How Skydiving Works

my mouth. I know, no, I already eight. You know, sometimes when you have a really empty stomach and you put I made one of my my good hot bone broths, icy bone broths, and then for the next thirty minutes, your stomachs just like screaming like what is that? Or it's thank you? Yeah, maybe thank you. I wish I knew my whole life. I wish I knew what my stomach was saying to me. What is your sphincter saying? You can usually tell us what you can usually tell

how your stomach is feeling based on your sphincter. Sphincter, don't lie, Oh man is that a truism or what, Yes, it is, sphincter's gonna spink yep it spinker's fine. That's then I think your stomach saying thank you. Okay, so we are moving on, Chuck, We're gonna move on. We're talking about skydiving today, and like I said, I'm surprised we hadn't done it already. Um. I met a guy who has I think he founded like one of the

Navy's um skydiving clubs. And here's a very nice man and asked if we'd ever done skydiving before, and I said I don't know, and I looked and sure enough we didn't. So here we are doing skydiving, and I think it's pretty appropriate. Well, first, have you ever skydived? I can't remember. No, I have not. And it's the kind of thing that like, I'm totally game to do. But I don't see myself making that initiative. But if someone got something together, I'd be like, yeah, trurell, I'll

jump out of a plane. I think that's how it typically happens. It's like a group and there's one like initiator and everybody's like or whatever. Yeah, but you you have not of course, no, I have I have Oh wait, I feel like we talked about this. What have you done? I went up to thirteen thousand feet and jumped out of a plane tandem. It was it was so so scary the way up. Everybody's laughing and joking and I was just quiet, and somebody looked over him. He's like, Josh,

your knuckles are pretty white. And I was like, that's super funny, right, And I was like, I don't think I even responded to that. I was too nervous. And we got up to thirteen thousand feet and I had this giant dude strapped to my back. Yeah, that's what you want. And We're kneeling together at the opening of this plane and I'm like, I'm I'm not doing this and he's like, yes, you are. And we were out of the plane and I don't remember the first couple

of seconds. I think I've talked about this before. The first couple of seconds or just my mind didn't form any memories. And then I kind of came to when we're plumbering toward the Earth and I was like, this is pretty great. Actually, that's amazing how it was just like twenty years ago or ten years ago, gosh, more than twenty years ago now they think, Yeah, I was in my early twenties, which is kind of the time you try it usually because you have very little to

live for at that point. You know. Sometimes the you know, seniors, the aged Yeah, they like to like take a challenge box off, you know, and say like I'm gonna get skydiving at seventy or whatever. Yeah, I just saw I think like a mom and her son sons seventies and the mom's nineties they went sky diving. Not what I expected you to say. Yeah they went skydiving. Wow, look good for them. So we are talking skydiving, Chuck. I strongly recommend trying it at least once. One reason why

is because it's gotten really really safe. Like I wouldn't just say, like go go base jump, Like I would never tell somebody to go base jump. That is not at all safe. But people have been skydiving and investing in like figuring out how to make it safe for so many years that it has gotten pretty safe. Yeah. I think that's a great idea. I mean, Ed has it at the end. He helped us out with this.

But we may as well not bury the lead and say that in twenty twenty one, I guess was the most recent year he could find something was ten fatalities per one hundred thousand jumps, which is point to eight deaths Now, I'm sorry, point two point two eight per one hundred thousand, not ten per one hundred thousand, right right, and already screwed it up. So less than a quarter of a person dies or just over a quarter of a person dies up for every hundred thousand jumps, which

is not bad. So yeah, and it's actually the old days, it's really good. Yeah, the old days being two thous eleven. It was at point eight one, which seems high compared to point two eight, but it's actually pretty low. Like if you go back to the sixties, you're at like eleven and we're like under one here. Now we're at just over a quarter. So it's definitely gotten a lot,

a lot safer. Yeah, And we'll talk about the multiple redundancies and backup shoots and all that stuff, and I'm sure we'll probably for the avid jumper, we'll probably get some of this slightly wrong, because we always do. But should we go back to the old days, Yes, let's because people have been like, I want to jump off a high thing, but I want to live, so how

can I do that? And the parachute is kind of a I think, even even if you're taking into account like hindsight, it's a pretty obvious low hanging fruit invention. But that doesn't mean that they knocked it out of the park immediately. There was they didn't understand exactly how to do it, but the idea of what to do

came to a lot of people over the years. Yeah, I mean, I think just even a kid jumping off of a wall with an umbrella, like, there's this weird human instinct of let me hold open a shoot like thing and jump off of something, and that seems to have certainly taken hold in France. France had a lot of early jumpers, And then we talked for sure in our Eiffel Tower episode about Franz Reichilt, who died in nineteen twelve while testing a parachute design from the Eiffel Tower.

