Indoor sky-diving
I’m hovering above the ground and gently spinning, lying flat towards air that’s being blasted at 130mph. This force is suspending me 2 metres above the ground, 5 meters from my wheelchair and an entire world away from my normal life. An experienced skydiver floats beside me, he signals to a turbine operator and whoosh! The turbine speed is cranked up and we rush vertically 10 metres higher, spinning faster. This is indoor skydiving.
The question I asked myself in the lead up to this is answered. “Can I really do this if I have a spinal cord injury? Yes I can”.
This is the question we asked ourselves when we saw the post on Facebook for the All abilities program at iFly in Essendon fields. We booked and paid online before we arrived at 5:30 on a Tuesday night. It’s half an hour before the experience takes off.
Rolling into the reception we’re directed to fill out the extensive waiver and head upstairs for our briefing. This first floor has the tunnel and is where the flying happens.
We watch a group of disabled flyers from outside the vertical glass tunnel. They spin around dressed in black jumpsuits wearing those broad smiles you might get when the g-force pushes your cheeks towards your ears.
In the room there’s a handful of wheelchair users, at least one blind flyer and some pretty excited young adults. It’s terrific to see this event organised specifically for the disabled.
We’re briefed by a fast-talking 30-something guy who seemed to be the head instructor. We’re about to have 2 separate flights – one to get used to the sensation of a ‘static free- fall’, the other to get a bit more adventurous. He issues us a safety briefing, our jumpsuit and helmet. The jumpsuit is a bit tricky to pull on – with tight bands around the ankles and wrists – but with some help from the staff we manage to wrangle it up over our clothes. Turns out our instructor has done more than 3,000 jumps - from real airplanes - and more than 100 base-jumps. The crew of instructors are all very experienced sky divers and seem more like mates than work colleagues. Friends in ‘very’ high places.
By the time we’re ready for our flight, we’ve already watched a few wheelchair users take to the air. We roll up along the entryway and inch toward to the tunnel doorway. The sound of the air is dulled by earplugs and our helmets. The instructors then gently lift us from our wheelchairs up into the airstream. Legs flap around but it’s not nearly as clumsy as you might think - the force of the air ‘flattens’ our bodies out.
Lying flat, spinning and being thrust up is truly exhilarating. Once we’ve done our flights, we sit there finding the words to talk about what it feels like. We’re smiling and flicking through photos on our phones and on the iFly computer screens. These hold some pics automatically taken when we’re in the tunnel. There are a lot of big grins here right now.
We’re really happy that ifly run all abilities programs and even happier we took part. Check out their facebook page or website to try it for yourself with other disabled flyers. You’ll be glad you did.
This article originally appeared in the ‘Spire Newslink’ newsletter (published by AQA)
Written by Ryan Smith & Rocca Salcedo