Being COOL on the Dropzone

Skydiving has come a long
way since the first (recorded) jump was made from a hot air balloon in 1797.
Only being practiced as a special stunt on public events, it was far from a
public sport at that point.

The silk envelope used to safely descend from 3000 ft on that first jump
wasn't much to look at in terms of design, but the design and materials used
formed the basis for the parachute as we know it today.

The military were the first to develop parachuting as an emergency escape
procedure for balloon and aircraft pilots, and later as a means of
delivering soldiers to the battlefield.

In
the 1960s, skydiving ventured outside its military use and started to become
seen as a sport in its own right.

As the sport grew, so did the research and development of the materials
used.

The harness, cutaway system and parachute itself underwent major changes and
upgrades, resulting in the gear that we all now accept as commonplace as we
exit the aircraft.

Due to these advancements in the materials used and their design, our gear
has actually passed the point where it is now safer than its end user.

Getting into the sport

Skydiving
was once
a sport which was considered pretty extreme in itself, but as the years went
by, and due to the gear and teaching advancements, it
became more and more safe,
and was
marketed as a sport for everyone.

In the media, the growing attention for the more extreme disciplines and
variations of our sport have led to a large group of people who no longer
see the basic sport of skydiving itself as the goal, but rather as an
intermediate training, or even an obstacle in the way of what they really
want to do.

These predetermined goals on what somebody wants to accomplish within the
sport often form before or during a skydivers first few jumps.

Not being a huge sport with millions of participants worldwide, we tend to
enthusiastically take in new people, and sometimes pull them into our sport
deeper and faster then they should be.

With every year that goes
by, people seem to be in more and more of a rush to jump with a video
camera, downsize their canopy, learn to fly a wingsuit, freefly in bigger
and bigger groups, fly head down straight from AFF and starting BASE jumping
with the bare minimum, if indeed any at all, experience. Sadly, the growing
trend is to encourage this behavior, and try to facilitate them in getting
there as soon as they can, instead of trying to make people understand the
potential consequences of the rushed path they have chosen.

Photo by Costyn van Dongen

Video

For
many,,
the media creates the image that a lot of the extreme variations of our
sport are things you can take up as easy as a bungee jump from a local
bridge, or a ride in a theme park. When people look at some of the 'big
names' in our sport, its easy to forget almost all of them put in many
hundreds, if not thousands of jumps to acquire the skills, precision and
experience to excel in their field of expertise. The PD factory team didn’t
start swooping on sub 100 sq/ft canopies straight from AFF, just as Loic
Jean Albert didn’t start flying wingsuits within touching range of cliffs
after his first skydive. There are many more examples like this within our
sport.

Here, I think,
lies our biggest responsibility:

Trying to help
people new to this sport understand the work it takes to reach a certain
level.

Trying to teach
them
to
respect and honor the
effort people put in, and
helping them
understand that’s what they need to do to reach their goals based on skill,
hard work and determination, not do everything as fast as they can and for a
large part trusting on luck to come out of it alive. Often thinking their
experience or exceptional abilities in other sports set them apart from
normal people, allowing them to progress much faster and skip steps. While
in truth, they are exactly the people the rules were made for.

 

Photo by Costyn van Dongen

Respect the rules

As with any developing
sport, rules and safety procedures were created over the years based on
experience. Some of the rules and safety recommendations where literally
written in blood. Learning lessons the hard way.

These days many people new to the sport tend to look at these same rules as
a means of holding them back. Stopping them from having the same fun as the
people on the dropzone who have been jumping many, many years already.

We live in a fast society.
Everything has to be done quickly
and with instant gratification. When we experienced jumpers
start talking to young skydivers about certain goals, this can develop
frustrated views on the sport for some of them. They get into a mindset
where they feel
skydiving isn’t fun until they have their A license, or how its isn’t really
fun until they are swooping a small canopy, taking up BASE jumping or flying
a wingsuit. If we go along with that line of thought, and acknowledge those
statements, we then suddenly turn skydiving into a point of frustration for
these newer jumpers.

Instead of enjoying their
first few hundred jumps, and slowly learning more and more about our sport,
they start seeing it as a big waiting game where they can’t wait start
jumping that same tiny rig and sub 100 sq/ft canopy as the cool guys who
have been around a bit longer.

Photo by Stefan
Smith

The road is more important
than the destination.

 Allowing people to cut
corners in reaching certain goals, is not only dangerous to them, but also
undermining the authority of people teaching.

It’s the image more experienced jumpers
portray to the newer
people in
our sport that determines how they in turn,
will approach the sport.

As an example, being in a
rush and boarding a plane without a pin check is not only dangerous to
ourselves, it’s also a bad example to the kid fresh off AFF who's on the
same load. The same goes for many aspects in our sport.

Realize that it’s not just the people who give instruction that are
teaching, it’s the way we as
individual skydivers
approach, talk about,
and treat our sport that ultimately sets an example that
the new flyers
will follow.