But before that, the first documented jump period was way before that, in seventeen eighty three from an observatory in France, And it seems like the French were just always experimenting with you know, sort of the rigid like wooden framed shoots and then silk shoots, and we'll talk about silk later.

It was a pretty good early choice for the fabric, but it wasn't until the early nineteen hundreds that we look at sort of the first modern parachute right right, And this kind of gives you an idea of what skydiving is like. The origin of skydiving came from a carnival act, yeah, where a guy named Charles Broadwick whose stage name was John Murray used to go up in a hot air balloon and jump out of it the way around was it? No, neither one of them are really that stage namy. Now that I look at it,

I know exactly. It's just kind of two normal names. But I guess he did. He thought John Murray didn't have enough mustard to it or something. Yeah, So he would go up in a hot air balloon and jump out with a parachute of his own design, which apparently was good enough to keep him alive. And he was touring the US in the eighteen nineties early nineteen hundreds, and he had two different wives who were assistance with

his act, but die in these parachuting accidents. Yeah, and I don't know if that drove him to it or if it was just I could see it driving driving him to it. He really spent a lot of time refining the parachute and the whole idea of a parachute coming out of a backpack on your back. That came from Charles Broadwick slash John Murray. Yeah. Yeah, he was like, let's stop this thing in there. I'm not sure what they were doing before. Were they just kind of holding it?

I think so, yeah, kind of like base jumping. I think yeah, yeah, so they were a guess holding it. Then he put it into a backpack again. I wish I had a little more information about his wives dying, if it was like, hey, you try this, or if it was just genuine accidents. I think the first one later on people said that it was more likely suicide. Yeah, I think the first one in nineteen oh five. Okay, but anytime there's two spouses that die that, I don't know,

that little suspicion is raised. It is definitely. But or also talking about people engaging in the earliest forms of sky diving, you know, so there's a lot of risk to it, for sure, But the Milly obviously is where a lot of the early parachuting went on. Obviously, in World War One, I believe they developed the rip chord by that point, right, yeah, where you pull like a little handle and the parachute goes whoop out of the backpack. They also came up with what's called the static line.

Like if you ever see in like a warm movie, especially World War Two, those guys like clipping into a line with like a rope, that's a static line, and when that's just dropping guys right exactly, there's no this

isn't for thrills. This is for getting you behind enemy lines, right, So they deploy their parachute immediately, and the static line does that when you jump out, that line stays attached to the plane for a second, and it's also attached to your shoot so it just pulls your shoot out immediately and then falls away and then you kind of float to safety, hopefully behind enemy lines. So the static line and the rip chord were both designed by the military,

and I guess people, I'm guessing from the military. That's where people started getting like the idea of like we should just do this on weekends too. Yeah, I have a feeling that's what happened. I wouldn't be surprised if retired military were some of the first instructors privately yea, because they certainly jumped a lot, and that's the only way you could get the kind of experience back then.

But I believe sites jumped down as the very first skydiving center opened in nineteen fifty nine in the United States, that it's still up and running today, which is pretty cool. Yeah. An Orange, mass Oh, an Orange. I don't know why Massachusetts has a town named Orange. Maybe it's just like wishful thinking for orange shoes. Not Florida. I looked it up. Yeah, because Florida is actually like kind of a huge state

for skydiving over the history of the sport too. But no, Moorida's jump site is called Fall Foliage, Florida, right exactly, Red Maple Leaf, Florida. But the sixties is when it started to develop and then big time, And I'm glad you love it. Don't just get then in the seventies,

you know, I remember, and I'm sure you do. Growing up in the seventies and eighties, skydiving just seemed like not like everybody was doing it, but it just seemed like a big, hot, thrill sport, and that's where it really kind of became refined, and people started pushing the envelope and going higher and faster and doing crazier things up there. And that's when like kind of modern skydiving

really came into its own. And there were two things that happened that completely broke open skydiving from like an arcane adrenaline junkie ex military recreation to like anybody can come do this. One was they changed the design of the parachute from that round, you know example of a parachute, the old timey one where you couldn't control it, like it was keeping you from plummeting to the ground and

you should be grateful for that. That was enough. But then a person from Canada in the sixties came up with the like the ram air parachute. Their name was Domina Galbert and they were a kite designer and they said, hey, these kites, actually you could turn them into a pretty cool parachute. And so those kind of wing like wide, rectangular, rounded parachutes that you see today that those are ram Air.

