Why Skydiving is so Freakin' Cool.

In My Humble Opinion
1

I was curious as to what the general internet population, at least SD, thought of it. I’ve been popped with every possible question before, but I figured I would try to anticipate and explain the sport in its entirety.

cracks knuckles

Why it appeals to me:
You get to fly around in the sun and clouds with your friends. You can move over to them gracefully (or not so gracefully) and take their hand, smile and laugh. The experience is always the most focused and spiritual of your life. No matter how fearful you are initially the actual skydive is always pleasant and calm, even starting out when you aren’t really in control of the process. Eventually you gain control of the experience which is rewarding in and of itself to overcome and be able to function in a stressful situation; When someone cuts you off in traffic panic is rarely your first response. Visually its a wonderful experience to fly in open air by a cloud so high above everything, as well as see a fellow human flying along side you.

How it works:
Basics:
You exit an aircraft mid-flight at which point gravity takes over. You accelerate at a rate of 1G for the first 3 or so seconds at which point wind resistance starts to slow down your acceleration. Eventually the falling body reaches terminal velocity, the maximum velocity a body has in freefall for a given amount of weight and surface area, which for a human in an arched position legs bent ends up being around 110-120 mph. In this position, and any other position: sitting, standing, headdown, you can move forward, backward, slow or speed up vertical descent, move sideways, turn and orbit a fixed point. When you learn to skydive what they teach you is to fall stable, meaning you stay looking at a fixed point on the horizon, forward and backward movement, turns, and keeping track of your altitude. If you were to exit your first time on your own you would likely spin wildly and forget to pull which is bad. Most student training programs cost between $1000 and $1400 USD. Most people take 7 to 10 jumps to complete the program.

Advancement
Upon completing this essentially you are safe enough to throw yourself out of your plane on your own gear. At this point you work with a coach learning more basic skills like fall rate control and taking docks. Taking docks mean essentially flying over to another skydiver and making touch contact with a part of their body or extremeties. You can take leg docks, arm docks, and side docks. The more people you have taking docks the more complex formations one can make. You can expect to pay another $500 USD for this part of your training and at the end you will have your A license and about 25 jumps.

Further Advancement
Competitive Skydiving
At this point you can choose to do a variety of different disciplines. Relative work is with a given set of people completing a sequence of different formations in an allotment of time. The most popular relative work groups are 4-way and 8-way, these are the big disciplines in which skydivers compete. The other major freefall discipline is called freeflying. Competively a team of 2 people and a camera flyer work together flying vertically, upside down and right side up. Much more is possible given the variety of positions in freefall. This is usually judged as an artistic event, whereas relative work is scored by the number of “points” or formations built. Assuming you are just a recreational jumper you may just jump out for fun with your friends flying around in bliss. There are other competitive events that deal with handling of the parachute, namely canopy relative work (CRW), swooping, and accuracy. Accuracy is how close to the target one can land. CRW, pronounced crue, deals with building formations with parachutes. Swooping is navigating a much smaller parachute through a course that is on the ground at high speeds. Landing speeds swooping are usually over 50 mph and in the begginning dive around 80.

Gear
Parachutists today use a dual parachute assembly. This means you wear a single harness with two parachutes. The first is your main, which is a ram-air wing. Essentially you are gliding about controlling the wing by pulling down the “flaps” with your toggles. Flaps are the back portion of a wing that when depressed allow the wing to generate more lift. On a parachute when you pull down both toggles the wing is flying slower both vertically and horizontally. At a higher airspeed when you pull down both toggles it allows you to fly to a stop which allows for a super soft landing. Your reserve is packed and inspected every 120 days by an FAA certified rigger. Its design and deployment method is much simpler than the main yielding a less than 1 in 10,000 failure rate. It also is a ram-air wing. The reserve parachute is also outfitted with a computer that keeps track of fall rate and altitude. If you are still exceeding 75 mph at 750 ft then it cuts the loop allowing the reserve to deploy if for some reason you forget to pull your main parachute.

Danger
About 30 people die skydiving in a given year. That’s with about 33,000 active jumpers. There is rarely a year where a first time jumper dies, and there have been almost no tandem fatalities (the first one in about 7 years was last year). All fatal accidents are attributed to human error, the gear is no longer the weak link rather the person at control. In other words people die under a perfectly functioning main parachute. Essentially when you start skydiving you justify it by researching common causes of accidents and avoid those behaviors, along with the view you will never make a mistake :slight_smile: Later in your career after seeing you do indeed make mistakes you hope your experience allows you to deal with it :cool:

For more basic information check out:
How Stuff Works - Skydiving

Information on myself:
NC State Graduate, 1100 Skydives, 150 Fixed Object or BASE Jumps, FAA Rigger, and 5 years in the sport. 0 injuries.

