Category: Skydiving

 

Took this shot of Mark and Dinger dodging clouds with a first jump student today.  We totally missed the clouds, and you can’t prove otherwise.

Well it’s that time of year again.  Time for a few brave skydivers to see if they’ve got what it takes to throw innocent young students out of perfectly good airplanes, let them go and see if they can catch them again when things go wonky.  Yes it’s time for our annual Accelerated Freefall Instructors course.  Despite my right hip giving me problems, don’t ask, I’ve stupidly bravely volunteered my expert services to act as the worst out of control student the candidates have ever seen.  I might bitch about being subjected to repeated freefall collisions, low pulls and morons tracking away with my pilot chute, TWICE!  but I keep doing it because I love it and because it’s important to keep renewing my pool of instructors.  I also love it because it’s a hell of a lot of fun.  Not only do I mess with the candidates in the air I get to do my best to trip them up on the ground.  To do that I take on different persona’s that each have their own individual set of problems that the candidate has to overcome and still be an effective instructor, my favorite is Billy Balls.  Billy Balls is a 70’s era ex-porn star turned film maker who just can’t seem to pay attention to what he’s supposed be concentrating on when women are around.  He’s constantly hitting on the women and trying to get them to star in his next movie.  In the plane when the candidates are trying to get him to go over what he’s supposed to do on the next skydive he instead will turn around and caress the thigh of the jumper behind him and ask them “Do you want to be a star?”  Good fun.  At the door I do things like wave to the camera or other jumpers, adjust my goggles or try and ask a question while hanging halfway out of the plane, them of course I just let go and curl up in a ball trying to flip over on the exit.  If the candidates can somehow manage to get me stable they’re supposed to let me go at which time I flip over on my back and begin spinning uncontrollably.  The candidate’s job is to catch me, flip me over and pull my simulated ripcord before passing through the 3500 foot hard deck.  It does make for some interesting jumps, stay tuned.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Not much time to post this weekend, too busy playing human yo-yo.

 

 

 

 

One of my instructors checking out the landing site on a demonstration jump last summer in Minneapolis.  The landing area is the outfield section of the baseball field in the lower left.  Tight demos always get my heart pounding because coming up short or overshooting usually means hitting something, or someone, you really don’t want to hit.  But I guess that’s why they pay us the big bucks.

The professional weather guessers employed by our friends at the US government told us that there was no hope that we would be skydiving this weekend.  Rain, wind and low clouds would keep the planes and jumpers grounded, no hope, go home and see a movie or something.  So of course we managed to fly fifteen loads of skydivers on Saturday and six on Sunday.  They were, on the other hand, correct about strong thunderstorms moving through the area on Sunday afternoon.  Towering cumulonimbus clouds were building as I went up on the last load to film 8 relatively inexperienced skydivers attempting to link up in free fall and build multiple formations, they were spectacularly unsuccessful  by the way.  When we landed I looked at the weather radar and saw that a line of strong thunderstorms was heading right for us.  This happens often in Wisconsin and one of my harder jobs is deciding weather or not to fly the aircraft out of the way of the approaching storms to avoid damage.  It’s a tough call because if we flew the plane away every time a thunderstorm is threatening us it would cost us thousands of dollars a year that we can’t afford.  But yesterday I made the wrong call.  As the storms approached the drop zone the radar showed the classic “Hook” of a possible tornado.  Shortly after the sirens went off and the radio warned us that a tornado had been sited in the area and was heading right for us.  It was too late to jump in the plane and fly it away so all we could do was watch as the wind got stronger and stronger.  My heart was pounding as the wind speed hit 75 Mph causing the plane to dance on the pad and strain against it’s tie downs.  We could hear the unmistakable roar of a tornado overhead but luckily it didn’t touch down and finally passed us by leaving the runway littered with the remains of the plastic lawn chairs.  It was a close call but we suffered no major damage, thank God.  It’s gonna be a long summer.

Watch of video of the storm HERE. 

Apparently the link doesn’t work, I’ll try and fix that.

 

This is an exit shot of a formation load I flew at Skydive Twin Cities two years ago.  The planes were PAC 750s, a single engine turbine jump ship that is my favorite ride when flying skydivers because it descends like falling safe and has a stick instead of a yoke, and who doesn’t like flying a stick?

Here in Wisconsin us frozen chosen knew summer couldn’t hide from us forever and yesterday it back all at once.  11 days ago we were on the receiving end of eighteen inches of snow and temperatures in the high twenty’s.  Yesterday the high temp was 92 F.  The return of summer means the return of skydiving season so after a short morning’s soak in the hot tub to loosen up the old muscles it was off to the drop zone.  Because it’s still early in the season we didn’t have many tandem customers on the books I was looking forward to a reasonably slow day, and that’s what I got.  Here are the high points.

