenty years apart from start to finish. That’s not a fluke. That’s a plan.
The neighbor who kept a 10-year promise
One of the best parts of this story has nothing to do with Ruby’s age. It’s about her neighbor, Rick Kelly. Rick had jumped alongside Ruby when she turned 90, and back then the two of them made a deal. If they were both still around a decade later, they’d do it again together.
Ten years is a long time to hang onto a promise made after an adrenaline high. People move, people lose touch, people forget. Rick didn’t. When Ruby’s 100th rolled around, he was there, ready to jump right along with his longtime neighbor for the second time. There’s something about that quiet loyalty that sticks with you. Two people, ten years apart, both showing up exactly when they said they would.
“Why would you be scared? There’s nothing to be scared of”
When people asked Ruby if she was nervous, she genuinely didn’t seem to understand the question. “Why would you be scared?” she said. “There’s nothing to be scared of.” She has a whole way of thinking about it, and it’s not the mushy inspirational-poster kind. It’s practical.
“If you sit and worry about it, then you’re going to talk yourself out of it,” she told one outlet. That’s the trick, really. She doesn’t give the fear a chance to move in and unpack its bags. She just goes. Her bigger philosophy is even shorter: “If you slow down, life is over. So you just keep on keeping on and enjoying life.”
She also said her kids joke that she should start acting her age. She has no interest in that. After landing safely on the ground at 100 years old, the first thing on her mind wasn’t a nap. “I’m not giving up yet,” she said.
Her family stopped arguing with her a long time ago
If your 100-year-old mother told you she was jumping out of a plane, you might try to talk her out of it. Ruby’s family knew better. Her daughter, Sharon McNally, put it perfectly: “At 100, you learn you’re not talking her out of anything.”
That line does a lot of work. It tells you Ruby has spent a full century being exactly who she is, and the people closest to her gave up trying to change that decades ago. They didn’t show up to the drop zone to worry. They showed up to watch her win. Her family said there was little chance of convincing her otherwise, and honestly, why would they want to?
Six other people jumped with her
Ruby didn’t go up alone. Six family members and friends took the leap with her, including several of her grandchildren. Imagine the group text that morning. This is a woman whose relatives don’t just watch her adventures from the sidelines. They strap on parachutes and follow her out the door.
Her granddaughter, April Bartok, summed up what the whole day felt like after everyone was back on solid ground. “There’s not that many other people on planet Earth that can say, Hey, I’m going skydiving with Grandma that’s 100,” she said. “I mean, it’s pretty special.” She’s right. There are roughly a few hundred thousand people over 100 in the whole country, and the number of them free-falling with their grandkids strapped to their backs is somewhere close to one.
The story took off faster than the plane did
Ruby’s jump started as a local news segment in Sacramento, filmed by the NBC affiliate KCRA 3. It didn’t stay local for long. Within days the story bounced across the country and then overseas. CBS News ran a national broadcast segment on August 17, just four days after the jump, with correspondent Ashley Sharp calling it Ruby “leaping into the next century of life.”
It went out over CNN Wire, showed up on KSL in Utah, and even landed on Yahoo News in the United Kingdom. A 100-year-old woman from Roseville became an international headline in less than a week. Not because of a scandal or a tragedy, but because she did something joyful and slightly nuts, and people are hungry for that. The video footage of her takeoff, the jump, and the family celebration on landing did most of the talking.
She’s already aiming for 110
Here’s where most people would call it a wrap. A century of life, three skydives, a happy landing. Good place to hang it up. Ruby disagrees. When someone asked whether she’d jump again at 110, she didn’t dodge it or laugh it off. “I’m aiming for it,” she said.
Her family is thinking even bigger. One of her granddaughters floated the idea of making the skydive an annual thing instead of waiting another ten years between jumps. Ruby, for her part, said she hopes the younger generations keep the tradition going long after she’s done. Given how this family operates, that seems likely. When your grandmother sets the bar at “jump out of a plane at 100,” everybody else in the family has some catching up to do.
What Ruby actually pulled off
Strip away all the noise and here’s what happened. A woman who was born around 1926, back when the Model T was still rolling off the line, decided at 80 that skydiving sounded fun. She did it again at 90. She did it a third time at 100, with six loved ones and one very loyal neighbor jumping beside her. And she landed talking about the next one.
Ruby McNally doesn’t feel 100. She said as much. And when you watch someone treat a triple-digit birthday as a reason to get in a plane rather than a reason to sit still, it’s hard to argue with her math. “If you slow down, life is over,” she said. So she keeps on keeping on, one jump at a time. See you at 110, Ruby.
