It's time to stay in the house. Or call security. Don't drink the water, don't eat the meat, don't touch that dial, get fed, get wiped, get burped, lights out, good night, look Ma, no clue. This is the tale of skydivers and toys. It's the story of toys and tools. It's the story of tools and distractions. It's the story of runaway blind consumerism and leaps of technology so loaded with bounce they leave the average observer no point from which to find a view let alone develop a reliable one.
Jumpsuit selection has turned into three hundred dollar custom fittings like Park Avenue debutantism in flames, complete with pampered indulgences and fatalism over deprivation of accouterments.
Automatic activation devices have usurped the integrity of self reliance and confidence as stealthily as a leech on a hemophiliac.
The once fabled internal clock and powers of observation have fallen on hard times, forlorn and forgotten with the advent and popularity of multiple audible altimeters.
Meanwhile canopy manufacturers traffic in newer aerodynamics and a greater fascination with their the-future-is-here designs than there are pilots to grasp the concepts.
Skydivers have simply found new ways to dress up and look the part and have lost their way around the sport of the sport. They've found new ways to have their hands held, their lives led, their days planned, their spots spotted, their canopies packed, their fashions adored, their time calibrated, calculated and coordinated, and their fears sent packing. And that's just one side. While all that cozying up to comfort and ease is going on there's a distancing from any search for knowledge and information for safety sake, for curiosity sake. As a result there's a disregard for what went before and an interesting categorization of fear. A disproportionate number of newer skydivers seems too afraid to learn to trust in the self, or not afraid enough to maintain a respectable distance from death and its cronies paralysis and brokeness. The greatest fears we know are the ones that either immobilize or the ones that blind. One sees but cannot move while the other moves without seeing.
Perhaps the yen for survival has some believing they need to outfit themselves with every device imaginable. Pity the same yen isn't enough to take on self reliance as a matter of course and to consider oneself the most reliable asset on any skydive. Is this nothing more than a cute rite of passage for the youngsters? Is this like any accepted element of risk in which there's a degree of allowing for pure luck to transport the neophyte to the graceful state of acting with knowledge? Is there a cause for a response, a counter action? Or is there nothing to be done, like it has no impact on the future of the sport? We could just let dependency run its course; nature wins anyway and Darwin has thousands of skydives.
In the long run we need perhaps to evaluate how we view the device dependent. We may need to evaluate how the death and injury of another affects the rest of us beyond any emotional slice through the heart. Maybe we need to evaluate our own sense of value for the hardness of the sport sustained by its pioneers. There's a reason five hundred jumps in a lifetime was a great feat thirty years ago. Five hundred today is realistically a beginner's well financed first Northern summer season.
There's technology and there's technique. If one has technique, technology is there to serve but it's not likely to take control, to create a dependency. And should one also possess skill and talent - and has no dependence on tools, toys or trickery, then a profound confidence must be one of the positive consequences. Such confidence lays the foundation for success, whereas renegade confidence gleaned from dependence becomes complacency and so becomes failure. In skydiving, failure can come with one hell of a sorrowful price tag.
In order to alleviate any charges of hyperbole, here are examples of real skydivers. These are not personified musings and they're not composites. These people have names and faces. Imagine, the skydiver with just over one hundred jumps who backed out of a coach jump because the battery to one of his two audible altimeters was dead. His other audible was fine. Likewise his wrist mount visual altimeter. His eyes were fine and he seemed to possess most of his faculties. And the coach had his own arsenal in fine working order to supplement the event. There was enough altitude detection equipment between the two of them to force the planet to announce its own damn self. There was the low time, infrequent skydiver who had a Cypres fire and explained it away by saying that it couldn't have been time yet because the audible hadn't signaled the pull. The experienced, sponsored four way team that waited for their sponsor provided audible altimeters to wake them up and all had their sponsor provided Cypres's fire. Or the fashion conscious darling who decided container manufacturers hadn't offered enough color options for the three ring assembly so spray painted the rings to match the main container color. It can be hoped the choice of red was in no way portentous. Or how about this DZ denizen and walking cliche. We may all recognize the one with all new gear who has yet to be released from the school. All the gear. All new. Booties in white and crisp Zero-P against a splash of newly inked log book signatures. To the cynic this is just too precious. This smoothie hasn't even figured out the level of redundancy in the gear bag. And such a retailer's delight.
Mechanical devices, we were possibly taught in skydiver kindergarten, are human-made and not to be relied upon. They are there to assist and to confirm. As sensitive to the air as we become in order to work within the strange environment we visit, skydivers must have a sensitivity to the time spent in the visit. Eyes gauge distance by knowing light changes, sky tones, space and size. That anyone would be unable to make a load because of no altimeter is ridiculous. A beginner needs the help to develop a reliable internal clock, an altimeter to support the sense of timing, but the skydiver must still respond to his or her own interpretation of the moment without having to call in a consultant. And certainly no audible was designed to be an alarm clock. Sleeping isn't in the game plan in skydiving.
Jumpsuits, stunning as they are - gorgeous things, really - are not saviors in pants suits. They really aren't the answer to myriad questions and frustrations in flight. Honestly. Would that it were that easy; solutions to human flight a simple fitting away! Fall rate. Fat boys and skinny kids flying together. In an ideal world of equality in skill that would be the end of the story on jumpsuits.
