Dan's Skydiving Page

I have 539 jumps at the moment. My D license claims to be a "master" license, but the requirements are sadly out of date. What used to make a master skydiver 20 years ago will barely get you in the door, today.
About 250 of my jumps are Canopy Relative Work (CRW), where we build formations with the open canopies. I jump with the Diamond Quest gang. This picture shows the basic formation of offset CRW, called the diamond. I thought this was the coolest thing I'd ever seen when I started jumping, and I still feel that way. The picture here doesn't happen to include me, but this one does.  [Picture of CRW diamond formation]
 
  This is me. We are doing a maneuver called a starburst, where everyone drops grips on the formation at the same time and flies away from the middle in a careful pattern so that we don't hit each other. Follow the link to see the full pattern. I'm in the upper row of two, on the right. 
 
  Before we dropped grips, the formation looked something like this. 
These lovely CRW images are all taken by and courtesy of Chuck Smith.

[Couple of paragraphs deleted, where Dan had links to pages that no longer exist.]

I've got about 100 freestyle jumps, if you use a fairly generous definition. It's a form of skydiving something like floor gymnastics minus the floor. Without the fear of cracking one's head open on the ground, and with the airstream to help maneuver, even a big lug like me can learn to do more flips and cool moves than I would ever have thought possible. The folks who are really good at it, like Tamara Koyn and Dale Stuart, are amazingly beautiful to watch. With CRW taking over my life lately, I'm not doing a lot of freestyle, but it still interests me greatly.

The rest of my jumps are just your average skydiving training, freefall relative work fun jumps, and the occasional oddball Elvis demo. But any way you look at it, skydiving is an important part of my life.

As far as equipment is concerned, I have two rigs: one for CRW and one for freefall. The CRW rig is a Dolphin D5 with a Prodigy 225 main and a Fury 220 reserve. (The numbers are the area of the canopy in square feet.) My freefall rig is a Javelin J4 with a Raven III main and Raven II reserve. The CRW rig has a pullout deployment system, and the freefall rig has a throwout. As far as I'm concerned, 7 is a fine number of cells for a parachute to have.

Back to the Dan Briggs homepage.

This page is maintained by Kathy Hedges.