High Places

Hello Steph,
How does one learn to fly a wingsuit? I’ve never even jumped out of a plane, but it really appeals to me! I’m no newcomer to adventure…..was NPS ranger in Olympic for many years…….then worked in film industry in many areas, including animal trainer (big cats, I raised several). Now I’ve moved back to Sedona, and wonder if there is anyone around here to contact to learn this? Oh, and I had 12 dogs until recently, now only 4. I’m a pro photog, among other things.
That’s about as short as I can make it! Hope to hear something back. Thanks in advance.
Galen


Dear Galen,
The path to wingsuit flight is a full, and fun, one! The first thing you need to do is go to a drop zone and learn to skydive. Usually they want you to do a tandem jump first (where you are strapped to the front of a tandem master). Then you go through AFF, levels 1-7. In this course, you learn how to belly fly (the most basic style of free fall body control), and how to land a parachute, throughout 7 jumps.

After AFF, you need to do a few coached jumps while you jump on your own, through your first 25 skydives. At this point, you have learned to pack a parachute, airplane protocol, belly flight body control, and landing patterns. AFF and the A license can be done over the period of a week, or over a year….just depending on your time constraints and money constraints. In my opinion, it’s better to go all out and obsess out. Jumpers talk a lot about “being current.” The more you are jumping, the better you are going to feel.

Wingsuit flying is the most regulated and potentially disastrous type of skydiving. There are actual wingsuit instructors, and drop zones will not let you jump a wingsuit until you have done at least 200 non-wingsuit skydives. There are many types of skydiving: belly flying, relative work (where you join with people in the air), freeflying and tracking. Most people will encourage you to try to learn some of everything as you progress through your jumps. For myself, I started doing tracking jumps at around my 23rd skydive, and did only tracking jumps until I was ready to move into a wingsuit. Tracking is flying your body as though you are in a wingsuit, without a wingsuit on. The first time I tried it, I loved it, and since I tend to focus in on what I most love, that’s all I wanted to do….I think my brother got me to do 3 sitfly jumps with him once, and then I went right back to tracking! A little obsessive

Gradually I started to want to fly a wingsuit. I think that doing hundreds of tracking jumps is pretty good training for wingsuit flying, if a little abnormal compared to how most people go about it.

All of this preparation can take a lot of time and money. The time part isn’t such a big deal, because it’s all very fun!

When you do finally get involved with wingsuit flying, you will see there is a lot to learn, and there are a lot of potential things that can go wrong, which is why skydivers are so regulatory about the learning process. A wingsuit instructor will teach you everything–from how to connect the wingsuit to your skydiving rig, to how to exit the plane and throw your pilot chute, and what flight pattern to take.

You need to think of yourself as an airplane during the jump, and it’s good to talk with the pilot and the other jumpers and be very aware of the plane’s direction of flight. You need to be careful not to fly blindly and end up miles away from the landing area.

It’s an endless progression with flight. At first you will be working hard just to stay stable in the air, and eventually you will be flocking with several other wingsuit flyers, exiting the plane in a tight mass, and flying side by side in the air, or even flying together with your pilot friends if you are jumping from small planes.

When I started wingsuit flying, I had a friend’s old Birdman Classic, which turned out to be a stroke of luck for my learning process. The Classic is the most intuitive, small, simple suit to fly, and I’m so glad I started with that suit. After I was totally comfortable in the Classic, I upgraded to a Phoenix Fly Vampire 2, which is a very big, high performance suit, and not easy to fly. It took me about 30 jumps in the V2 before I even felt relaxed in it, and it was a very different body position from the intuitive, flat flight shape I used in the Classic. I definitely would not have wanted to be in a big suit like that at first, with so much else going on. Now, many jumps later, the V2 feels perfect. But I would advise starting with a small suit like the Phoenix Fly prodigy, or a small Birdman, when you first start flying, anticipating that you will upgrade to a more high performance suit after you are totally comfortable in the small one (able to do jumps out of helicopters, flips and barrel rolls, fly relative with people, etc.).

To me, flying like a bird, with my friends, is perhaps the most amazing experience a human being can have. The more you fly, the more natural it becomes, and it just gets better and better.

Since you live in Arizona, you are fortunate to be somewhat close to Skydive Arizona, in Eloy. It’s one of the prime dropzones in the world–they even have a campground and a bar on their grounds, so you pretty much never have to leave Maybe take a weeklong trip to Eloy, and go through your AFF…..from there, the sky’s the limit.
Blue skies!
xx Steph