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Swooping / Canopy Piloting
Canopy Piloting, also known as "Swooping", is a growing activity in the skydiving world. Many think the reason for this is that it is one of the few skydiving related events that are spectator friendly. Canopy Piloting entails the canopy pilot deploy their canopy at 5000 ft, piloting their canopy to an "execution" point over the swoop course, then turn, from 270 to 180 degrees or more, into a rotating dive dramatically increasing the canopy's speed. The canopy pilot stops the canopy's rotation on the proper course heading, while at the correct altitude allowing their body to pendulum back beneath and level with the canopy before entering the course, all while going at speeds approaching 50 mph. Pro Swooping Tour (PST) competitor Jay Moledzki was clocked at 91 mph as he entered the course during the 2005 PST Championships at Mile Hi Skydiving in Longmont, Colorado.
Professional competition courses mark the entry gates with 5 ft tall wind blades, whereas some part of the pilots body must break the imaginary line across the top of the entry gate pair, often only 20 ft apart. These types of landings are inherently more dangerous than normal landings. For competitor safety this is usually done over a "swoop pond", a shallow artificial pond that can be narrow and long, but for safety a trend to build larger square or rectangular ponds is becoming more popular. At Mile Hi Skydiving their newly installed pond was the site for the inaugural Canopy Piloting Circuit/Go Fast Canopy Pilot Challenge events in Sep 2005. It was a huge success for canopy pilots, coming in as the largest yet built at 190 ft x 370 ft.
The goal of the canopy piloting competition is to negotiate a number of different courses which challenge different performance characteristics of canopy flight and pilot skill. Speed, Distance and Accuracy are just three of the basic courses used at most competitions. Quickly evolving out of these courses is the Freestyle discipline. Freestyle typically uses a large body of water for competitors to drag through, or touch with different body parts and positions while maintaining nearly constant contact with the water. Gaining popularity both with competitors and spectators alike, freestyle puts the canopy pilot in contact with the water at high speeds, increasing their risk and chance of a violent impact, or a spectacular run over the pond, ultimately landing on solid ground on the other side.
To become a high performance canopy pilot, an interested and competent skydiver will typically have at least 1000 jumps to their credit, and start a 1-2 year training process to become skilled and experienced enough to compete at the 'standard' level. Professional levels take 2-4 years of dedicated training, where some competitors have 10,000+ jumps.
As canopy design puts us more on the edge I suggest that everybody should attend some sort of advanced canopy skills course before moving to a performance canopy and especially performance landings.Many of us know little about our canopies beyond flying a pattern and finishing with the flare we were taught on our first jump course .In my case there is so much I didn't and still don't know. When I'm not working with the Freefall University I spend my time jumping from 5000ft playing with the canopy. How does it react to a turn, how does it recover, how to turn with the minimum of height loss etc. I have taken a step back to learn the fundamentals of performance landings and for me am happy that the distance will come in the future. I have also examined our student programme and begun to integrate some of the basic drills into our consolidation jump programme.
External Links
Welcome to Swooping.net
You would think that skydiving would be extreme enough on its own - but you're wrong. Many people have felt the need to think up a sport that's even more extreme than regular skydiving. The result is called "swooping". Essentially, swoopers start out with a regular sky-dive, but go a bit faster than they would ordinarily. The result is somewhat spectacular, and needs to be timed just right. The point of swooping, after all, is not just to parachute down from a plane and make a good landing. Instead, you want to swoop over the ground gracefully. Often, this is done over a lake or other body of water. For this reason, the sport of swooping is also sometimes called pond swooping. When pond swooping, the point is to attempt to drag one or both feet in the water for as long as is possible without landing entirely. However, in places that do not have large bodies of water, this is not the way that swooping is done. Instead, people attempt to swoop over the land. In some places, skydivers swoop over corn fields, and drag their feet in the corn, instead of in water. The two things that most people who are into swooping try for is a higher speed when they near the ground, and going further in their swoops. However, one thing that all people who swoop have in common is a lot of experience skydiving.
Freefall University - Swooping
A large proportion of injuries in Skydiving happen under perfectly good canopies. For one reason or another people perform a turn (and hence a dive) too close to the ground. Many people are trying to perform swoop landings without the needed " survival " skills. David Cowman talks of his experience on his first advanced canopy piloting course. With over 2000 jumps going into his course , he felt he had mastered his art ..how wrong he was. This article was published in the British Parachute Associations Journal which is distributed to all British Skydivers in July 2004.