Category: General Skydiving Skills/Info
Skydiving skills come naturally to some of us, but not so much to others. And skydiving safety is not always intuitive, especially if you don’t have a background in aviation. Learn more about how to skydive safely and effectively with these tips.
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Hop and Pop Skydiving Smarts
If you’re a people watcher, observing skydivers preparing for hop and pop skydives (low-altitude exits) is a lot of fun. You see everything from cool-cat, ho-hum, highly experienced swoopers practicing their craft to jumpy first-timers doing their first exits below full altitude, hoping with all their hearts to be stable enough to deploy within the 5 seconds required to graduate from student status. With all that observation, you tend to…
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Long Hair? Avoid This Skydiving Malfunction
Ah, the feel of freefall on your face, your hair whipping in the wind… wait a minute! If you have long hair (past your shoulders), hair whipping around in freefall is actually a bad thing. Aside from the Gordian knot that often results from 120mph of wind whipping your hair around, hair that is very long can actually cause a malfunction when you deploy your parachute. This is highly unusual…
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Movement Dive Policies
Horizontal movement jumps are fun… free flowing… and inherently potentially much riskier than jumps that fall straight down. Any jump in which jumpers plan horizontal movement other than tracking for separation after breakoff requires good planning and execution to minimize the additional risks to everyone on the load. Above photo by Daniel Angulo! That responsibility is 100% the job of the organizer(s) doing movement jumps, and it should not be…
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Whose Airspace Is It, Anyway?
Skydiving often seems like one of the most dynamic, chaotic sports in existence. People are falling from the sky every which way, for cryin’ out loud! 🙂 In reality, the chaos is highly engineered to allow us all to enjoy our dynamic freefallin’ fun while staying safe, and that engineering starts with ensuring that each group on each load has its own airspace column (with the exception of horizontal flying…
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Exit Separation Between Skydiving Groups
As skydivers, we tend to like to do things together. We like to skydive with our friends, give each other grief about any minor mistakes during the dive, celebrate our successes, and enjoy brews together after sunset. Some people prefer solo skydives on occasion so they can work on skills or just enjoy the sky without distractions. However, there are such things as too much and too little togetherness in skydiving.…
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Skydive Spaceland Introduces the Safety Stand
What if every drop zone posted their safety policies and daily notes conveniently in one location in the loading area for all jumpers, old and new, to browse and learn while waiting for aircraft? Check that box for Skydive Spaceland! We’ve just posted our own Safety Stand in the hangar, complete with information on: Basic safety guidelines Aircraft safety Camera jumps Tracking dives and who should/should not lead them Wingsuit…
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Skydiver Training Tip: When to Learn to Pack Your Parachute
Hello student skydiver! As you progress to ever more awe-inspiring feats of skydiving skill in our Skydiver Training Program, do you ever wonder about the magic that happens before you strap your gear on for the next jump? I refer of course to the magic whereby the billowing parachute, hundreds of square feet of nylon, that you lay down on the packing room floor after a jump is organized and…
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Skydiving Tip: You’re Not THAT Good…
Skydivers tend to be pretty confident people. We trust ourselves to save our own lives while throwing ourselves out of (ha) perfectly good airplanes towards the planet, right? We trust that we have the skills to succeed in the dives we plan. We trust that our gear will work, and even if it doesn’t, we trust that we have the knowledge and skills to handle it and still land safely.…
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Tracking Dives: The Fun and the Danger
Ah, the sunset tracking dive. What could be more fun than flying along with your skydiving friends in a flock with a beautiful sunset? After all, all the cool kids are doing it! Graduation jump tracking dive, anyone? Just kidding!!!! If the dive goes wrong, a whole lot of things could be more fun than that tracking dive. Tracking and angle flying dives that plan for the group to move…
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Skydiving Tip: Predictability = Safety
Plan the dive, dive the plan. You’ve been practicing this since your first student training jump. There are two reasons for a dive plan: SAFETY! Engineering the dive so you can get in maximum learning and/or performance from the jump. Once you have graduated from a skydiving training program, there are SO MANY things you can do! You rock–you are now a licensed skydiver! But that is just a license…
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Skydiving Advice: Listen With Care
Skydivers come in all shapes and sizes and from all walks of life, but If one word could be used to describe nearly all of us it would probably be “passionate.” This is a sport we love dearly and deeply, and we love to share that passion with others. That passion, unfortunately, can cause problems in the scenario of one jumper giving another advice. If you are a skydiving student…
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Loading Area Etiquette
Getting ready to board an aircraft for skydiving is more than a little different than boarding a plane for commercial travel or getting in a car for a drive. There are concerns for personal safety, the safety of others in the plane (and the plane itself), and efficiency. Stay safe and efficient with these loading tips! Personal Safety Complete your gear checks before the plane pulls up. This means 3 rings,…
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Skydiver Training Tip: Cool Weather Gear
We may be in southern Texas, but the weather is definitely cooling down! Skydiving in wintertime brings a few challenges we don’t have in summer, namely how do we stay warm while staying safe? The heavy winter clothes you need to avoid frostbite can bite you in other ways, especially those big, bulky hoodies we love so much. Loose, floppy clothing can obstruct your handles if you jump without a…
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Top 11 Things to Know About Movement Jump Safety
How often have you heard this at the drop zone? “Hey, let’s go track!” or “Hey, let’s go do some angles!” Movement jumps are extremely popular at most any drop zone in the world, and with good reason: They’re a ton of fun! But they are most definitely not just another skydive. Key Point: It’s extremely important that everyone doing movement jumps understands one critical fact: It is 100% YOUR…
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Exit Order and Aircraft Boarding
If there is anything consistent among a group of skydivers, it’s the fact that we all want to make more skydives! Often what stops us is money or time, but other times it’s just plain running out of daylight. We can’t hold the sun up in the sky to get more time, but every skydiver can work to make aircraft boarding more efficient and thus allow more loads in a…