SkyDiving in blighty (England)

I’ll be honest, this is more of a rant than an actual skydiving post, but it does have a purpose (of sorts) other than to just let me spew a load of vitriol and bile out there…

So, I returned from LA, leaving the good old Perris Valley a long long way behind me, a little too far to just drive down and jump for a day or two (about 5500 miles ;o), but I figured it would be no big deal, skydiving is an international sport and there must be plenty of places to go and jump in England and I could just pick up where I left of with no problems. Well, I was half right.

Yes, there are loads of places to jump over here in England, certainly enough that no-one should have any problems, but, to be honest, if you’ve started learning elsewhere then they really don’t want your business. There seems to be a very arrogant attitude at the UK DZ’s that if you’ve started learning with someone else, then they don’t want to touch you. Also, what the heck is up with making you do static line first? They just want the cash for the extra jumps you’ll have to do… Not surprising I guess, seeing as it seems to cost twice as much to jump over here as it does anywhere else in the world…

Don’t even get me started on the bureaucracy, the forms, the doctors note, the insurance, the hair pulling teeth gnashing nanny state of it all… and I thought the video taped disclaimer I had to do in the U.S. was over the top… Oh, and that USPA member ship you have? if you aren’t already A licensed then it don’t matter for crap, back of the line, take out a BPA membership (after you’ve filled out all the forms in triplicate and had them verified by the queen… okay a small exageration).
AirKix seemed to be the best candidate, but after the first e-mail reply asking where I had made it up to, they couldn’t be bothered to return any contact, the other DZ’s have basically said that as I didn’t start training with them, they would only be willing to take me on if I started from scratch including doing some static line jumps. Now, call me stupid, but the free-fall is the best part of the skydive, so I begrudge spending the whole cost of a jump plus instructors to not even get the benefit of my favourite part.

Anyway, all is not lost, I plan to just get a cheap flight over to spain and a spend a week training there… I will make it even if it kills me (but hopefully it won’t).

Missing - Having you seen this blogger?

Now many of you who may happen to read this blog may think that the blog was setup for just myself.  However this is not the case.  In reality it is setup for two skydivers / bloggers, myself and Seri.  Unfortunately Seri seems to be very lazy when it comes to blogging.  by reading this blog you would think that Seri has only jumped once.  When in fact he actually has I believe 10 jumps.  What a slacker!  So please everyone, chime in with your comments and encourage Seri blog his thoughts on these jumps before he forgets about them.

Blue skies!

Congratulations to Bryce Yates on passing his AFF… Just the A license now!

Co-founder, friend and sky diving buddy Bryce passed his AFF and did his first solo jump on this momentous day, Saturday the 22nd of March 2008… I wait for him to get to jump 24 so I can witness the A license jump!!!

Congratulations Bryce, I’ll be there myself soon!

Missing - Have you seen this Skydiver

So I’m axiously awaiting my upcoming jumps, which are scheduled for the 15th of March.  With any luck after the 15th I’ll be off student status, having completed all 8 stages of the AFF program, and will have done my first solo skydive.  There is one big problem though.  I seem to have lost my skydiving buddy Seri.  If you’ve seen him please be sure to send him my way.  For those of you that don’t know what he looks like here is a description

Seri - Male, 5′ something, one hundred and something pounds (not sure what the equivalent would be in stones), brown hair.  I have no idea what is eye color is as I don’t usually pay attention to details like this on guys.  He is kind of curious looking and can usually found in front of a computer when not skydiving.  Also like most brits he makes use of the word whilst instead of while (they speak the queens english you know).

Mind Boggling Skydiving Records

Skydiving is, by all accounts, a pretty insane sport, we gladly pay for the privilege of letting a dubious looking pilot take us nearly 3 miles high into the sky and then we walk up to the open door of the airplane and throw ourselves out for fun. It should be no surprise, that for some people, after they have a few (thousand) jumps under their belt, the thrill wears off and they start looking to inject a little extra excitement into their jumps. It’s due to these fearless, courageous, competitive or just bat shit crazy individuals that I’m able to present some of the most mind boggling skydiving records.

