Author: Kim

Wingsuit flying, also known as wingsuiting, is the sport of flying through the air aided by nothing but your nylon wingsuit. Sometimes called birdman suits, or squirrel suits, wingsuits have strong fabric between the legs and under the arms. This gives jumpers a greater surface area enabling lift and controlled flying. As you can imagine, wingsuit flying can be fun, but also very dangerous. There are two major types of wingsuit flying. Wingsuiting from a plane starts similarly to standard skydiving, whereas wingsuit base jumping starts from a fixed object such as a mountain or tall building. Both types of…

How do parachutes slow you down? Does your weight affect your speed? How does it feel when your parachute opens? When you sign up for a skydive you are putting a lot of faith in the team, instructors, and equipment. Skydiving is incredibly safe. In fact, you are 24 times more likely to have a serious car accident on the way to the skydive. But it’s natural to have questions about how it all works… Let’s break it down and have a look at how parachutes slow you down and bring you safely back to the ground. How does a…

Many new and novice skydivers have questions and concerns, it’s normal. A lot of those questions will be around how the weather and natural elements affect skydiving; what makes for safe and unsafe skydiving conditions? One of the most common questions is: ‘does temperature affect skydiving?’ You’ll probably have a lot of queries as to how different temperatures and weather conditions affect skydiving safety. But you’d be surprised by most of the answers, and under what conditions it’s still safe to skydive. To get to the bottom of this let’s take a look at what are the best weather conditions…

Is there a difference between base jumping and skydiving? Skydiving, parachuting, and freefalling are interchangeable terms; used to describe the act of jumping and descending from great heights. But when people use the term ‘base jumping’ they are referring to something very specific. To get to the heart of what the difference is between base jumping and skydiving we need to look at a few things: the techniques, the equipment, and the dangers. The basic principles of base jumping and skydiving are very similar, but there are also some important differences. As well as using different equipment, the risks and…

There’s an old joke, ‘you don’t need a parachute to go skydiving, you only need a parachute to go skydiving twice.’ Despite those words of jest, there are those, who by meticulous planning and bravado or freakish luck, have survived skydiving without a parachute. While there’s no such thing as a totally risk-free skydive, skydiving is a relatively safe sport (when done correctly and under the supervision of professionals). But doing so without the aid of a parachute or wingsuit is a different story altogether. Professional skydiving with a parachute results in a fatality less than once in every 100,000…