Head Down, Straight Towards the Ground
Today I did something that I'm really proud of, and I want to talk about it. Unfortunately, no-one reading this has ever tried to do this before, so you can't really appreciate how hard it is. Nevertheless, I'm going to try to explain what I did and why it's so difficult.
There are four generally accepted orientations for flying one's body: belly to earth, back to earth, head up or sitfly, and head down. If you consider that a human body's natural centre of gravity is somewhere around the belly button, you can see that pushing that point closest to the earth as in belly or back to earth flying, is a naturally stable freefall position. If we now try to raise that centre of gravity to the middle of the falling mass, you can see how falling in a non-flat orientation becomes more difficult. I believe that sitfly involves subtle pushes against the relative wind to keep yourself from falling off the position, but head down flying is all about body position. Even tiny changes in your body position can have drastic effects - for example, by pointing your toes you create less drag on your feet, and you will move backwards.
While I can sitfly reasonably well, I've had a terrible time learning to fly head down. Possibly this is because I've spent a lot of time flying on my belly, so I've taught myself to position my body for optimal belly flight. Some people (the bastards!) pick up head down very quickly, but I've been trying for about four YEARS to fly head down, without much success. I can point my head towards the earth no problem, but falling "down the tube" has always eluded me. What we mean by falling down the tube is straight towards the earth, like a bowling ball. It's much harder and more dangerous for other people to fly with you when you're caroming off in every direction. So today, I managed seven whole seconds of reasonably straight, head down flight! Seven seconds doesn't sound like much, but it's probably more than I've ever done before - in total.
So where do I go from here? Well, I need to be able to fly straight down consistently and for an entire skydive. After that, there's turns, movement in all directions including up & down, docking, and carving. They say that head down is difficult to learn, easy to master, but I suspect I've got enough learning to keep me busy for a long long time. But I've started!
There are four generally accepted orientations for flying one's body: belly to earth, back to earth, head up or sitfly, and head down. If you consider that a human body's natural centre of gravity is somewhere around the belly button, you can see that pushing that point closest to the earth as in belly or back to earth flying, is a naturally stable freefall position. If we now try to raise that centre of gravity to the middle of the falling mass, you can see how falling in a non-flat orientation becomes more difficult. I believe that sitfly involves subtle pushes against the relative wind to keep yourself from falling off the position, but head down flying is all about body position. Even tiny changes in your body position can have drastic effects - for example, by pointing your toes you create less drag on your feet, and you will move backwards.
While I can sitfly reasonably well, I've had a terrible time learning to fly head down. Possibly this is because I've spent a lot of time flying on my belly, so I've taught myself to position my body for optimal belly flight. Some people (the bastards!) pick up head down very quickly, but I've been trying for about four YEARS to fly head down, without much success. I can point my head towards the earth no problem, but falling "down the tube" has always eluded me. What we mean by falling down the tube is straight towards the earth, like a bowling ball. It's much harder and more dangerous for other people to fly with you when you're caroming off in every direction. So today, I managed seven whole seconds of reasonably straight, head down flight! Seven seconds doesn't sound like much, but it's probably more than I've ever done before - in total.
So where do I go from here? Well, I need to be able to fly straight down consistently and for an entire skydive. After that, there's turns, movement in all directions including up & down, docking, and carving. They say that head down is difficult to learn, easy to master, but I suspect I've got enough learning to keep me busy for a long long time. But I've started!