Category: Skydiving

He swears he had a good time.

Sorry for the total lack of posts lately but the weather here in Wisconsin has finally gotten good and I’ve been jumping my butt off trying to make up for all the lost time.  Not all that much new happening around here anyway, fly, jump, repeat.  We finally finished filming season two of  DANGEROUS FLIGHTS and it should be airing in Canada sometime in September and word has it that season one has been picked up by a network in the US but I’m not at liberty to say which one at this time.  We did have an interesting visit from the local police last week.  I was about to get on the plane and make a jump when one of Baldwin’s finest drove up, got out of his squad car and approached me.   “I don’t suppose your plane crashed today did it?”

I looked over at our Cessna 208 Caravan that we use for skydiving and noticed a complete lack of fire damage and crumpledness and responded “No, I don’t think so.”

“That’s what I thought, apparently a train engineer reported that one of your planes flew right past the front of their train engine and crashed into a field.”

I could see how a train engineer might mistake our plane landing on our grass runway for a crash landing because the end of the runway is only fifty feet from the train tracks and we don’t clear the raised tracks by much when we come in.  Satisfied the cop left only to come back a few hours later to inform us that the railroad had reported us to homeland security for buzzing their train.  That’s rich I thought, a pilot doesn’t have any such restrictions during takeoff and landing.  I can’t wait to see how this plays out.

Here’s a shot of the Caravan over the raised train tracks on final.  He’s usually closer.

Yours truly following a student out on his graduation jump.

With the sun making a rare appearance last Sunday there was no time for the usual Father’s day activities due to the bodies that needed dumping out of airplanes.  This year however was a little because my own Number One Son  (NOS) has started working at the drop zone as the aircraft loader, fueler and all around slave.  At the end of the day things slowed down enough I was able to reward him with his second tandem skydive where I taught him how to do turns and forward motion in free fall and pull the ripcord.  It was a pretty good Father’s Day after all.

After nine days of intense training the 2013 Skydive Twin Cities Accelerated Free Fall Instructors course is DONE!  Five out of the six candidates are now qualified to throw innocent students out of perfectly good airplanes and see if they can catch them.  The last part of the course was my favorite because that’s when we give the candidates real life training situations complete with made up student personas.  The two I used this week were dead country singer John Denver and a rich Saudi prince named Mohammed.  We use the personas to challenge the candidate’s ability to train challenging students and not get distracted.  As evaluators we have a lot of fun trying to get the candidates to mess up.  While Mohammed was a complete jerk who wouldn’t pay attention to instructions or even bend down to pick up his parachute, John Denver was the complete opposite, getting easily distracted offering to sign autographs and pose for pictures when his instructors were trying to give him instructions on the next jump.  On the way to altitude I/John even led the plane in a rousing rendition of “Thank God I’m A Country boy”  The poor candidates trying to keep me focused were beside themselves.  But in the end, all but one managed to pass the course and have been released into the wild to teach falling and stuff.  Seeing that I taught four out of the five that passed how to skydive in the first place made me quite proud.

Here’s one of the evaluation dives I did during the Free Fall instructors course we’re doing this week.  I’m the one in white.

Sam and Smiley working hard on their first “Hot” evaluation dive.  They did a great job and passed so we’ll  make it harder next time…….Yes, yes, I know, that’s what she said.

Day four of the Accelerated Free Fall Instructors course and I’m beat.  As in beat up.  I’m covered in bruises from candidates trying to hang on to me on exit and then trying to catch me in free fall when I get away.  for the most part they are all doing well but even the best of them gets a little too aggressive and hits me kind of hard.  Not only does this hurt but it gets them an unsat on the dive making them do it again.  Up until now they have been doing classroom work and practice dive but today they go “Hot” which means every dive counts.  If they score too low or get too many unsats they fail the course costing them to have wasted a week of their time and about a thousand dollars so you can imagine pressure.  Seeing me limp around the house this morning moaning and groaning my wife told suggested that I take the day off and not jump today.  It’s an appealing thought but I’ve worked too hard on these kids to take a break now.