Building and grounds maintenance: Transplant sod to fill in bare spots in front of the main door and hang photos.

Instruction: Re-train two students on emergency procedures in the skydiving simulator.

Flying: Hop in the 900 hp. Cessna 208 Super Caravan and fly a load of skydivers up to 14,000 feet.  The next load was only 4 jumpers so we pulled out the 5 passenger Cessna 206 which of course didn’t start.  As we were getting ready to jump start the plane with my truck the local FAA representative stopped by for a chat, great timing.  Flew the load up to 10,000 feet and descended to a nearby municipal airport for fuel because we don’t currently have any avgas at the DZ.  While re-fueling the 206 I met a pilot who was flying his Piper Arrow across the country and had made the stop in Wisconsin to visit his 100 year old grandmother.  Flew the 15 miles back to the DZ over rolling farm country staying under 500 feet seeing the deer and wild turkeys feeding in the alfalfa fields.

Video editing:  After landing edited two skydiving videos from the load I’d just flown.

Skydiving:  Took one of my tandem instructor candidates up for two training jumps.  The candidate is at the point of his training where I test his ability to regain stability after an unstable exit so I grabbed the side of the plane as we left causing us to tumble uncontrollably for 1000 feet before he got us under control.  He did better on the second jump.  While under canopy I realized that the wind had picked up and while my candidate and I still managed to land on the DZ another one of my candidates who was jumping with someone else landed almost one mile away.  Finished up the day with a six way speed star celebrating one of our jumpers 200th jump.

Wrap up:  After putting the planes to bed the jumpers brought out a case of beer and we all sat around in front of the building debriefing the days jumps and enjoying the sunset.  Like I said it was a slow day, pretty soon it’s going to get busy.

Well the sun finally decided to come back from it’s extended vacation and start doing it’s job again.  Despite professional forecasts to the contrary, don’t get me started, we had beautiful weather this weekend allowing the gang at Skydive Twin Cities to once again take to the skies.  With our grass runway still covered with snow on Saturday we spent the day doing re-currency training  for those skydivers that took the entire winter off and I started training the next batch of tandem instructors.  For those of you that don’t know what a tandem skydive it’s when an instructor straps a student to the front of him and takes the rookie jumper for a skydive, remaining attached the whole way to the ground, hopefully.  To get a license to be an instructor you have to take an intensive training course which consists of one day of ground school followed by training jumps with an evaluator who tests their skills at overcoming challenging scenarios.  In other words I get to go up with instructor candidates and acting as a new student try and kill us both.  If the candidate manages to overcome the emergency I put us in he passes the jump, if not………well that’s what I get the big bucks for I guess.

  On Sunday our runway was still too soggy to use so we packed up the entire operation and moved to the municipal airport in the town I live in.  It has a paved runway and great facilities that are under used so we invaded the new terminal building and took over.

I did four successful evaluation jumps with two separate candidates and only feared for my life a few times.

 

After a hard days jumping it was time to call it a day and head on home.  Seeing that The plane had to make one more flight to get back to the drop zone in Baldwin and seeing that it would be flying right over my house it only made sense to have the pilot “drop me off” on his way back.  Hey, I’m as green as the next guy and ride sharing is important.  So as the plane passed over my neighborhood I bailed out and somehow managed to find room to land in the cemetery next to my house.  As a bonus my neighbor met me with a beer when I landed, so I had that going for me.

On Wednesday last week we had six inches of snow on the runway and hopes of jumping on the weekend looked grim.  Then the sun came out, melting the snow and making it possible to finally start skydiving.  We were a month late in opening but at least we were finally up and running.  Or so we thought.

That, my friends, is fifteen inches of snow.   It’s May 2nd.  Global warming my ass.

Two days ago the runway at my skydiving school, Skydive Twin Cities, had six inches of snow on the runway and the restrooms were frozen solid.  It looked like the drop zone would be still be in winter’s death grip this weekend so I pushed our opening day back to next week.  Everyone was disappointed but we couldn’t risk damaging my beautiful grass runway, it’s my baby you know.  Well of course once we’d re-scheduled everything the weather got incredibly warm and is forecast to be even warmer for the next three days.  soooooo, change three, called Texas and told them to send the plane up and told all my staff to put their jumping shoes on because we’re skydiving this weekend!  Oh by the way this last minute change is driving my office manager nuts.