It's interesting to note gradual and isolated incidents of the cycles of evolution. The best of the best can do it in jeans and tank tops, T-shirts and shorts, thin cotton pants and no top, defying the imaginations of mortals through every touch of the air. If the ideal is pure human flight, then what a curious route it takes from being born naked, with nothing but dreams and imaginations unspoiled by any information whatsoever assuring us we can indeed fly. In the dream chase we cover our bodies in a circus assortment of jumpsuits - harlequins and peacocks - but if we pay attention, the chase could take us to fly naked. The ideal of every dream is to never have to leave the dream, so sometimes that from which we divert at one stage in experimentation becomes that to which we are ultimately driven in order to stay with the original intent. It becomes cyclical. But how far away from our course must we become diverted before we are on the return arc where to keep going away is the same as returning? In a circle, it's an inevitability. Dream or no dream, none of this changes the market in high end coveralls; fancified versions of what you can get for twenty bucks downtown. The only shameless sales point is in claiming that they're a necessity. Seriously, retailers love this.
Trace amounts of advanced knowledge are all it takes to lead the young and the empty. They can be told anything and steered in any direction. They reveal a tremendous suspension of disbelief. A devious sort could have quite an assortment of fun with naivete. Where it isn't dangerous it's humorous. It's a genuine chuckle to see someone with no knowledge or practiced skill rely solely on faith to have what luck is needed to keep going long enough to tip the luck/skill equation. Newbies often reach a level of devotion to a newly minted mentor on a hand shake and the cycle is complete once more. However, there's a variant, a deviation of course and of strain that has surfaced and is manifested in a loss of clarity. Is the ken for humans to fly easily and unencumbered, unburdened by a lack of imagination or by physics, weighted by neither cultural mendacity nor scarcity of dreams being supplanted by consumerism and a safety net paralysis? It is a false resolution found in props and disguises. The search for the soul and spirit of human flight has, sadly, mundanely, found a detour in the marketplace. And when you can be sold, you accept defined boundaries. In the pursuit of evolving flight and imagination, boundary definitions become shackles.
Skydiving's history is so short, it makes everything that took place as little as ten years ago seem like lore and legend from another era, another place. Hot shot enthusiasts who have been around as little as five years can seem to be elders, mentors, pedestal adorners. Where there is no history there is no memory and skydiving suffers this deficiency. As a result, pain and death and how to go about attaining serious levels of each are quite nearly lost on some skydivers. We have yet to master the challenge of life without suffering and so still must contend with death's inevitability and the degrees of living until we get there. Sometimes, as our memories take us farther away from our birth pains, the farther away we feel we are from anything mortal or final. For a while. There was a time when display of skill and potential was a determinant for progress. And progress often means exploring farther reaches of the envelopes. There was a time when state of the art still meant heavy risk. Today's skydivers are becoming introduced to the sport through its ubiquity. Skydiving is everywhere and in every whuffo's vocabulary. Fewer and fewer spectators expect to see rounds anymore. Many more newly arrived inductees are farther removed from the horror stories once so prevalent in skydiving legends and so have less concept of skydiving's real dangers. Because canopies can make it over greater distances more deaths occur off the drop zone and therefore out of view - they become as emotionally removed as they are physically distant.
Side by side with manufacturing a product for consumers to fly are designers advanced knowledge of aerodynamics and secrets of flight. Canopy manufacturers may or may not be skydivers and it really isn't a requisite for fascination and expertise in canopy design. The dreams and visions of the designers need have no correlation with the skill and talent available to develop and master the end results of those visions. And the end result of a dream of a flying device must be its flight. So there are test pilots. There's debate over whether canopy manufacturers should take control over who buys and flies their visions of flight. In part because they seem in a hurry to meet the demands of the skydivers who believe, in their dreams, that they are the test pilots. And as each technological advance simply finds new patents to distinguish one salable commodity from another, manufacturers may also be fearing a rush of consumer infidelity. So there may well be some validity to the debate that favors manufacturer responsibility. But that debate cannot be allowed to die there. This responsibility, as with many, must be shared. Instructors must do their best to instill a dram of conscientiousness in their students. Acknowledged mentors must accept their role with humility and guide their shadow dwellers through wise and intelligent decisions. And they must all instruct in actual handling and use of canopies. Schools and deliberate high performance instruction must be allowed to proliferate on drop zones with drop zone encouragement and impetus, not banishing high performance pilots or waiting for a canopy guru to appear from the mists. Canopy manufacturers and designers are in no way obliged to withhold their conceptualizations from realization and they are in no way obliged to keep their designs off the shelves. They're forging ahead in their own element with new and advanced solutions to flight maintenance. Being an end user does not distance a canopy pilot from responsibility. Being a canopy pilot ought to be synonymous with responsibility and responsibility should mean more than not killing anyone else. Consider that every time someone dies in skydiving the Feds want to know what the living are doing to keep that from happening again. It has yet to be fully acceptable that suicide runs free and unchallenged. Part of that responsibility must include the self analysis and reflection that teaches one his or her own capabilities and inherent talents. It must also come to the conclusion that rushing through any damn thing at all in skydiving results in less than star studded performance. At best a rushed behavior might mean not getting the jump on video. At the worst, well, check the history books for those answers because you can't ask the dead what went wrong. And the list of deaths due to inattention to detail and rushing is impressive. All things in their own time. Skydiving is in its way a natural thing. It lives and plays with natural laws. Nature has a sparky, competitive character at times and though we can toy with it, have a little fun with it, we should never just forget who goes home with the trophy when the gloves come off. All things in their own time. It's one of nature's little fancies.
Neither fashion nor fear should distract control of our fates, nor pride blind us to our limitations.
And as always,
Thanks for listening and please, come back in one piece!
Kim Emerson, S&TA