Sky Diving
Introduction to Sky Diving and history
The first successful parachute jump was made from a hot air balloon in 1797 and, from that point, the military developed parachuting as a means of evacuating staff from emergencies on board airplanes and balloons. Later, parachuting was used as a method of deploying ground troops in war zones.
These days, sky diving is the recreational form of parachuting and can involve a period of freefall, wherein aerial acrobatics and formation maneuvers may be performed before deployment of the actual chute. Competition sky diving began in the 1930s and was recognised as an official sport in 1951.
Sky diving is done from a plane or sometimes a helicopter which takes off from a small airbase known as a drop zone. Skydivers usually exit the aircraft at a height of 4000 metres (13,000 feet) and freefall for a time before opening their chute to slow their descent to a safe landing speed.
A parachute is normally fully inflated at around 2,500 feet. It is law that a skydiver jumps with two parachutes, a main chute and a reserve in case the main one should fail. Upon full parachute inflation, a skydiver can control his speed and direction with steering lines. As such, technical maneuvers can be performed by experienced sky divers and they can land with great precision, sometimes competing to land in an area with the most accuracy and style. In addition to simply bundling oneself out of a plane, opening a chute and floating down to earth, there are many types of skydiving specialisations.
Today, there are sky diving clubs all over Britain that run everything from beginners day courses to advanced technical specialisations. Here is a list of the various offshoots of sky diving available in the UK:
Accuracy Landing
A type of competitive skydiving where a sky diver earns points for landing as close as possible to a target on the ground.
BASE Jumping The most dangerous and extreme of all types of sky diving. BASE is an acronym that refers to the launch sites of its practitioners - Building, Antennae (an uninhabited tower structure or aerial mast), Span (like a bridge) and Earth (a cliff or canyon). Only very experienced sky divers can take part in BASE jumping as the risks of such a short jump in close proximity to structures threatening entanglement and/or collision are enormous. Between 1981 and 2007, it is estimated that some 111 experienced BASE jumpers have died as a result of failed BASE jumps. You can see a list of fatalities here.
Formation Skydiving
During freefall, experienced skydivers combine to make and hold formations before breaking off to open their chutes and parachute to earth as normal. The world record formation skydive was a 400 man formation held for 4.25 seconds starting from an altitude of 25,000 feet preformed in Udon Thai, Thailand.
Freestyle Skydiving
Where a skydiver performs acrobatic maneuvers like rolls and tumbles during the freefall, before opening his chute. Freestyle also involves another skydiver whose job it is to film their partners performance via a helmet-mounted camera. It was registered as a competitive sport by the FAI in 1996.
Freeflying
The art of controlling ones body and being able to move through various static positions during the freefall stage prior to opening one's chute. Common manoeuvres such as Back Flying, Sit Flying, and Head Down allow a skydiver to control his speed and trajectory as well as exit rolls and tumbles in order to safely deploy their chute when the correct altitude is reached.
Skysurfing
An even more radical method of skydiving, wherein a skydiver has a board akin to but smaller than a snowboard attached to his feet. Such an apparatus is extremely difficult to control and even standing straight up requires skill and balance only garnered through considerable experience in freeflying. Experienced skysurfers can use their boards to initiate rapid tumbles, rolls and spinning helicopter acrobatics. As in Freestyle, an auxiliary partner is required to film the skysurfers performance. For safety reasons, the board is detachable mid-air but of course this involves an extra hazard for anyone on the ground. As such not all skydiving clubs allow skysurfing.
Wingsuit Flying
A recent invention where skydivers don a specially designed suit with webbing stitched between the legs and the arms. The resulting suit creates an airfoil, giving lift to the skydiver and apportioning him an advanced level of control over his trajectory and descent speed otherwise not possible. Wingsuit users often employ the use of portable computers to record velocity and distance traveled and a momentary speed as low as 25mph has been recorded. At the specified altitude the arm webbing of the wingsuit is unzipped so that the parachute can be deployed.
Wingsuits are particularly popular among BASE jumpers, as they can turn a 60 second freefall into a 3 minute one. However, wingsuit skydiving is only for the very experienced, and it is recommended that a skydiver have several hundred jumps under his belt before he embarks on this branch of skydiving.