PALATKA, Fla. — It was a Sunday morning in the South during Lent. As church parking lots filled with cars and pews with people, another group concerned with a different kind of resurrection gathered at a small airport nearby.
Canopy piloting, or swooping, which is considered spectator friendly, could help reinvigorate skydiving’s popularity.
Swooping involves jumping at lower altitudes and maneuvering smaller parachutes at high speeds. They were skydivers, competing in the sport’s newest, and most extreme and spectator-friendly discipline, called canopy piloting or swooping. With small, agile parachutes, canopy pilots fly at high speeds and low altitudes, performing maneuvers sometimes just a few inches from earth and water.
“The new heroes in our sport are canopy pilots,” said Ed Scott, executive director of the United States Parachute Association.
But can they rescue skydiving? After decades of steady growth, the sport went into decline. For the first time in more than 50 years, membership in the U.S.P.A., a requirement for active skydivers, fell in consecutive years — for five straight years, from 2002 through 2006.
Meanwhile, total jumps dropped. In 2007, the U.S.P.A. reported 2.15 million jumps by its members, nearly 100,000 fewer than seven years earlier.
Although there has been no consensus on why skydiving suddenly became less popular, three factors are commonly cited: the shiver sent through the aviation community after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001; the aging membership of the U.S.P.A., which had helped build the sport during its formative years; and ESPN’s dropping skysurfing from its X Games lineup after the 2000 Games.
To reinvigorate interest in their sport, some in the skydiving community have looked to swooping. Begun a decade ago with the development of smaller, high-performance parachute canopies, swooping is the only skydiving discipline in which most of the action can be seen from the ground.
Canopy pilots jump from aircraft at less than half the altitude for normal skydives, immediately open parachutes and prepare for a ground-level swoop. As they zip a few feet above earth and water at up to 90 miles an hour, their only safeguards against violent impacts are sound judgment and skill.
“There’s no doubt it’s the most dangerous discipline in skydiving,” said Luigi Cani, a canopy pilot who in February landed a 37-square-foot parachute — the size of a twin bedsheet — to set a world record.
A regular student canopy might be 280 square feet, while a swooping canopy could be 120 square feet or smaller. Cani described the difference as “driving an old sedan and driving a 2008 Lamborghini.”
In competition, where swoopers perform freestyle maneuvers, negotiate slalom-style courses and aim for accuracy, the spectacle is often compared to auto racing.
And like auto racing, swooping has been prone to crashes.
“I lost a few friends at swooping events,” Cani said about his career. “And a lot of people that I know got serious injuries.”
Last year, 18 people died while skydiving and at least four deaths involved high-performance canopy piloting.
Due to its inherent dangers, there has been debate in skydiving circles about banning swooping. The U.S.P.A. requires that swoopers land at a separate area or time from other skydivers. And some skydive centers have prohibited advanced swooping maneuvers altogether.
Still, some have embraced the new discipline precisely because what makes it dangerous also makes it exciting to watch.
“All of a sudden they come screaming across the ground or the water, and that has really intrigued interest in the sport,” Frank Casares said.
Casares owns Mile Hi Skydiving Center in Longmont, Colo., where he will host the U.S.P.A. National Skydiving Championships in canopy piloting in August. He hopes that the event will lure a large crowd from Denver, 30 miles to the south.
“The general consensus is that it will attract the spectator,” he said. “And the more spectators you have, the better it will be for the sport.”
Jim Slaton is the founder of the Pro Swooping Tour, a professional league. He believes skydiving has suffered more from a lack of exposure than any other factor. “When skydiving got kicked out of the X Games, that was a big blow, maybe the biggest one,” he said.
Slaton has struggled to secure mainstream sponsorship, and the Pro Swooping Tour, once a five-stop circuit, has been reduced to one stop this year. Without a television contract, skydiving has been shunted to the fringe, he said.
It was not always this way. For the first 45 years of its history — ever since skydiving was pioneered as a pastime in Mineola, N.Y., in the late 1940s using surplus military parachutes from World War II — participation had risen steadily.
The 1990s were a kind of golden age, when U.S.P.A. membership grew by 70 percent. Meanwhile, skydiving appeared prominently in movies (“Point Break”), commercials (Reebok and Mountain Dew) and regularly on TV as part of the X Games.
Figures from 2008 suggest a turnaround could already be under way. In February there were 31,562 U.S.P.A. members, 1,000 more than the previous year. Still, it was about 9 percent less than the peak in 2001.
In March, about an hour south of Jacksonville, 24 people traveled from Britain, Sweden, and five states to compete in a development league to the Pro Swooping Tour. There are approximately 250 competitors nationwide, according to Slaton.
Colorful parachute canopies hung in the air along with a whiff of rotten eggs from a nearby pulp mill. At 1,000 feet competitors performed a cartwheel maneuver and skimmed through a course along a grassy infield at 70 miles an hour — skidding, running and stumbling to a stop.
“With canopy piloting you’re close enough, and it’s fast enough to you, that you experience that thrill,” said Jay Moledzki, who watched from behind dark sunglasses along the fringe of a runway.
With a Mohawk worn in a ponytail, Moledzki, 34, is a skydiving icon. He is the current canopy piloting World Cup champion. In 2005, he set a skydiving record by swooping 678 feet. Now he envisions greater distances, like those between the fringes of the sporting world and the mainstream.
On hand to coach four members of a British Army swooping team, he noted how other competitors in Florida worked in fields ranging from accounting, marketing, real estate, and the military and blue-collar ranks.
“I really think it’s our golden chance as a sport — because I fell in love with the sport first — it’s our one chance to bring the sport to the public and have them feel as though they’re involved enough for them to keep wanting to come back,” Moledzki said about canopy piloting.
Yet others are quick to acknowledge that certain aspects of skydiving will likely limit its growth potential.
“Is it going to be as big as surfing or skiing?” said John LeBlanc, vice president of Performance Designs, Inc., a parachute manufacturer in DeLand, Fla. “Probably not, because there are only so many people that are willing to step out of a perfectly good airplane.”
