DexterFree-Flying
May 31st 2008 07:25
The mass free fall, free fly!
A free-flying formation by the Circus
Woody in Toy Story - "That’s not flying! That’s falling with style.”
What do you do with your weekends? Well from the videos below it seems that some likeminded individuals are getting together to break free-flying records.
So what’s free-flying you may ask, well it’s an extension of skydiving whereby instead of the traditional belly first position of plummet before opening chute some have realised benefits to feet or head first decent.
As so often happens onthis site - Going Down!
Aside from being faster it allows for large groups of people to jump out of planes and create formations in the sky. Viewing it through eagle eye lensed footage takes awhile to accept what your seeing. There is something surreal about the way they are walking on air and fluttering there limbs like wings for stability with interlocked hands.
The airborne chorus line
According to wikipedia the discipline was popularized in 1994, “by a group of skydivers who wanted to experiment with non-traditional forms of flight. This group, called "The Freefly Clowns" was founded by Olav Zipser, along with Mike Vail, Charles Bryan, Omar Alhegelan, and Stefania Martinengo”
“A freeflyer, in order to fully understand the aerodynamic power of his/her body in freefall, needs to first learn to control all of the skydiving forms: box position (belly-to-earth, traditional skydiving position), back flying (back-to-earth), head-up flying, head-down flying, and side flying. These positions are not held for the duration of a skydive. Freeflying can, and usually does, involve constant transitions in position and speeds, with vertical and horizontal orientations. This can involve constantly flowing skydives, with all positions explored, or more static skydives where flyers are concentrating on building a large formation while flying in one of these freefly positions.
Due to the increased freefall speed and potentially faster horizontal speeds, freeflying has dangers beyond that of a normal skydive. Extra care must be taken for freefall skydive groups to stay away from belly-to-earth skydivers to avoid collisions. Since most parachutes are not designed to be opened at speeds higher than that of normal belly flying, freeflyers must transition back to the "belly to earth" position and slow down their descent for several seconds before deploying their parachute.
While freeflying is a younger and more extreme addition to skydiving, it is becoming a popular event in competitions and world records”
Video 1 – 400 Way Freefalling World Record.
Video 2 – 69 Freefly World Record
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