1: Consecutive accurate landings

This might not seem like much, to get a few landings, one after another, all within a small distance of one another, but, consider what it takes to hold this world record. The record is: G-1-b : Landing accuracy with 0.02 meter disc : 4 cons. landings + 0.01 m, set on the 17th of August 2007, by a Liudmyla Zem’ska in the Ukraine.
Now, think on that, for those who aren’t used to having to think in meters, then I’ll make it simple, after jumping out of a plane at a height of nearly 2.5 miles, this parachutist successfully hit a disk that was about 1 inch wide on four separate occasions, with a level of accuracy within half an inch. That’s like dropping a pea from 3500 feet up and hitting the same spot four times in a row within a quarter of an inch, admittedly the pea doesn’t have a steerable canopy, but you get the idea.

2: Most Jumps in a 24 hour period

Unimpressed huh? Well, how about this, the most jumps within 24 hours, commonly referred to as a day, but if you think about it, it also includes a night… (sorry I’m being obtuse again). Anyway, how about Jay Stokes, who from the 8th to the 9th of September 2006, at Greensburg, Indiana managed to complete not 100, or 200, or 300 but 640 jumps. That’s one jump every 2 minutes and 15 seconds, and that’s without taking into account the need to use the toilet, drink some water or hell, maybe eat a sandwich. I can only guess that they must have had a sealed bottle on the plane for him to use (don’t think of Dumb and Dumber) and maybe some amphetamine.

3: The worlds largest freefall formation (of totally blind skydivers)

Just to make sure we’re all on the same page, I’m not talking about the largest group of people to jump out of an airplane at the same time and make some pretty little shape in the sky, I mean the most BLIND people to jump out of a plane and make a pretty formation, well, how pretty can it be with only two people, but it’s the thought that counts. On September 13th 2003 at Garrettsville Ohio, the world record was set when John Fleming and Dan Rossi, two blind skydivers, jumped out of a plane and completed a formation skydive. It’s not so bad you might think, as after all, they would have had altimeters that audibly alerted them when to pull and the landing would have been assisted on radio. It’s when you realise that one of the blind skydivers had the other one tell him when to pull the cord and deploy the canopy.
To copy from parachutehistory.com “At 6,500 feet Rossi gave Fleming the pull sign, a hard shake of his upper arm. Fleming deployed in position and then Rossi, assisted by a safety diver who was lurking near by, tracked to 4,000 feet and deployed”. So you not only somehow dock with your companion who is also blind and you locate them how?, but you then allow them “who cannot see their damn altimeter”, tell you when to pull and deploy. This took something bigger than brass cajones my friends.

4: Worlds longest freefall (in distance)

On November 1st 1962, at Volsk in Rusia, Eugene Andreev jumped from an altitude of 83,524 feet and free-falled until a height of 3,134 feet. That’s a massive 80,380 feet of total free fall, or to put it another way, just over 15 miles of falling through the sky, without your canopy deployed, at a speed of around 130mph assuming a regular neutral body position and a pretty big canopy on your back. Unfortunately I’ve been unable to find out exact details of this jump, but I can only assume it was done from a balloon with the jumper sitting there and crapping themselves the whole way up. Knowing how I feel in the plane when it’s only going up to just below 15,000 feet, I would empathise with this possibly psychotic individual, that is until we come to our last insane hero…

5: The highest parachute jump in history

In 1960, on Tuesday August 16th, Captain Joseph W. Kittinger with the United States Air Force, boarded the gondola Excelsior III and climbed to a height of 102,800 feet, nearly 20 miles, before jumping from it with nothing other than a canopy strapped to his back.
For those that can’t be bothered to click the image on the right for the bigger picture, the inscription on the ledge outside the gondola reads “This is the highest step in the world”. You know, there’s nothing like a little bit of reminding that you’re about to carry out something that is in nearly every psychiatrists book, certifiably bat shit crazy. Unfortunately Captain Kittinger doesn’t also qualify for the worlds longest or furthest free fall as he had to deploy a drogue chute behind him to stabilise the fall.

