Team Fastrax members include John Hart, Niklas Hemlin,
Doug Park, Thomas Hughes and Steve Redinbo. Team members have a cumulative 80
years of skydiving experience and hold the highest licenses and ratings awarded
by the United States Parachute Association (USPA), including the "Professional
Exhibition Rating." Team Fastrax also carries USPA Demonstration Jump insurance
for your peace of mind.
About Formation Skydiving
Some call Formation Skydiving "belly-flying", with the earth always below, and the skies above.
Formation Skydiving is much more than this, and entails quite a long history.
In the 70's, freefall veterans experimented for a long time to hook up two
people while falling straight down. Currently, the span of Formation Skydiving begins
with a two-way
and ends with a 400-way as the official world record.
It's a social affair in the air: skydivers are holding hands and legs and
sometimes both at the same time to build all kind of different formations.
Organizers and coaches engineer the puzzle. Formation Skydiving has two
different areas: recreational formation skydiving, also known as fun jumping,
and the competitive arena, also known as RW Relative Work.
Recreational Formation Skydiving
Recreational Formation Skydivers meet on all kind of
different occasions to build formations in the sky. They are filling their
local jump planes on the weekends, as well as weekday sunset loads, to the
maximum capacity. As the number of bigger events with larger aircraft continues
to grow, they meet with skydivers from all over the country, sometimes all over
the world, to build large formations. The current world record is a 400-way
formation. Team Fastrax Outside Center Doug Park participated on this dive in
February of 2006
Competitive Formation Skydiving
Competitive Formation Skydivers sharpen their flying
skills in wind tunnels and jump camps then go out to compete. Formation
Skydiving has become a very well organized competition arena. Regional leagues
and meets are offering competitions for all performance levels each season.
Nationwide championships bring the best teams in the United States together
(such as the National Skydiving League Championships and the USPA National
Championships). The national champions of all countries in the world compete
each year at the World Cup or at the World Championships and the best teams of
the world are invited to compete at the World Air Games. Formation Skydiving is
slowly forging its way to becoming a part of the Olympic Games.
Formation Skydiving competitions are recognized by the
IOC (International Olympic Committee) and sanctioned by the
FAI (Federation Aeronautique Internationale), the IPC (International
Parachuting Committee) and by the USPA
(United States Parachute Association) in the United States. The sanctioned
competition disciplines are: 4-Way 8-Way 16-way.
Competition teams perform up to six rounds per day at
a competition. After exiting the aircraft, teams have a certain amount of time
available (4-way 35 seconds, 8-way and 16-way 50 seconds) to perform the same
pre-determined sequence of formations and maneuvers. The team with the most
accumulated points wins the round. At a competition, all teams must perform
between six and ten rounds. Each competition round has a different sequence of
formations and maneuvers. A team videographer films the performance and
delivers the footage to the judges for evaluation. The major competitions have
live broadcast of the freefall and live judging.
Twenty years ago, the world record holders in 4 way
were scoring 8 points in time, and no one would ever have believed that our
sport would have advanced to currently scoring 42 points in time. This rapid
progression is testimony that formation skydiving is truly a professional,
athletic sport with highly trained athletes, and is a skill that can be
developed and cultivated like many other professional sports in our culture.
