When you land, it’s more like you’ve jumped from a small height than anywhere higher up. You fall at only a couple of miles per hour downwards. We’ve skydived solo, tandem, sitting, head down, and looked at speed records!Īfter all this craziness, our journey under canopy is much more of a controlled descent. Wondering what that looks like? Well, here’s one of those record-level jumps: The fastest ever skydive was recorded at 373.6mph (601.3km/h) by Henrik Raimer in 2016. That’s right – among various other competitions in skydiving (like landing on a target or formation skydiving), there’s championships about how fast you can fall. In this case, it’s “Dude, how fast can you fall?!” People will get competitive with just about anything. It’s because we’re entering the world of Speed Skydiving. Why is the word typically underlined? Good question. Skydiving head-down will typically increase your top-speed all the way up to 180mph. The much-increased speed also makes your margin of error much smaller, since the air force is much more powerful. This position is especially hard to keep balance, as anything out of symmetry can put you into a spin. The best position when you want to land quickly and tell everyone how awesome you are. How to really hit the throttle – head down skydiving. By becoming a dot in the sky (instead of an arch), you drop almost all air resistance and rocket downwards. Head-down skydiving is the fastest way we have of falling. Remember that image of falling like a pencil? Well, this is that technique. There’s one more level to go… Skydiving Fall Speed: Head-Down You might have guessed that’s not the fastest. Instead of being a ‘relaxed seat’, it’s more of a controlled movement.Īdopting a sitting position will increase your fall speed by around 10-20% to around 140mph. When we transition into a seated position, you need to keep that symmetry and control while in quite a contorted position. It’s the easiest way to keep a wide, symmetrical position as you fall. If you’re not symmetrical, you’ll start to spin as more air pushes against one side of you. When you’re falling, you control your movement by how the air passes around you. It’s actually quite an advanced position. Sitting in the sky not only makes you fall faster, but also makes you 2-3x cooler. This is where we get into the first change in skydiving position – sitting! Sit skydiving in action – courtesy of Australian Parachute Federation I touched on how your maximum fall speed is influenced by your mass, and the amount of you that’s in contact with the air. Thanks to these pilot chutes a tandem skydive’s fall speed is reduced to a similar terminal velocity of around 120mph. The pilot chute slows you down and aids in stability It’s worth noting that the larger your instructor, the faster you fall!įor this reason, tandem jumps involve the use of a trailing pilot chute, called a drogue chute.Īs you fall, a miniature parachute is let out to give you guys some added air resistance and stability as you fall. This doesn’t mean that the fall speed is doubled, but it’s definitely increased. When you strap two people together, you double the mass of the object falling through the sky. Remember what I said about mass and fall speed? The arch turns us into a steering wheel – a little turn of the arms is how we can control our direction.įor almost all solo skydivers falling in this position, their speed will max out around 120mph (193km/h). In almost all skydives, we’re taught to fall like this: Image courtesy of Skydive SpacelandĪrch positions are how we slow our speed.īy adopting an arch, we slow our fall speed and remain in control. Skydiving Fall Speed: Solo Skydivers, Arched With those covered, I can now tell you the speed you’ll be falling depending on your situation. Now that’s when we see a really big mass increase! Instead, the real difference is when you have a tandem skydive – two people strapped together. I don’t say this to put anyone on the heavy side on edge. Put simply, the heavier an object is, the faster it’s terminal velocity will be. The clothes you wear also affect your skydiving speed.Īlternatively, if you were to stand straight like a pencil and fall feet first, you’d massively accelerate! Since there’s so little of you punching through the air. This increases your air resistance, slowing you down. If you stretch yourself out as flat as you can – like in an arch – then more of you will be in contact with the air. The real answer is that it depends!Īt the risk of giving you math class flashbacks, here’s the equation for terminal velocity (maximum fall speed):Īs you can see, two huge factors are your mass (m) and your body position (the drag coefficient, Cd). How fast do you fall when skydiving? Very, very fast! Skydiving Speeds – Answered ScientificallyĪs skydivers, we say that ‘your terminal velocity will be 120mph’ similar to how we say a car would travel at 70mph.
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