We'll talk a little more about them. So that was a big one, because now you could control where you landed. And then the second thing was some dudes in the seventies, actually a couple initially Peter Chase and Gloria Maybury, who were married, decided to try what's called tandem jumping, which is what I did, where a more experienced person is strapped to a novice and you jump out together, and the experienced person is the one who like pulls the

rip cord and guides the whole thing. You're just basically along for the ride. And now, all of a sudden chuck, it went from having to have tons of experience, possibly a military background too, I'm going to show up, do an hour long course and jump out of a plane an hour later after I get there. And that's suddenly people who are just complete amateurs who are curious could show up in skydive. And that's really where the whole thing blew open. In the seventies. Yeah, and that's I mean,

I have a feeling of skydiving. We're still at the point where even if you needed one day of training to come back the next day, the rate of people trying this out would just plummet plummet. Probably not the best words to use. But the fact that they made it to where you can go you don't have to know anything, and you can go out that same afternoon and jump out of a plane. That's what really kind

of entice people, I think, to try it out. And then, of course, like you said, just the fact that you're you know, they show you how to use the gear, and they walk you through that quicklike lesson, which I imagine is just like let me handle anything. I'll walk you through it all. When we come to the ground.

That's really the only other time where you need to worry about stuff, which is you know what, like pull up your feet so you don't break your legs, yes, and I'll land for you and you'll kind of sit on your butt, yeah, like you're strapped to the front of the instructor like a baby, but not facing them. They'd just be weird. You're both facing the same direction. That's the romantic style. But you know they're they'll they'll

also going to be explaining kind of. It's not like they just say here's what you do and just shut up, like they're gonna say, listen, we're gonna be flying. It's you know, ten to fifteen thousand feet and we'll be going one hundred ish miles an hour when you jump out. So all this stuff is just to sort of give you the lay of the land, and it's I don't think it necessarily helps you with your jump, but it just you know, you know what's going on, you know

how high you are, you now fast you're going. Did they even bring up terminal velocity? I don't know, but this is what I proposed, I say, I don't remember if they did or not, probably, but I say, we take a break and pretend that it's the night before your first jump, and then the sleep is the ad break, and then when we come back, it's like waking up and going to the airfield to participate in your first guy dive. Ever, how about that? That's super exciting. Okay,

good morning, Chuck. It's time. It's time for your first sky dive. So what are we gonna do. Well, we're gonna do all the things we talked about in the first segment, and then I'm going to jump out of a plane, but your mind structure, so you're gonna be strapped in my back right and this plane, by the way, is going to be typically a prop plane. Yeah, you're not. We're not jumping out of a gin or we know it'd be such a bad idea. So you're jumping out

of a prop plane for a couple of reasons. One, they're easy on the gas, and if you're flying people up to skydive, you want to be economical with your gas. And then they have a low stall speed, meaning they can go to really slow speeds without their engine stalling out, which is a problem. Although if you're ever going to be on a plane that goes down, that's the plane that you want to be on that's going down because you're strapped to somebody with a giant parachute on their back.

But for the most part, when you're jumping out, you're jumping out about one hundred miles an hour out of probably a Beechcraft king Air with maybe fourteen other people, and you're gonna be up there between ten thousand to fourteen thousand feet. Like I said, I jumped out at thirteen thousand and it seemed perfecto. And when you jump out, Chuck, get ready to rumble. Yeah, you're you know, a terminal velocity is what I mentioned before the break, and that

doesn't have anything to do with death. They picked a very terrible word there to name it. But one hundred and twenty miles an hour. And we'll talk more about terminal velocity kind of throughout, but that is, you know, regular human jumping out of a plane with their arms and legs out, belly down, just sort of standard skydiving. You can we've all seen James Bond movies and stuff where they and well, terminal velocity I think was the name of the movie with Charlie Sheen, right, I think

I saw that in the theater. Yeah, And it's the coolest thing when you're a young kid and you see someone tuck their arms in and put their head down and all of a sudden they're flying through the air faster than one hundred and twenty miles an hour. You can learn how to do that stuff with training, but typically one hundred and twenty is what you get up to.

Although when you out of a plane, you're going one hundred miles an hour horizontally, so there's a period of time where you're I guess following diagonally until you reach the point where you're just following vertically. Right. They should have a name for that. They do. It's called going over the hill. No, I mean like a name like

terminal velocity, like, oh there something zone. I'm gonna call it the diagonal okay, the diagonal zone, but more follows an arc because when you jump out of the plane, remember the plane's going one hundred miles an hour. You were in the plane. Even though you just left the plane, you're still going roughly one hundred miles an hour in the same direction of the plane. But you slow down so quickly that it's not like you're keeping up with

the plane even for a second. So you fall away, but you're still kind of you've got like that horizontal motion before you hit that arc and you start to fall downward. And the whole reason there's such a thing as terminal velocity is because of friction from the air. And if you and a bowling ball jumped out of the plane at the same time in a vacuum, you would fall to the earth at the same rate. But because of air friction, um you fall at different rates.

