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Freeflying is a
skydiving Parachuting, including also skydiving, is a method of transiting from a high point in the Atmosphere of Earth, atmosphere to the surface of Earth with the aid of gravity, involving the control of speed during the descent using a parachut ...
discipline which began in the late 1980s, involving freefalling in various vertical orientations, as opposed to the traditional "belly-to-earth" orientation. The discipline is known to have originated when
Olav Zipser Olav Zipser (born 12 March 1966, Simmern, West Germany) is a Sports Emmy Award winning professional skydiver. Zipser launched the freeflying movement of the early 1990s when he began experimenting with non-traditional forms of body flight. Sinc ...
began experimenting with non-traditional forms of
bodyflight Bodyflight, or body flight, is the term in the skydiving, which means staying or moving of a body or system of bodies in the air flow. It is one of the most dynamically developing sports in the world. In the windtunnel sport parachuting and skydivi ...
. Zipser founded the FreeFly Clowns as a two-person competitive team with Mike Vail in 1992, and was joined by Omar Alhegelan (1st ever FAI Freestyle World Cup & World Champion), Charles Bryan, and Stefania Martinengo in 1994. The FreeFly Clowns are also credited with opening the first school to teach freeflying,
The First School of Modern SkyFlying The First School of Modern SkyFlying was founded in 1994 by the 'Father of FreeFly' Olav Zipser with the objective of researching, documenting, developing, teaching, training, and pushing the envelope of human flight capability, with an empha ...
. Freeflying broke into the limelight in 1996 when the SSI Pro Tour added freeflying as a three-person competitive discipline at the second televised event (with Skysurfing), part of ESPN's Destination Extreme series. 150 countries watched the FreeFly Clowns (Olav Zipser, Charles Bryan and Omar Alhegelan) as they took 1st place in all four international competitions along with other teams like, the Flyboyz (Eli Thompson, Mike Ortiz, Knut Krecker, Fritz Pfnür), Team AirTime (Tony Urugallo, Jim O'Reilly, Peter Raymond, Brian Germain), and many other pioneers of freeflying showed off their best moves. In 1996 and 1997, the SSI Pro Tour staged eight televised events in both North America and Europe with $36,000 in cash prizes awarded to freefly teams. SSI invited the 1997 Pro World Champions, the Flyboyz, to participate in the 1998 ESPN X Games as an unofficial exhibition. The resulting global television exposure attracted considerable attention to the FreeFly Clowns, the Flyboyz, and others. A once fledgling offshoot of the mainstream, freeflying now comprises fully one-half of the overall skydiving community.
Olav Zipser Olav Zipser (born 12 March 1966, Simmern, West Germany) is a Sports Emmy Award winning professional skydiver. Zipser launched the freeflying movement of the early 1990s when he began experimenting with non-traditional forms of body flight. Sinc ...
's
Space Games Space is the boundless three-dimensional extent in which objects and events have relative position and direction. In classical physics, physical space is often conceived in three linear dimensions, although modern physicists usually conside ...
used a "space ball" as a research and measuring device to provide a constant speed and direction from which individual athletes could be trained, rated, raced against each other and judged. The
Space Games Space is the boundless three-dimensional extent in which objects and events have relative position and direction. In classical physics, physical space is often conceived in three linear dimensions, although modern physicists usually conside ...
took FreeFlying to the next level from 1998. Thanks to the efforts by Arizona Freeflight llc (Omar Alhegelan & Kama Mountz) who ran test competitions & wrote and submitted the rules for futures competitions; In 2000 FreeFly was accepted as a skydiving discipline by the International Parachute Commission (IPC) and the first official FreeFly National & international Championships were held worldwide.


Explanation

Freeflying is an expansion of skydiving which includes the traditional belly-to-earth positions, but extends into vertical flight where the flyer is in an upright position (falling feet first) or in an inverted position (falling head first). These positions increase freefall speeds and make new types of formations and routines possible. A freeflyer, in order to fully understand the aerodynamic power of his/her body in freefall, needs to first learn to control all of the skydiving forms: box position (belly-to-earth, traditional skydiving position), back flying (back-to-earth), head-up flying, head-down flying, and side flying. These positions are not held for the duration of a skydive. Freeflying can, and usually does, involve constant transitions in position and speeds, with vertical and horizontal orientations. This can involve constantly flowing skydives, with all positions explored, or more static skydives where flyers are concentrating on building a large formation while flying in one of these freefly positions. Due to the increased freefall speed and potentially faster horizontal speeds, freeflying has dangers beyond that of a normal skydive. Extra care must be taken for freefall skydive groups to stay away from belly-to-earth skydivers to avoid collisions. Since most parachutes are not designed to be opened at speeds higher than that of normal belly flying, freeflyers must transition back to the "belly to earth" position and slow down their descent for several seconds before deploying their parachute. While freeflying is a younger and more extreme addition to skydiving, it is becoming a popular event in competitions and world records.