So, the next time you’re in the doorway of a plane at 14,500 feet wondering just what the hell you’re doing, have a think of some of the people who have gone before you, and remember, if the view doesn’t look like this, then you’re probably going to be okay.

Little Man in a Wind Tunnel

Bryce posted a little video on YouTube of his 5 year old son Chase in the wind tunnel at Perris Valley. I know it’s yet another case of me blatantly avoiding actually writing a proper post, but one is coming soon.

Extreme SkyDiving

I know that updates have been a little slow coming, we’re still working on getting the site looking right, we finally ditched the pre-made themes and have been working on one ourselves from scratch, it’s getting there, just a little slowly.

As a temporary piece of filler, I recently saw this which both amused and scared the living crap out of me. It’s a SkyDive with no parachute in a parody of the RedBull adverts.

2008 Skydivers Information Manual Online (SIM 2008)

The full edition of the 2008 Skydivers Information Manual is available for online reading. This publication is general mandatory reading for people training in Skydiving and covers everything you need to know. I’ve attached the PDF version of the manual to this post but you can also download that directly from this link here too.

And so it begins… again

The phone call was made, the credit card information was given, the time was chosen, date was set, the plans were laid… It’s jump time! Juggling the finances around a little between me and Bryce we’ve managed to wrangle things… Real life problems like mortgages and debt collectors are nothing when it comes to attempted suicide…

The nerves are already starting and it’s still a few days away, this time is going to be a little different however. Although it’s two jumps again, there’s also going to be 5 minutes before hand in the wind tunnel, because, as my jump details show, my body position sucks. So, after Sunday when there’s a new update, I should be able to tell you how my AFF Level 3 & 4 went and what it was like to spend air time in the wind tunnel…

Dodge trucks, the biggest peril to an aspiring Sky Diver?

There’s a post that’s supposed to go between this one and my last one, which I will finish writing soon, and when I do this little bit will be deleted, but for now this little disclaimer is required so that everything makes some form of contextual sense.

Last night whilst me and Bryce were carpooling home, we were speaking about when to schedule our next jump. Now that I’ve been mildly bitten by the bug, I want to go again as soon as possible, however, finances aren’t superb at the moment so I have to be a little bit cautious. After a little bit of calculating expenses and schedules, we decided that Saturday or Sunday at the very beginning of February would be the best time. As we decided this, I have to say that I had a few of the small tremors in my stomach again, the mixture of excitement, fear, apprehension and nerves. We spoke a little more about it, whether we would be able to fit in 2 jumps, if we might be able to complete AFF levels 3 & 4 in the same day (unlikely but definitely worth an attempt), what time we would need to get there to be able to spend some time in the wind tunnel before hand, then we settled into our regular crap talk for the homeward commute.

As we were cutting through L.A., a minor disaster struck. Bryce’s 4 year old, perfectly running truck stalled, dead. We managed to make it to the side of the road where there was a gas station and sat there for a few moments. The truck fired up again and we made it through the rest of LA and back onto the freeway. Unfortunately as we were driving down the freeway, the truck stalled again. With myself hanging out of the passenger side window, waving my arms at the cars in the lanes next to us to show we needed to come over, we made it onto the shoulder. Anyway, to cut a boring storing short, the truck kept stalling and we limped home (the remaining 30 miles) using surface streets and the occasional hard shoulder.

So, what does this have to do with Sky Diving? Unfortunately Bryce now needs to buy a new vehicle, and, factoring in all the expenses, all of his toys and fun budget is likely to be eaten up for the foreseeable future. This leaves me in a bit of a awkward situation. I don’t want to continue on my AFF by myself, there’s a comforting feeling being able to look over at someone who’s doing the exact same thing as me, with the same amount of experience. Also, I would feel bad saying the next week about how much fun I had, knowing he couldn’t do it. I guess over this weekend I’ll have a little think on it and see if I can come up with any possible plans. But for now, Sky Diving is on indefinite hold.