Salocin

That's not flying, that's falling with style!

I recently booked myself into AFF Level 1. That's Advanced FreeFall. It's the first of 8 lessons after which you get a license to jump out of a plane all on your own.

AFF Level 1 involves a day's training on the ground followed by a jump out of a plane with a parachute and with a couple of experts holding on to your harness for dear life (yours, not theirs) to make sure you're not sideways on or something when you deploy your parachute.

Probably also to make sure you actually do deploy your parachute.

I'm raising lots of funds for charity too - since I'm paying for it myself, the charity's getting all of the cash. It's almost £600 now and I'm still more than a month away from jumping.

Some people I would not have expected to donate have been outstandingly generous, and others whom I would have thought would have been happy to make a gesture have suddenly adopted a low profile. I suppose that was to be expected. I find myself keener to get a long list of names sponsoring me than I am to get a large amount of cash - the messages of support I've received from friends - some of whom I haven't heard from for a while - have been the best part of this. Some people who I know are not necessarily flush with cash have also been surprisingly and spontaneously generous, both financially and in terms of the messages they've written, and the gesture is incredibly warming.

In case I decide to go for the full AFF course once level 1 is out of the way, I'm putting all the chances on my side and I'm going up this weekend for freefall "training" in Bedford at a place called Bodyflight. It's a big fan powered by a massive engine in a tower, and it creates an upward draft powerful enough to fly in unassisted. I'm going to be spending 12.5 minutes in freefall over a period of 3 hours, and will hopefully pick up enough experience in that time to be able to pass AFF without needing to repeat any levels - should I choose to take the whole course. 12.5 minutes is equivalent to between 17 skydives with 45 seconds of freefall in each. That's a lot of experience in 3 hours.

I think the bodyflight experience will be helpful, but more than that, I'm going to be flying in a column of air powered by a massive fan, driven by a giant engine, in a big tower in Bedford this Sunday evening. How cool is that?

One of the websites said that we should bring laceup shoes, because if someone loses a shoe, they have to stop the engine and go get all the pieces of shoe that end up scattered all over the place. Fantastic! That's one hell of a fan...

Posted by nlvp at June 14, 2006 02:44 PM