2

My opinion of skydiving is complex, and possibly a bit biased.

I’m a flight instructor (in airplanes, that is) and aerobatic pilot. And like many pilots, I take a dim view of departing a functioning aircraft intentionally. But since I sometimes fly aerobatics, I have to wear a chute. It makes me nervous to have one on and not know how to use it. So I may go for a jump or two at some point so I know what to do should I ever have the need to depart the plane I’m flying.

I also respect any activity that involves skill, which skydiving certainly does, especially when you get into the group stuff. However, I’m skeptical of the sport’s safety because of a few interractions I’ve had with jumpers.

Being a pilot, I talk to a lot of jumpers and I know pilots who fly the jump planes. Two things bother me:

  1. I sometimes hear a dangerous attitude with regard to aircraft. One jump center near me complains that too many planes go over their airspace. I can understand that, but they refuse to work with me when I propose educating the pilots at the nearby airports.

  2. While hanging around a big jump center near me and talking to people I noticed that everyone was quick to point out how few fatalities there are in the sport. While listening to this several times throughout the day I realized that there were lots of people walking around on crutches. So I asked a group about the rate of injuries, at which point there was much hemming and hawning and staring at shoes. Seems that lots of people around there had had rough landings resulting in sprains and broken legs, and damage to cars and other obstacles on the ground.

These two things add up to making me think twice about the sport. I don’t see the professionalism, caution, and discipline that I usually see in aviation. It seems to be more of a surfer mentality, for lack of better description (with apologies to surfers).

So I do plan to jump for the sake of my flying. But unless I meet with a different attitude and demeanor than I have yet seen, I probably won’t be going deeper into the sport.

3

I started jumping in March 2000. Static line jumping. I learned it the old way. No AFF course for me. Never jumped roundies, though, always squares.

Mach Tuck, my BF has a CPL, and flies as a jump pilot until for the moment. He got into flying through jumping, and I know a few other pilots that started flying after they’ve had been skydiving for a while.

As a jumper, you’re taught to treat the plane with respect, always approach it from behind and never walk underneath the wings. There are lots of signs warning that propellers kill, on all dropzones I’ve been to.

Most pilots that fly for a parachute operation know to delay they’re approach, to give the skydivers time to land and gather up their gear. A dropzone can be efficiently run, it needn’t be dangerous.
Systematic gear checks and malfunction drills should be standard procedure.

I know a few people that broke some bones, and those injuries usually occur when somebody is getting too cocky, too confident, end therefore complacent.
They get smaller and smaller canopies, and then can’t control the landing because it’s going too fast.
They want to show off and do hookturns, and smack into the ground cos they’ve miscalculated their speed and height.

I’m not saying that there’s no potantial for seious injury and fatality, but it can be done safely.
never had an injury or a malfunction.

Go and take a course. Maybe you won’t like it, but at least if you ever have to jump and abandon your plane, you’ll know what to do and what to expect.

4

I lived in Phoenix AZ for several years and I have had many sky-bound adventures. I’ve been sky diving and yes it is very fun. But I must say, the first time someone mentioned hang gliding, my interest was taken in a decidedly upward fashion. I’ve got my Hang 2 license and an Eagle 164 Glider. I have to say it is the best of every world. I love it! There is nothing like spending an afternoon exploring the canyons and mountains of Northern Arizona. Words can not describe how it is to pilot your own wind operated glider…Epic…

5

Some of the smaller places I’ve been around this has been a problem, but larger dropzones tend to have their ducks in the row. There were lots of aircraft problems in skydiving in the early 90s. The FAA basically stepped up to the USPA and said fix the problem or we will. As for flying over a DZ parachute operations are noted on sectionals and most of the local flight centers know to stay way. The pilot usually announces his position and where he is going to drop with a 2 minute warning, so any planes in the vacinity should know to divert :slight_smile:

I’ve never seen damage to obstacles such as cars in the DZ parking lot. As for injuries some drop zones report them to the USPA and others don’t. Some of the places I’ve been reguarly are really large drop zones and I’ve never seen what I would deem a LOT of people on crutches. Out of my friends only one of them has had an injury and that was a sprained ankle. Generally the same is true of jumping and GA; if you treat it with respect and read the incident reports you can reduce danger dramatically.

This is probably certain with newer jumpers, ie less than 400 jumps but once you’ve been around you understand it requires the utmost respect. We find out who the cowboys are real quick, and they are given a talk. If they don’t change their actions and they aren’t in danger of harming others then our philosophy is let them do as they please, they were warned usually repeatedly. In some instances they’ll hurt themselves and correct their actions really quick or others nothing happens. That is the primary difference in GA and skydiving I guess, there is a good bit of freedom to do as you please. If you want to push the limits and progress in the sport however you have to be disciplined. You likely haven’t talked to the right people.