how to become a solo skydiver

Here we take 5 with Skydive Jurien Bay owner, Christine Sparrow, to discuss how someone can become a solo skydiver and learn to skydive in Perth.

Interviewer: Now, for someone that hasn’t skydived before, what does it take to learn to skydive?

Christine: Well, we have an Accelerated Freefall course (AFF course) which normally takes between 3 and 5 days to do 10 jumps over the course of that time. It starts off with a Tandem Skydive where we really tend to concentrate on learning to fly your parachute safely and accurately and that’s like a dress rehearsal for your first solo skydive as well. But even in your first solo skydive isn’t really solo in that you have two instructors that hold onto you in free fall all the time and they’re making sure that you stay stable and height aware and that your parachute is deployed at the correct altitude. And then you’re flying your own parachute from that point. The instructors have a radio that they can talk to the student on to help direct them down under the parachute.

Before you come to do the solo skydive course we have quite an extensive online training course as well so it’s all nice and stuck into your brain about all the things you’ve got to do and once you’ve done that first solo skydive. After that first jump we have the rest of the course and the whole AFF course is ten jumps. Early in the course we do a couple jumps with two instructors holding onto you and we slowly start to release you in free fall ’til you’re actually free falling solo.

You go down to one instructor after a couple of jumps and after about six solo jumps with instructors you’re allowed to do jumps completely solo without an instructor with you at all. And you go through until stage 9 which is actually your graduation jump and it’s a lower altitude jump where you just jump out of the plane at a lower altitude (5000 feet) and deploy your parachute and land and there’s lots of celebrations after that. And that really is the start of a big learning curve because we really never stop learning in skydiving. There’s so many disciplines and so many new things to be doing all the time.

We prefer to do the solo skydive course intensively so that you can do three or four jumps a day when you come and learn to skydive with us. So again, it’s all fresh in your mind you haven’t got to retrain and you get through the stages much easier and feel a lot more confident as well. Doing the AFF course as quickly as possible is the best way to do it.. so 3 or 4 jumps a day is perfect.

Interviewer: what sort of people learn to skydive?

For us here lots of FIFO workers like to do our course because we do it very quickly which fits in with their rosters. That said, you get all walks of life learning to skydive ranging from doctors to cleaners and everything in between – it really is a diverse mix of people and that’s one of the reasons the sport is so great.

But really anyone can learn to skydive. We are really focusing on girls this year (2016) and last year we had a massive percentage of girls coming through because it does tend to be a bit male-dominated and we don’t want it to be a football club here so we really focus on giving lots of TLC and lots of encouragement to girls. Most people tend to be 20s or 30s but we teach people right through 40s, 50s. One of our female students recently wrote an article about her experience learning to skydive – click here to read it.

Ready to get your skydive ticket?

Go to our “Learn to skydive” page to learn more and book your solo skydive course. You won’t regret it!