Skydiving is one of today’s most exciting sports. Dynamic and colourful, it offers mastery of the air and the freedom to make the skies your own!

Enjoyment, exhilaration and limitless challenge are available even to the absolute beginner. And at its highest level, skydiving is an intensely competitive sport which requires finely tuned skills, intimate knowledge of the air and perfect body control.

More people than ever are discovering for themselves the pure joy that freedom of the skies can bring. The majority of skydiving is done as fun jumping. It offers not only the enjoyment of the jumps but great opportunities to meet with friends and enjoy a wide range of social activities.

There are three ways you can make a first jump:

1 Static line

A static line descent can be made after usually about 6 hours of ground training and involves the student jumper leaving the aircraft at 3500 feet. The main parachute is deployed using a device called a ‘static line’. This is a length of webbing attached to the aircraft at one end and the bag, in which the main parachute is kept, at the other, as the jumper falls away from the aircraft, the static line pulls the main parachute out and begins the deployment.

The parachute or canopy used is a modern ‘square parachute’ made of technically advanced materials and specifically designed to allow the student jumper to steer the canopy to the landing area. A radio attached to the jumper’s helmet is often used to coach the student and assist in the landing of the parachute.

This type of jump opens the way to becoming a skydiver, further training and more descents will allow the student to jump without the static line, deploying the parachute manually and achieving that all important ‘first free fall’ descent.

2 Accelerated Free Fall (AFF)

AFF is an intensive course, more expensive but allowing rapid progression in skydiving. Your first descent is from 12,000 feet accompanied by two highly specialised instructors who will guide you in freefall by way of hand signals and under canopy with radio communication. You will experience 40-45 seconds of freefall before you open your own, ram-air canopy at 5,000 feet. This is the real sport!

Your first AFF jump is part of a week’s course of 8 levels and a minimum of 10 consolidation jumps which will qualify you as a skydiver in your own right. If you know you want to take up skydiving, this is probably the quickest and most motivating method by which to do it – although of course it is not cheap.

3 Tandem

Tandem parachuting offers a quick and easy introduction to free-fall using a dual harness system.

You are securely attached to an experienced tandem instructor takes charge of vital functions such as opening the parachute and landing safely. Your preparation for the jump takes only 15 minutes. Free from responsibility, you can relax and enjoy the skydive knowing there is a qualified instructor in charge.

Weather permitting, you will exit the aircraft from around 10,000 feet, experiencing 30 seconds of freefall, which is quite a rush! At 5,000 feet, the instructor deploys a huge ram-air parachute designed for two. You can have your choice of a gentle or thrilling flight to the ground, where you should have a soft landing. Tandem parachuting allows many disabled people, subject to a satisfactory risk assessment, to experience the thrill of skydiving. Tandem jumpers who are bitten by the skydiving bug move on to either AFF or RAPS jumping.

Progression

Whichever method you choose for your first jump, there is an organised structure for you to learn about the sport and advance at a safe pace. You will be assessed by BPA instructors, they will progress you to the next stage when you are ready. The two systems are identical, only your equipment differs.

Your first freefall can be as early as your sixth jump and will usually be a five second delay. The time you spend in freefall will be gradually increased and you will start to learn body flying skills such as turns and forward movement. About 30 jumps and you can qualify as a fully fledged skydiver. From here, all the different avenues of the sport are open!

Progress

Students initially progress within the sport from beginner to complete parachutist via one of two methods, depending on how you make your first jump. Static Line Jumping takes you through a ‘Category’ system from 1 to 10 while AFF takes you through a number of levels. As you progress, you can also qualify for BPA Licences A to D (for more see What next after BPA A Licence? and Further progression).