Lets Go Skydiving
Want To Go Sky Diving?
Say, what’s the closest thing you’ve done to flying?
If you’re going to talk about rollercoasters and airplanes and bungee jumping, that could never
count as an experience of flight. This experience will only come closer with the least contraptions you have to aid
your flight. And sitting inside an airplane, riding on a descending rollercoaster, bungee jumping, all these
activities can never be truly closer to simulate the experience of flight.
With sky diving, flying comes close. It is the only airborne activity where
your body is the flying instrument; therefore it IS flying in a sense. Except to go back up, anyone can do just
anything a bird can do. Travel laterally? Of course you can. Barrel rolls, somersaults, swooping dives, anyone can
glide and soar like any bird in flight. A surging interest, the tracking jump, is a sky diving where the intention
is to maximize horizontal speed while minimizing vertical speed. It really is flying but without gaining
altitude.
Flying at Terminal Velocity
How do they do that?
This is due to the fact that when a falling body reaches Terminal Velocity, it won’t be
accelerating anymore, having gained a steady momentum once the atmospheric drag (or the air resistance) and the
weight of the body becomes equal and opposite. And at terminal velocity, the falling sensation disappears, the
‘stomach in your throat’ feeling. This is where the sky diver gets familiarity with the experience. At Terminal
Velocity, it will be easier to perform feats, such as doing formations, maneuvering for directions, or just take
pictures or videos with a specially mounted camera.
That makes the establishment of experience for beginners the only cure for the ‘safety feeling’
in sky diving. Sky diving is remarkably safe; most accidents that occur are often under a fully functioning
canopies and experienced jumpers who continually go over the extremes. Visual and audible altimeters and Automatic
Activation Device Chutes more than make up the safety of sky diving. Beginner accidents are rare, and fatalities
due to malfunctioning equipment are rarer still.
It is easy to see why sky diving is a fantastic sport because it certainly has an edge to it. It
may be an adrenaline pumping sport, whose addiction can be misplaced but many sky divers jump because it is the
next thing to flying. And flying is one dream man had yet to conquer. Are you going sky diving?
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