And like you said, it's about one hundred and twenty miles an hour, and when you reach terminal velocity, you're still going really really fast, about one hundred and twenty miles an hour, but you're not speeding up any longer. That's that's the difference. You're not accelerating any longer. And that would be pretty cool. It would be pretty cool. And you can actually do that when you become a

skilled skydiver. You can hit terminal velocity and then like go from say belly to like you said, a forty five degree angle and start free falling again. Like you can. You can stop and start your freefall just by moving your body and changing the amount of friction that you're providing the air that you're plummeting through. Yeah, when you get down there, and this is something I kind of never knew the exact numbers on, but you know that when that shoot opens, it looks like a pretty violent

reaction when it jerks you up. Um, it's gonna slow you down very very quickly. Yes, to the point where you're going to be feeling about two point seven five g's of your body. I think ED said you're decelerating by about thirty meters per second per secondly, Yeah, that's what I said. No, I think it's per second per second, oh,

per second per second. Yeah. Prosecco, prosecco, what is per second per second even mean, that's what I'm saying, Like, I don't know what it means either, but when you say it like that, it's like, wow, that must be really fast. They had to say per second twice. They're like, we couldn't even come up with a better term for that, so we're just doubling up on it. Slap another per

second on it. So that is that is a really quick slowdown, and eventually you'll get down to about I mean, when you're landing, you're in the like the fifteen to eighteen mile an hour zone. Not bad at all. I mean, especially going from one hundred and twenty miles an hour about two hundred miles an hour if you're tandem to seventeen.

That's pretty gentle comparatively speaking. And like you said, when that shoot opens, you stop, you stop accelerating downward or even hitting terminal velocity, and now you're accelerating upward even though your body's still falling downward. So that's negative acceleration, and that's what you're doing as you kind of start to slow down and hit that seventeen mile an hour thing and then land and Chuck, I know that we've

completely abandoned the whole story. But congratulations on your first skydive. You did really well. Oh boy, that was a lot easier I thought I thought it was going to be. And technically, now I think about it, you've done skydiving, it's just been indoor skydiving and you did great. Yeah, I mean we have to mention that. I think we have no way around it. We did a parachute emergency short stuff and I know for a fact we mentioned

it in that. Yeah, but if anyone's curious, Josh and I did a Toyota commercial years ago, back when people cared about us representing their brand and we used to get those calls occasionally. Yeah, and we were put in. They flew us out to LA and we shot a

mile neighborhood. It was super cool and one of the things we did was go to a wind tunnel one of those indoor jump facilities and you know, sort of explain something while we were doing that, and it's online and it was super fun and you get to see Josh take a little indoor spill, which is still makes

me laugh every time I see. I was thinking about how much they had to cut out of that commercial to preserve that spill of mine and just how badly the director and producer wanted to make sure that stayed and that was a lot of work. I'm sure to keep that in. So it was it was hard to do. It was harder than I thought it was going to do, just to stay stable, definitely, And as evidence by what happened to you, you just you got a little caddywompus and all of a sudden you just got funking to

a wall. Yeah. I don't remember anything after that. Yeah, because I guess the commercial ends, oh, you're a good sport, and of course they use that in the commercial. So let's say, Chuck that you're like, I want to do that every day of my life, for the rest of my life. You can do that. You can take on skydiving as a hobby, not making Toyota commercial skydiving as a hobby, right, that'd be great. And there's a couple of ways you can go. One's actually really hard to find.

The other one is you can find it at any place you go skydiving. There are two different types of training that are going to get you to the same place. Which is a Class A license from the United States Parachuting association. Yeah, and I a D is one instructor assisted deployment, and then AFF seems like the way more common one, which is accelerated freefall. Accelerate freefalls when an

instructor jumps out with you, but not tandem style. They're not attached to you, but they're with you kind of making sure everything goes great, but you're you're in control of everything. I still don't quite get what I a D is. Are they Is that a static line thing? Yes, So the instructor acts as the static line. They have your parachute and they are staying on the plane and when you jump out, they pull your shoote so immediately. So your first several it isn't fun. It's very deliberate.

They want to teach you like landing essentially U first, So your first jump is at like thirty five hundred feet which is really low, and then you just move yourself up and up and up, and then I think with both courses, after about six jumps, you finally make your first solo freefall jump. Okay, And that's the goal for most people if they want to really get into it, yeah, is to just be able to go to a place I imagine you have to pay them a little something, right,

you have to sign over your first born. Well, you have to pay for the plane and stuff. But even if you have all your own gear, they're still fees involved. Yes, Um, I think I calculated about thirty five hundred bucks, which from what I saw it looks pretty right to me. Um, unless they get your light fully licensed uff right, Yes, the course is about eighteen hundred, say two thousand, and then to get all the way to your license, with all the exams and all that stuff, it's about thirty

five hundred the thing. No, and equipment is expensive, as you might assume. We're talking about equipment that keeps you alive. So like your parachute might be a couple grand, three grand, helmets can get pretty expensive. An altimeter is four hundred dollars, so it starts to add up really really quickly. You can pick up a used altimeter on that crazy. I would sure, I would like if you if you get into this, A word of advice for me, do not

cheep out on your equipment, in particular your altimeter. Yeah, I would imagine. So, Um, you can go through this whole thing, and I don't know how long it takes. I actually didn't get a sense of that. But when you get your license, you're like, what do you mean license?

