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Skills - Technical Library - Blue Sky Adventures SkydivingParachuting has complex skills that can take thousands of jumps to master, but the basics are often fully understood and useful during the first few jumps. There are four basic areas of skill: basic safety, free fall maneuvers, parachute operation, and landing.Free-fall maneuversIn freefall most skydivers start by learning to maintain a stable belly to earth "box" position. In this position the average fallrate is around 120 mph. Learning a stable box position is a basic skill essential for a reliable parachute deployment. Next, jumpers learn to move or turn in any direction while remaining belly to earth. Using these skills a group of jumpers can create sequences of formations on a single jump, a discipline known as relative work (RW). In the late 1980s more experienced jumpers started experimenting with freeflying, falling in any orientation other than belly to earth. Today many jumpers start freeflying soon after they earn their license, bypassing the RW stepping stone.Parachute operation and landingChoosing when to deploy the parachute is a matter of safety. A parachute should be deployed high enough to give the parachutist time to handle a malfunction, should one occur. Two thousand five hundred feet is the practical minimum for advanced skydivers. In freefall, skydivers monitor their altimeters to decide when to break off from the formation (if applicable) and when to open their parachutes. Many skydivers open higher to practice flying their parachute. On a "hop-and-pop," a jump in which the parachute is immediately deployed upon exiting the aircraft, it is not uncommon for a skydiver to be under canopy as high as 4000 or 5000 feet.Flying the parachute has two basic challenges: to land where planned, often on a target; and to avoid injury. On a more advanced note, some skydivers enjoy performing aerobatic maneuvers with parachutes. An example of this would be the "Swoop", an extremely exciting, but dangerous skill which entails a fast speed approach towards the ground, and then levelling off a couple of feet above the ground to cover as much distance as possible (as much as 600 feet), in a fast horizontal swoop. A modern parachute or canopy "wing" can glide substantial distances. Elliptical canopies go faster and farther, and some small, highly loaded canopies glide faster than a man can run, which can make them very challenging to land. A highly experienced skydiver using a very small canopy can achieve over 60 mph horizontal speeds in landing. A good landing will not have any discomfort at all, and will land the skydiver within a few feet of his intended location. In competitions, champion accuracy skydivers routinely land less than two inches from the center of a target. Nowadays, most of the skydiving related injuries happen under a fully opened and functioning parachute, the most common reasons for these injuries are badly-executed, radical maneuvers near to the ground, like hook turns, or too-low or too-high landing flares. |
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