Ouch. On Thursday, a parachutist went off course during a jump at Fort Riley, Kansas, and crashed feet first into the 1st Infantry Division's marching band. Three band members were…
Lawn chair ballooning lives on!
Via CNN, I learn today that Kent Couch of Bend, Oregon managed to fly 200 miles from Oregon to Idaho in a lawn chair 'powered' by helium balloons. Such stories…
Unconventional skydives: balloon jump!
A couple of weeks ago I attended Skyfest 2008, a large skydiving convention (‘boogie’) which had attendees from all over the country. They also had a number of unconventional aircraft, namely helicopters and hot air balloons. I decided to make a hot air balloon jump, my second, but this time I got video of the jump, which appears after the fold!
Unconventional skydives: beach jumps!
Over Memorial Day weekend, i went with a group of friends to a skydiving party (‘boogie’) at the Emerald Coast Skydiving Center, which is near the Gulf Coast. The fun of this particular boogie is the ability to skydive over the Gulf and land on the beach, right in front of the Flora-Bama Bar (which is on the coastal border between Florida and Alabama). My friend Terry did some nice videos of our jumps, and I post one of them below the fold!
Grounded!
Well, I'm back from my skydiving adventure at the Memorial Day Boogie at Emerald Coast Skydiving Center. Just like last year, the staff was friendly and helpful, and I managed…
Fusion man goes flying, or: How about them jetpacks, eh?
It would be quite remiss of me not to comment on the cool video of Swiss pilot Yves Rossy, aka “Fusion Man”, and his remarkable jet-powered wing. There’s a YouTube video associated with the news story which, although it’s in Swedish, is quite interesting to watch. This flight was the culmination of five years of training.
The equipment is quite impressive: with his eight-foot wings extended, he stepped out of an aircraft at 7500 feet over the Alps, turned on the jets and accelerated to 186 miles per hour. He was able to do figure-eights, loops, and climbs of up to 2600 feet. Maneuvering is achieved by altering body position, in a similar manner that a normal skydiver maneuvers.
A couple of comments in the AP article jumped out at me:
How high can you fall from?
My friend Personal Demon tipped me off to a potentially historic skydiving event that will be happening in roughly 17 days; Michel Fournier of France will attempt to break the…
Skydiving again, finally!
I finally managed to make a couple of skydives this weekend, after about a six-week hiatus. My undesired “break” from the sport was a combination of bad weather on the weekends at home and travel on the others. In celebration of getting back in the swing of things, I post a video of a jump I did about 8 years ago in upstate New York (below the fold):
Skydiving ‘Free for All’: A speedstar jump
I broke out another of my skydiving videos to post on YouTube the other day. This one, below the fold, is what is known as a “speedstar”. Most formation skydives are meticulously planned to be “slot perfect”: that is, every skydiver has a very specific place in the formation, as in the jump I blogged about previously. A speedstar, on the other hand, is all about everybody getting together as fast as they can! Nobody leaves the plane together: everyone piles out single file and then rushes to the formation. In the video below the fold, we were doing a speedstar with 10 people (a “10-way”) and we planned two points…
A major falling-out with some of my friends…
Alas, I fear I must report that I recently had a major falling-out with some of my friends. We have these sort of events all the time, but this time I managed to catch it on video, which is after the fold…