Is the government going to come a recipe? No, But if you show up to a skydiving place you say I want to jump, they'll say, well, we need to see your license, and if you have your a license on you, they'll say, hop aboard and you can pack your own parachute. You can do jumps. I think you can do water jumps, which seems like I don't know. I guess water jumps are probably really difficult because you can get wrapped up and sink if you're not careful. Yeah, right,

what was the um? There was some action movie where dude dejects from a plane and lands and water and like has to like it's lost consciousness and has to come to and get out of the parachute UM rigging. So I think the first top gun. I mean that's how Goose died. Right, Yes, this person survives. I keep seeing Bruce Willis, but I don't think it was Bruce Willis.

I don't know, but you were you were saying, you don't know how long you can get this class eight, how long it takes you need twenty five freefall jumps, five group dump group jumps, and some other training. So I would imagine even if you're really eager and cooking like this takes a matter of months. Yeah, that seems to get all those in. Yeah, for sure. I guess you go every day if you were really like I had to learn fast. Yeah, which I mean, that's what

I'm saying. I wonder what's the rush? Absolutely right, exactly, Well you want that rush, that's the rush. Oh that's true. Uh, the b license sounds interesting because you can do night jumps. Which it's funny ED put this together person. I think he said the night jumps was the only thing he said that interested him, right, he says it's the only thing that that um makes him kind to want to do this, right, is a night jump. But you have to do you have to invest a lot before you

get into night jumps because that's your class. Is really scary to me, it is super super scary. Um. One thing I thought was pretty cool is the USPA has um training uh and like kind of differently structured courses to help people with disabilities get their licenses too, which I thought it was pretty great. Totally. So, um, you mentioned night diving, which sounds really cool, Like you're just you're jumping out at night, and like, you know what

cities look like from an airplane. Imagine if there's nothing between you and the city but air, that must be pretty awesome, right, That's one of many things you can do. So once people started getting into skydiving in the seventies, they're like, how can this be more dangerous? How can this be more thrilling? And they came up with a

lot of different interesting things. Yeah, they're like, hey, you want to be on the evening news, why don't Why don't thirty of us get together on the first day of spraying and make big flowers in the air by doing something called formation flying. Yeah, or just let's sit around until we hit our nineties and take our seven year old sons with us. Yeah, exactly. Formation flying or relative work or belly flying a couple of other names.

That is when again, usually you see it on the evening news when people go up and they all get together to set a record or just join hands and legs into funt shapes up in the air on their way down. Imagine, it's a great group activity for the enthusiast of skydiving. Yeah, you're looking up and say, oh, it's a flower. Yeah, we do flowers last time. Gary always wants to do flowers. When can we make the

amper sin right, I'd like to see that. So the thing about floormation flying that's belly down right, you said, there's another one called free flying, where it's vertically oriented, not belly oriented, which is horizontal, and they do all crazy looking Yes, they'll also sometimes. One of the reasons they call it free flying is because they'll there won't be like a plan. A group of them will kind of hang out and just figure out together, kind of

like breakdancing but midair, except you're doing a tea party exactly. Yeah. Or they do surfing, um, like you'll surf on somebody's back, all sorts of really cool stuff, and you can also get some crazy speed as we'll see. Um. There actually is something called skysurfing where you don't use your friends back. You actually use like a snowboard. Yeah, and you connectly because it's a snowboard. You're suddenly putting out, like you know, form resistance to the air, um, and that friction can

allow you to do some pretty sweet tricks. Once you get good at skysurfing, yeah, like standing on that thing and spinning around, yeah, or doing loop to loops in the air. I don't know why that always cracks me up, but skysurfing always that was kind of fun. And it

sounds like I'm making fun of it. I'm not. It's it is cool, but I'm just trying to think of you know, the first guy that was like, they're always trying to combine their loves of the extreme things that they love, you know, like let me put a wingsuit on a motorcycle or whatever like all that. The other people on the plane were like, why do you have your surfboard? And he just watch. There's another one called tracking that I thought was pretty delightful. Now, is this

just the James Bond thing. Yes, it's it's just moving away from where you jumped out, moving away from the plane. But that happens innately, right you move, Yes, the plane moves away from you. This is you purposely, purposely moving away from the plane yourself by by positioning your body at different angles. So you're suddenly like shooting off to

