It is all about the exit! That’s a phrase you’ll often hear in the world of competitive formation skydiving. A good, clean exit means a team can start turning its points quickly, and a bad exit can easily eat up more than 25 percent of even the best team’s working time. In all FS, but particularly in 16-way, the time elapsed to the first point is one of the best indicators of how a team will fare in competition. Getting 17 people (the performers plus the camera flyer) off of the airplane quickly and in as orderly a way as possible is no simple (or comfortable) task, and teams who are serious about 16-way put an incredible level of effort into making sure they have the best possible exit by the time Nationals rolls around. Consequently, the volume of tribal knowledge on how to get the best possible 17-person exit from the side-door of a Twin Otter—usually the aircraft of choice at Nationals—has grown over the years.

This year, that tribal knowledge didn’t assist the 16-way teams much, since—for the first time in the competition’s history—tailgate-door CASAs provided the lift power for 16- and 10-way FS. This posed a training challenge, since Nationals host Skydive Paraclete XP is the only DZ in the U.S. that regularly uses CASAs. Thus, a 16-way team that wanted to effectively train for the event needed to either travel to Paraclete or lease a CASA from Paraclete for use at its home drop zone.

Texas team Deguello, a perennial 16-way team at Nationals, simply decided not to train for its appearance this year. Dallas Disturbance—a diehard 16-way team from Skydive Spaceland­–Dallas in Whitewright, Texas—took a creative approach.  It altered its training schedule and held three three-day training camps at Skydive Arizona in Eloy using its Skyvans. As tailgate aircraft, Skyvans are in many ways similar to CASAs, but they are not a perfect analog and the number of people who can exit together is not the same. However, over the course of the camps, Disturbance developed a pretty good approximation of a CASA exit. For the fourth and final camp, Spaceland DZO Steve Boyd brought in one of Paraclete’s CASAs. Thus, the team was able to dial in its exit and feel comfortable and confident going into Nationals, where it earned the silver medal in 16-way.

Zach Lewis | D-21616
Carrollton, Texas