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.

Remember when President Harry S. Truman announced over the family radio that there was a growing threat on the Korean Peninsula? Me neither. But U.S. Army recruit Lewis Barton Sanborn must have been paying close attention, as he was going Airborne and was about to make his first jump. On April 18, 1949, he made that jump—a static-line from 1,200 feet—over Fort Benning, Georgia. That was a long, long time ago.

John LeBlanc, vice president at Performance Designs, loves “flying everything that can be flown.” He’s been doing just that for more than 40 years (since age 16, as a matter of fact), and he’s been designing parachutes for 35 of them. Over the course of those years of intense testing, LeBlanc has unsurprisingly suffered more than his share of openings that were slappers.

Photo by Jeff Donohue | C-36419

From top, Kyle Lobpries, Scott Callantine and Wess Sandler fly their wingsuits during the FYRE Boogie in Grand Bahama Island, Bahamas.

Tom Baker and Cameron McMahan perform a dynamic angle jump at Skydive Paraclete XP in Raeford, North Carolina.

Richard Garrett (top) and Kendall Sage of the Silver Wings Parachute Team fly a 2-stack at Skydive Atlanta.

Travis Mickle swoops the pond on his way to taking the overall bronze medal at Florida Canopy Piloting Association Meet 2 at Skydive City Zephyrhills in Florida.

Density altitude, to put it blandly, is pressure altitude corrected for non-standard temperature. What that means in English is that the air is the equivalent density (thickness) that you would find at x-thousand feet on an average day. So, if you are at a sea-level DZ with a density altitude of 4,000 feet, it will feel as if you are actually at an elevation of 4,000 feet.

The USPA incident reporting system has been due for a significant overhaul for some time now, and it is getting one. USPA members reported 4,277 reserve rides and 2,147 injuries that required medical care in 2018, but USPA received only 29 incident reports. Sit back for a moment and imagine the lessons lost to the skydiving community when all it would have taken is for each of those jumpers to have spent 10 minutes filling out a short report.

Local, state and federal agencies exercise minimal control and supervision over skydiving, recognizing that those most capable of regulating skydiving are those who do it. At the very core of this system is the USPA Safety and Training Advisor, an unpaid volunteer appointed by the USPA Regional Director serving that drop zone.