the west or shooting off to the northeast. And this is like a this is a practical skill that you need to have just as a basic skydiver, but people have turned it into new feats of amazingness, like how far can you go? How fast can you get there? Seeking through the air? Sure, like their landing spot is a really far away, and so they try and go as horizontally as far as they can go, yes, to

hit a certain spot. And also if you're doing formation flying or free flying, you need to be good at tracking because you have to get away from one another before you deploy your shoots or else you're gonna end up on earth sandwich together. Yeah. And speaking of speeds, I believe the currents bead record now we said terminal was one twenty three twenty nine miles per hour. Yeah, is the current record for someone shooting through the air with a straight James Bond like body. Yeah, and kilometers

per hour. That's a mind boggling number two. I'm sure I don't quite get what cupping is. Is that just what we did? And the wentz on a like, yes, regular trying to resist the air. Yeah, you're you're well, you're making like an arch out of your body and when you do that, you kind of make yourself into a parachute and you go up right. So let's say you've got four other people and you just finished making a flower to Gary's dismay, and you all need to

get away from one another. There's different ways to get away. So Gary shoots off to the northeast. He's all mad, you shoot off to the west able your biblical friend and cups. So he goes upward all of a sudden to put some vertical distance between you two. And then Kane Abel's brother ironically right makes himself into like a missile and shoots downwards. So now there's even more vertical distance between all of you, vertical and horizontal distance. All

of that is considered tracking. That's so cane. Yeah, Cane's like here I go. I mentioned the wingsuit. That is, when you've seen the people who look like flying squirrels in the air, it is it's a wingsuit. It's a suit that has a webbing between the arm pits and between your legs, and that just creates more wind resistance, but it also creates something called a burbal in the biz, and that is the dead air behind you, sort of like when a race car has that dead or not

even a race car. You know, a big semi truck on the highway, Yeah, has as an area of dead air behind it where a car can draft for either more speed or to use less fuel or both. But that is a burbal in the parlance of skydiving, right, and apparently in the verbal like wingsuiting is is a pretty tricky thing. Obviously, it takes tons I think two hundred dies before you're allowed to put on that squirrel suit.

But the verbal makes it hard to or just a little trickier to get the shoot out properly in the verbal yes, so yeah, I wingsuits sound pretty awesome, but that's not that's well beyond my limit, I think. No, well, you just don't wanted Scott have two hundred times to get there? No, probably not, Probably, it's a lot. So remember I said, tracking is like a basic thing that people have turned into, you know, feats of amazingness. They've they've done the same thing with the actual parachuting part

called canopy flying. There's swoopers, there's gliders, there's people who um go on like an obstacle course over water, and

it's pretty cool. Apparently, when you swoop correctly, you make a sound when you come in for your landing, okay, And I've seen video of people that you can pick up some real speed if you angle your canopy your parachute the right way, and they'll go from like really really fast ten feet above the ground to like almost still with the softest landing you've ever seen, you know,

a second or two later. It's really neat. Yeah, that is cool, and that's where a lot of the accuracy skydive when we talked about, happens when you're a canopy flying and you really want to nail that bull's eye. One other thing they do that's awesome is that your canopy has straps on the top, and sometimes a bunch of people will coordinate so that each one's strapped in by their feet to the canopy below them. So it's a big chain of people skydiving, which sounds so dangerous,

but yeah, I'm sure so cool. Now the kind eye would be interested in more so than an airplane even is. And you need a B license for this, so there's no getting around doing the series of steps to get there. But the hot air balloon jump. And at first I was like, well, who cares, what's a big deal, But as we mentioned When you go out of that plane in a hundred miles an hour, you've done it. I'm

and you blacked out for the first few seconds. I imagine it's like just a big sort of violent rush of air and sound and you don't really quite know what's going on at first. But you jump out of that hot air balloon, it's dead silent. You actually experience a true freefall from the jump. Yeah, like you know, you would on an amusement park ride, right, And the silence of it and the stillness of it really is

appealing to me. Yeah, it's not until you start to really pick up speed that like the air makes a sound running past you. That's pretty cool. It does sound pretty cool for sure. So that's called no airplane skydiving or hot air balloon skydiving, which is pretty cool. There's another one that's like that, but it's up way higher. It's called space dive. And if you watch the Felix bomb Gardener two thousand and twelve jump that I was

looking back at that. So we're talking. You know, if you go up in your skydiving and it's uh, like like what I did, I did thirteen thousand feet, which is really high. You're up there so long you're freefall. So you're following about one hundred and seventy six feet per second, which means that you're in free fall from the time you jump out of the plane till the time that you you pull your rip cord or the guy strapped to your back does m forty five to

sixty seconds of that. That sounds about right. That's at thirteen thousand feet and then pulling it about five thousand. So m Felix bomb Gardner jumped out at one hundred and twenty seven thousand feet. What was his freefall? How long was that? I think it was several minutes actually, And remember he famously got into like this horrible tailspin that they're like, well this guy might be a goner.

