LOUISVILLE, Ky. — Retired Air Force veteran Mike Bratcher plans to jump out of a plane 100 times on Monday. 

He’s aiming to beat the current Kentucky state skydiving record for the most jumps in a day. The current record is 80.

It all started as an attempt to celebrate his 60th birthday.

“I turn 60 in December and I wanted to do something that not every 60-year-old does, so I was going to do 60 jumps in a day in the month of December, and I figured nobody’s going to come out that cold and be watching, and I’ve barely got enough daylight to do 60 jumps,” he explained. “Then, I looked up to see what the record was, and I saw it was 80, and I thought, ‘There’s no way I’m going to get that close to breaking a record and not break it,’ and I’m not going to break it by just one.”

Bratcher will begin jumping before daylight at 6 a.m. Monday at Addington Field in Elizabethtown. He hopes to have completed all 100 jumps by around 6 p.m. He says he’ll be jumping about every seven minutes, 15 seconds.

Bratcher is raising money for two charities as part of his attempt to break the state record.

He asked people to donate 100 teddy bears to the Elizabethtown Police Department so he could jump with a different teddy bear each time, then donate them to EPD’s Shop with a Cop holiday event. He also asked that everyone who donates a teddy bear sponsor the Shop with a Cop program by donating $50 to EPD. He got all of the bears, but more than 60 of them did not come with sponsorhips, so he’s still asking people to send or drop off donations at the Elizabethtown Police Department.

He also set up a GoFundMe to cover the expenses of the aircraft that he’ll jump out of. He says he’s almost raised enough money to have the entire day covered and plans to give any further donations to the Radcliff chapter of the Disabled American Veterans Charity.