Back flying

Back flying is the ability to fly on the back in a stable and controlled fashion. This skill is critical so that when the flyer flips out of some of the more advanced positions he or she stays in control and does not endanger his- or herself or other skydivers.


Sit flying

Sit flying is called such because it looks similar to the position taken while sitting in a chair. For flying a sit, the feet are oriented toward the relative wind and 90-degree bends maintained at the knees, hips, and shoulders. To move around, the flyer redirects the airflow in the opposite direction the jumper wants to go. Newtonian mechanics then push the flyer in the desired direction. Fall rate changes (descending faster or slower) can also be made.


Head down

A person falling in the ''head down'' position has less cross-sectional area exposed to the air while falling, which results in much faster fall rates. Average speeds while flying head down are around . Due to the increased speed, every movement made can cause the skydiver to become unstable or disoriented; thus increasing the risk involved in skydiving.


Records

The world's largest vertical (head down) formation took place on Friday, 31 July 2015, when a multinational team of 164 skydivers, some traveling at speeds of over 200 mph, linked over Skydive Chicago, in
Ottawa, Illinois Ottawa is a city located at the confluence of the navigable Illinois River and Fox River in LaSalle County, Illinois, United States. The Illinois River is a conduit for river barges and connects Lake Michigan at Chicago, to the Mississippi Riv ...
, United States. This broke the previous record of 138 linked skydivers, set on Saturday, 4 August 2012, also at Skydive Chicago.
Marc Hauser Marc D. Hauser (born October 25, 1959) is an American evolutionary biologist and a researcher in primate behavior, animal cognition and human behavior and neuroscience. Hauser was a professor of psychology at Harvard University from 1998 to 2 ...
set the world record for the fastest horizontal free fall at 304 km/h in Empuriabrava, Spain, without specialized equipment, in October 2012.


See also

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Vertical formation skydiving Vertical formation skydiving (VFS) is a subcategory of formation skydiving using high-speed body positions normally associated with freeflying. Competitors build pre-selected formations in free-fall with multiple people gripping each other's limb ...
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Freestyle skydiving Freestyle skydiving is a competitive skydiving discipline where one member of a two-person team performs acrobatic manoeuvres in free fall while the other one films the performance from a close distance using a helmet-mounted camera. History The fi ...
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Freefall In Newtonian physics, free fall is any motion of a body where gravity is the only force acting upon it. In the context of general relativity, where gravitation is reduced to a space-time curvature, a body in free fall has no force acting on it ...
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Parachuting Parachuting, including also skydiving, is a method of transiting from a high point in the atmosphere to the surface of Earth with the aid of gravity, involving the control of speed during the descent using a parachute or parachutes. For ...
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Vertical wind tunnel A vertical wind tunnel (VWT) is a wind tunnel that moves air up in a vertical column. Unlike standard wind tunnels, which have test sections that are oriented horizontally, as experienced in level flight, a vertical orientation enables gra ...
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Olav Zipser Olav Zipser (born 12 March 1966, Simmern, West Germany) is a Sports Emmy Award winning professional skydiver. Zipser launched the freeflying movement of the early 1990s when he began experimenting with non-traditional forms of body flight. Sinc ...
*
The First School of Modern SkyFlying The First School of Modern SkyFlying was founded in 1994 by the 'Father of FreeFly' Olav Zipser with the objective of researching, documenting, developing, teaching, training, and pushing the envelope of human flight capability, with an empha ...
*
Space Games Space is the boundless three-dimensional extent in which objects and events have relative position and direction. In classical physics, physical space is often conceived in three linear dimensions, although modern physicists usually conside ...


References


External links

{{Commons category-inline, Freeflying Air sports Aerial maneuvers Aerobatics Parachuting History of aviation