BUTLER, Mo. — Come in a Benz, come in a beater, nobody cares.

If you make jumping out of an airplane a regular thing, that’s good enough for the bunch on the ground at the small airport in the Bates County seat of Butler.

Weekend mornings, the gravel lot fills up with everyone from lawyers to window washers, retired folks to college students, many if not most of them from the Kansas City, Missouri, area.

All ages, all walks and once here, they are the same. They come for that one minute when nothing else matters, the one minute when life makes perfect sense.

These “fun jumpers” climb aboard Skydive Kansas City’s Beechcraft King Air and ascend in blue sky high enough to see Truman Lake 30 miles to the east. Then out the door they go more than 14,000 feet above green farmland.

The one minute? That’s how long it takes to free fall from roughly 3 miles to 1 mile at 120 mph with salvation packed on their back.

“This consumes you,” said Aaron Jensen, 39, an IT guy from Peculiar, Missouri, with 1,100 jumps. “Nothing like it in the world.”

Golf? Please.

Only skydivers know why others do it because it’s why they do it. Only they know when to nod when the stories are told. They are family. Things that happen up there — and that’s a lot of things — are like old things in the attic they’ve all seen.

They jump. They hang out in the packing hut between jumps, longer in rain. They crank the music and party at the RV campground on Saturday nights. Someone hits the fence on landing that day — beers all around, on them.

Theirs is a bond forged in adrenaline, neighbors on a 2-mile road.

“These are my brothers and sisters,” said Jay Fabing, a para-educator from Gardner, Missouri. “I trust them with my life up there.”

The bucket list people, the ones who pay $200 for a one-time tandem jump, pay the bills at Skydive KC.

“But the fun jumpers bring the buzz,” said Skydive KC owner Chris Hall. “They swoop in with the cool suits and little fast parachutes — they put on a show and that’s inspiring to students and first-timers.”

Enter John Duckworth.

He’s 31, a window washer from Kansas City and had never even been on a plane until his first tandem jump. He was sitting on a picnic table looking at his phone outside the main building at Skydive KC when something flashed above him.

“I didn’t even know he was there,” Duckworth said. “It looked like he came in too hot, but then slowed and landed on his feet like it was nothing.

“I knew right then I wanted to be part of this forever.”

Other drop zones in the area provide much the same services and camaraderie as Skydive KC.

Falcon Skydiving is at Noah’s Ark Airport in Kansas City, North, and Missouri River Valley Skydiving is in Henrietta, Missouri.

On a recent Saturday morning, rain had stopped but clouds hung thick over Skydive KC’s drop zone in Butler, an hour south of Kansas City.

The King Air sat fueled, ready and wet. First-timers checked in for tandem jumps. Then waited. Gulp.

Out in the fun jumpers’ packing hut, they checked gear and talked. But not a lot about regular jobs.

“Everybody comes here for different reasons,” said David Lang, 24, who coaches indoor skydiving at iFLY in Overland Park. “But everybody’s the same when we get here.”

Some read, one slept. Somebody ran into Butler to get goodies from Koehn Bakery, a local favorite.

Everybody watched the sky. Inside the main building, Hall, the owner, monitored the weather on his laptop.

“I think we’re looking at 1 (p.m.),” he said.

Hall, 44, has jumped out of an airplane about 5,500 times. He opened the Butler business in June 1998, something he’d wanted to do ever since watching his dad, a door gunner in Vietnam, jump at a small field in Paola, Kan.

“It was harder to jump back then,” he said. “Not a lot of places to do it. My parents didn’t want me to do it, but I jumped as soon as I turned 18 and pretty much haven’t stopped since.

“If there’s not a wedding or a funeral, I’m here every weekend.”

Skydive KC has seen steady growth over the years. The King Air, which holds 16, goes up about 25 times a weekend, reaching altitude in nine minutes. A lot of tandem first-timers. Then there are students.

Fun jumpers fill out the loads. This never gets old to them, and they never stop learning. They bring their own gear and pay $26 per jump. Skydiving is not a cheap pastime. Getting certified costs about $3,000. Parachutes run twice that, or more.

“This gets to be an $8,000 hobby pretty fast,” Hall said.

Skydivers would say worth every nickel.

“Where else do you get to live in the moment?” asked Derek Wallen, who came to Butler from Omaha, Nebraska, for a special team jump practice. “Our lives are about jobs, wives, kids, the house, money.

“It is only here, jumping, when we truly live in the moment. Nothing else matters up there. Nothing.”