About 5 years ago my amazing mum and dad bought me a voucher for going to iFly the indoor skydiving centre in Basingstoke. It was amazing! Loved it and got me hooked on indoor tunnel flying. It also got Hannah enjoying the sport as well.
Unknown to us… our very good friends Mark and Helen had had a similar experience with getting a voucher and flying. When we spoke about our experiences we agreed that we should make this a “thing” and go regularly to the tunnel. So we did… we quickly burned through our 4×4 minute flights and 6×6 minute flight return vouchers and joined the Return Flyers Club.
At this point we’ve got belly flying sorted with all degrees of movement and even flying together in the tunnel with multiple people. We’d got pretty stable at back flying and getting started on transitions from back to belly and vice-versa. That’s where the big outdoors became an idea. Why not do this stuff in the sky rather than in a tunnel?
Mark had already done a “once in a lifetime” AFF level 1 jump and once in a lifetime became “I wanna do it more”. I’d done a tandem jump about 25 years ago and Hannah had done a jump as a birthday gift about 6 years ago. As we’d done so much tunnel time – we decided at some time we’d like to do our AFF. Well….. with us “at some time” tends to be “as soon as we can organise it”.
A big motivation to do this for me is that my Dad was in the parachute regiment when he was in the army. I want to be able to talk to him about a shared experience. Even more excitingly, there is a dropzone in the town my parents live in. I want to be able to go home to visit them, jump out of a plane and them be at the landing site. I think it will scare the living daylights out of my mum but will be a great conversation with my dad.
