Salocin

140 mile-per-hour winds

The photo above is a view of the inside of the flight chamber at BodyFlight, a freefall simulator based north of London. The nutter in blue is me. The nutter in red is the instructor.

I spent 12.5 minutes in that room, and hardly touched the ground once. It's a fantastic experience that I highly recommend.

Don't do it on a full stomach.

Controlling your position when you're not touching any solid objects and you're hanging in a 140-mile-per-hour current of air is not an easy task. The professionals who practice in the tunnel and the instructors who work there make it look like it's not only easy, but the greatest thing in the world. As a newcomer to the sport, the best you can hope for is to not ridicule yourself.

I went for the "starter course", which is a collection of lessons in a day with an instructor to help you through them - this gives you first an experience of what it's like, followed by some feedback and some tuition, and then some more time to practice. The total time in the chamber is not that long (12m30s), but you do it in 1m15s intervals. I would have preferred 2 minute intervals, but no longer than that as there's a lot to take in at once, and the breaks help you assimilate what you've learned.

Bodyflying is completely counterintuitive. As soon as you lose your balance in the airflow, your body wants to do things which will only make the problem worse, so you have to subdue those unhelpful reflexes. Near the end, when I was getting tired, I was no longer able to do this, and would curl my legs up too far, thus flying quite violently backwards into the walls of the chamber, bruising my knees.

The staff and professionals show you how it's done - with complete control over their body, their flight and their position in the air, they turn the chamber into a skydiver's playground, zooming around the walls, doing backflips and corkscrews with massive smiles on their faces. It's certainly something to aspire to!

Despite the newness of the exercise, I wasn't too tired afterwards, although I think there's a muscle in my back that I very rarely use, which it quite crucial when skydiving, and which was tired at the end of the session, causing me to adopt a less-than-ideal flight position - I can just feel a little soreness there today - enough to let me know that the entire experience wasn't some strange and mysterious dream.

Posted by nlvp at June 19, 2006 08:36 PM