I was a late starter when it came to skydiving. I began at age 37 in 1969 when several of my firefighter buddies and I were watching our 10-inch black-and-white TV in the station and saw a program about skydiving at Skylark Airport in Lake Elsinore, California. “What the heck,” we said.

I have always made a point to get a DZ safety briefing about local hazards like power lines, highways, water hazards and irritable farmers whenever going to a new place

Your appeal for us to share our [malfunction or accident] stories with a larger audience (“Gearing Up” by Executive Director Ed Scott, April Parachutist) not only resonates, it makes sense.

I don’t understand why you’re reversing the standard aviation placement of numerator and denominator, and I would urge you to adopt that standard.

Hats off to Jim Crouch’s article “A Record Low—the 2018 Fatality Summary” (April Parachutist). Crouch’s article points out the significance of the fatality index rate being at its lowest ever in our sport: one in 254,000 jumps (or 0.39 per 100,000 jumps).

“Watching My Opening”

Colored pencil

Heather Weter | B-47715
Ozark, Missouri

Facebook.com/flyingmonkeyartanddesign

With this year’s skydiving season now at the mid-point, we’ve got some great news to report on our initiative to solicit more incident reports: Many of you have responded to our plea and have begun submitting them.

Karine Joly and Greg Crozier of French freefly champion team AirWax enjoy a skydive while visiting Skydive Sebastian in Florida.

Photo by Michael Tomaselli | D-18530

Team Fastrax practices its demo skills during a training day at Skydive Sebastian in Florida.

On June 21 a Beechcraft King Air with 10 skydivers on board crashed shortly after takeoff from Dillingham Field near Waialua, Hawaii. All 11 aboard the aircraft were killed in the crash. The recent Hawaii crash was the deadliest jump plane crash since the September 1995 crash of a Beechcraft Queen Air near West Point, Virginia that killed 11 on board the aircraft and one person on the ground.

If you were to experience a pilot-chute-in-tow malfunction, how would you respond? Now ask yourself, are you confident that your response is correct?

The weather was terrible, but everyone had a blast May 10-12 at the Sisters in Skydiving Leading Ladies of Skydiving boogie at West Tennessee Skydiving in Whiteville.

The testing and soft launch of USPA’s new online rating renewal system are ending, and we’re poised to release this functionality for all members possibly as early as June 10. To facilitate online renewals, many supporting features needed to be in place, and you may have already started seeing changes on your USPA profile.

At the USPA Drop Zone Operators’ Conference this year, attendees heard from presenter Jeanice Dolan, a CPA and DZO of Ocean City Skydiving Center in Maryland, about a growing enforcement issue that is changing the landscape for DZs: worker classification. Increasingly, state and federal departments of labor are auditing businesses—including DZs—to determine whether they are correctly classifying workers as either employees or contractors. Two things are driving this government scrutiny: 1) a growing gig economy where businesses classify their workers as contractors and 2) governments’ need for tax revenues.

Brought to you by Niklas Daniel and Brianne Thompson of AXIS Flight School at Skydive Arizona in Eloy. Photos by David Cherry. Information about AXIS’ coaching and instructional services is available at axisflightschool.com.

No great adventure was ever achieved by staring at a phone. Well, unless you’re a skydiver who spotted a post on social media about a Huey-helicopter-based innhopp (a nomadic skydiving adventure where you’re not told the itinerary) in Namibia, Africa, and decided to sign up! Noted innhopp organizer Even Rokne and aerial cinematographer Tommy Papatango put together the event, which included jumps into 23 locations, overnight stays at five-star lodges and an adventure spanning 1,600-miles.

It was June 2011, and USPA excitedly announced its newest program. We had named it Sisters in Skydiving. We had no idea how the skydiving community would receive the program or whether it would succeed. But we knew one thing: We needed to do something to encourage more woman to take up and stick with the sport.