The Associated Press

GREENSBURG, Ind. - A couple celebrating their 60th wedding anniversary renewed their vows before taking a different kind of plunge - from an airplane.

As nervous friends and relatives craned their necks to watch, Albert and Esther McDaniel made their first skydiving jump Friday. Both jumped in tandem with an experienced skydiver and returned safely to the ground.

"I can't say that I was scared at all," Albert McDaniel, 88, said afterward, although his 81-year-old wife confessed, "I'm weak in the knees."

Earlier this year, the Martinsville couple read a newspaper article about the Never Too Late Foundation, which grants wishes to the elderly. They contacted the group and told them their wish was to jump out of an airplane and soar back to Earth.

"We woke up one morning and he said, 'We're boring. We don't do anything exciting anymore,'" Esther recalled her husband saying.

Friends and family were shocked by the couple's decision. Their son, Dennis, said he had been praying about the event since his parents made their decision in April.

After getting the all-clear from their doctor, the couple worked with Skydive Greensburg, which paired them with experienced tandem jumpers.

Before Friday's jump in southeastern Indiana, the McDaniels' marriage hadn't lacked for adventure. The couple had previously gone whitewater rafting and parasailing.

Now that they're in their 80s, Esther is legally blind, and Albert is hard of hearing, but the adventure continues.

"A team they are. They were just made for each other," said their longtime friend Mary Hershberger, who was Esther's maid of honor in 1944.

After watching and listening to an instructional video Friday, the couple rode a golf cart to the airplane that would take them on their adventure.

Then, outside the plane and wearing bright yellow Skydive Greensburg T-shirts, the couple renewed their wedding vows with grandson Dennis McDaniel Jr., an ordained minister, officiating.

As the couple made final preparations for their tandem jump, Albert, who was a gunner on a B-24 bomber in World War II, checked out the plane. Esther asked how long it would take them to return to the ground after they jumped from the plane.

"It depends on if you open the parachute," joked Dennis Anderson, who jumped tandem with Albert.

Family and friends anxiously waited on the ground as the small figures in the sky made their way down.

"I didn't say a word," Esther recalled later of her jump. "I said, 'Whoopee.'"