But even more impressive than that, he entered he hit mock one point two five, which means he broke the sound barrier. He was the first person to do it without a plane, and he which is about eight hundred and forty three miles per hour. All right, I just looked it up real quick. What you don't usually do? He he was in prefall for four minutes in nineteen second man, that was crazy and then his record was broken by a guy named Alan Eustace to two years later.

I don't think that. I don't know, Yeah, I don't either. Felix bomb Gunner definitely got the press for that. Pretty cool. Yeah, he did it first. I'm sure that guys like oh man, no one, he've been batter t to my jump. Well, actually, another guy, Colonel Joe Kittinger did it first in the sixties.

It was just like a gas balloon. Yeah, he does space jump, which is I mean again, remember there was like eleven deaths per hundred thousand jumps for a regular skydiving and this guy's up and at a gas balloon one hundred thousand feet above the Earth doing it. So hats off to all those people who've ever jumped out of a balloon in space. All Right, I guess we can take a late second break here and talk about

this equipment we've been harping on. Yeah, all right, we mentioned the equipment money that you can spend and the rabbit hole to get the coolest helmets and goggles. The first thing that you want as a parachute. If you're a beginner, you're canopy. It's gonna be a little bit larger, make you go a little bit slower. Yeah, back in the day, we said they were silk because silk has a very high strength to weight ratio. And it's also and here's sort of the key, it's a very tight weave.

Because you know, you can't jump out with a gauze parachute, it's not going to do much to slow you down. So that tight weave of the silk really helped. And then they eventually moved to nylon, of course, and that nylon even usually has a coating on it to make

it even more nonporous. And we mentioned the big round early parachute compared to the shape they have today today they have and it's not only for flying cool and doing you know, having more maneuverability, but they are formed into different cells, as you will see if you look at a parachute jump in. Those cells are sort of a redundancy in themselves because if like one thing goes wrong in a part of the parachute, you still got

plenty of parachute left. Yeah. What I didn't know I ran across some research is the sides in the back of the ram air parachute are sewn up, but the front is open, so that air enters those cells and puffs them up and creates a bit of buoyancy from what I can tell, Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, it's pretty cool. So that again, that just completely changed everything when they came up with UM that type of parachute. Another parachute that really comes in handy is your reserve parachute.

So there's there's UM they've kind of updated the technology on this. Before I don't know, you probably had to be carrying a Rambo knife in your teeth when you jump so that you could cut your shoote to release your your shoot from you so you could release your reserve canopy. Now there's like just a little pull chord and the like all of your shoot that's failed falls away your initial canopy and then you can pull your

reserve shoot pretty easily from there. Some of them even have a thing where when you pull that chord and your main canopy goes away, it actually pulls your reserve shoot out like it's a static line basically, which is probably good because I'm sure you're a little bit panicked maybe when your shoot UM doesn't doesn't work when it fails, even though you know you have a reserve shoot that's got to be. You know, you're down one, You're down

to your last one. Now this is your back up. Yeah, absolutely, Um, the harness and the container is what it's. The little backpack is called that everything is packed in. Yeah, and of course you want to have someone that knows what they're doing doing that. I'm sure there are many many instructional lessons involved for you to get to the point where you can pack your own. And they say, even when you're packing your own, it's not the kind of thing where you should pack it and just like leave

it in your closet for a few years and jump again. Like, you should probably repack that thing just to make sure everything is as it should be. Yeah, your reserves SHO has to be packed by a licensed instructor and they have you have to unpack it and repack it every one hundred and eighty days to make sure that it's in good condition. So, yeah, you don't want that thing

getting that's hung up. No, that's no joke. The altimeter, I told you, that's the thing that tells you what, um, where you're at above sea level, So you know when polar ripcord usually it's three thy thirty feet and the louder. Some of them will will make a sound in your ear, in your helmet. Some of them have really big numbers. Just kind of wear like a watch on your wrist. Again, do not cheap out on your altimeter. Okay. Also, do not go to Craigslist to pick up your AAD. That's

your automatic activation device. That is the redundancy on the redundancy if you're doing if Gary flies over in mid stem formation, kicks you in the head by accident, and you're passed out up there and Gary can't get back to you, you have a device that is set to automatically pop your shoot out at a preprogrammed altitude based on how fast you're going. You really want that thing to be set up correctly. You know. Some people say

