AN inquest was due to open today on a former SAS officer who plunged from a plane over the skies of Oxfordshire.

Expert skydiver Charles "Nish" Bruce, aged 45, died after apparently jumping 5,000ft without a parachute from the twin-seater Cessna 172 into fields near the village of Fifield, on Tuesday.

Judith Haig, 39, of Cobham, Kent, was flying the plane from Spain to Northamptonshire when the incident happened.

The pair were good friends and Miss Haig had been in Spain for a number of weeks, her mother Margaret said.

Miss Haig told investigators Mr Bruce "opened the door and jumped out", a spokesman for the Civil Aviation Agency said.

In an interview with national newspapers, Miss Haig's father, Dr Nigel Haig, said his daughter had tried to stop Mr Bruce from jumping by grabbing his trouser leg.

Mr Bruce, who lived in Spain, left the SAS in the 1980s and penned an autobiography, Freefall, under the pseudonym Tom Read.

Mr Bruce described his descent into mental illness after a career which included service in Northern Ireland and the Falklands.

It centred on his bid to claim a unique world record by skydiving from the edge of space, jumping from a balloon gondola 26 miles above the Earth.

If successful, he would have accelerated to Mach 1.2 and become the first man to break the speed of sound without the aid of an aircraft or rocket.

But the bid failed as his mental state deteriorated.

Police and air accident investigators were continuing to piece together the sequence of events which led to Mr Bruce's fall.

A post mortem examination conducted yesterday revealed that Mr Bruce had died from multiple injuries consistent with a fall from a plane.

Mr Bruce, who held a pilot's licence, worked as a security expert after leaving the SAS and had been employed as a minder for showbusiness personality Jim Davidson.

Paying tribute, the comedian said: "Nish could fly aeroplanes and helicopters and he was an expert skydiver. I've never known him to run away from anything and I just can't understand what happened."