Garry didn't even really try to get back to you. Yeah, that's what I saw, and it's all on my GoPro one thing. I saw. This what the AAD is. If you go up an airplane and for some reason you don't jump out, you better remember to turn if you're a d because when the airplane hits like seven hundred feet, it's going to activate your pairs in the airplane. Yeah, that's that's no good. And then you got your jumpsuit which protects your skin, and then you've got your helmet

and goggles, which are absolutely essential. Yeah, and you put all those things together, you're ready to go skydiving. Yeah, what's the little uh? It doesn't a little mini parachute come out at first, and that pulls the main shoot. Now, Yeah, so the pilot shoote just kind of pilot shoot. Yeah, it catches enough air that it can pull your shoot out of your container, out of your deployment bag, your

d bag they call it, Yeah, they do. And then one thing that that can happen if your shoot just opened from like nothing to open like in a second, it's going to pull you up and possibly break your shoulders, do all sorts of terrible stuff to your growing, and

you don't want to do that. So they've actually created something called a slider which holds the chords together and then as the shoot opens up, it kind of slides further and further down, so it controls the opening of your shoot to make it a much more pleasant experience. And that's the one that you use for just a solo a skydiving. There's another one called a drogue shoot they use for tandem, right, and that is it's sort of like a pilot shoot, but is bigger than a

pilot shoot. Right. Yes, it's in between pilot SHOOTE and canopy. Yeah, and that is deployed, I mean kind of right afterward, right right after you job. I don't know when the drogue is deployed or not, because they could be because the rip chord is pulled by the instructor. It's not like the drogue pulls the main canopy out right. But the reason the drogue is bigger is because even though a bowling ball and a person would fall together at the same speed to Earth in a vacuum, mass does

count when you add air friction. And when you're tandem, you're presenting the same amount of surface area to the to the resistance to the air as you are if you're solo, because the person's on your back, but you've got about double or more the weight. So you do hit that terminal velocity at a higher speed of about two hundred miles an hour, and you need a bigger canopy and a larger drogue shoot to um to make

it again a pleasant experience when the canopy opens. Yeah, and you also, you know, I think people what they want is at freefall time. Yes, and I'm sure they're maybe not guaranteed, but I'm sure they're sort of promised five to a minute. Yeah, yeah, And I mean, like it's that's not to say that the floating from a parachute is. It's just a totally different experience, and you go from one to another in like almost the blink of an eye. It really does happen really fast, and

you're hollomating toward Earth. It's really really surprisingly cold up there. And then all of a sudden, you know, your shoot opens and you stop falling, and you're you're no longer belly down, your your feet are angling, and you're just kind of gliding along, floating on air. It's gotten quiet. All of a sudden, you actually feel the temperatures start to get warmer as you get closer and closer to the earth, and you just get set down. It's it's

just an amazing experience. There's nothing else like it that sounds great. I gotta try it out. I hope you do, man, let me know. If you do, I'll watch you. We would do it again, though, if I did it right. I'm not sure Youmi would let me at this point. Really, She's just like, why bother? You've done it? Yeah, she did it once too. We actually kind of are like, we did it once, we don't need to do it again. This has made me want to do it again, but again,

I probably will just stay on the ground and watch you. Okay, Well, I certainly love knowing what a life experience feels like, so maybe I'll do it. Okay, Well, while we wait for Chuck to do it, how about we do a listener mail. Let's do it quick correction by the way, And this is something that embarrassed that we forgot. But in the cave episode where what was his name that

was trapped in the cave, Floyd Collins. Yeah, I could think of a Felix bomb gardener, and we kept talking about how cold it was like for fourteen degrees or whatever. Obviously the temperature in the cave is because it's underground, is a pretty static, steady number. That is not what it's like on top of the ground. So I don't understand that because there was ice mixed in with the mud and the rock in sand cave, I don't know what to tell you, my friends, it's possible sand cave

was a little more open to the surface. I don't know. Maybe I saw it in multiple places that there was plenty of ice to contend with, all right, but I get you with you. I saw people groaned or shouted at their their phone or whatever. It's like that that was the one thing that was it That the cave supposedly has a steady temperature and we don't even know that that's true. Everybody, that's true, all right. So this is the email, and it's about another correction that boy

you certainly heard from the bitters lovers of the world. Yeah, when you said nobody wouldever just drink bitters, apparently a lot of people drink bitters, and a lot of people in Wisconsin drink bitters. Hey, guys, well, listening to the most recent episode on tomorrow, amused by your exchange about bitters being alcoholic. Chuck was amazed at bitters contained alcohol at all and was confused while I was in grocery stores and Josh explained that nobody would drink a bottle

of bitters. You said and said you put money on it. Yeah, well, Josh, it sounds like you need to do a tour of the wonderful state of Wisconsin. I could summarize this article about the longest operating tavern in Wisconsin and number one consumer of bitters in the world, but it's incredibly well written. Read this while I take an ad break. And this was from Kevin Pep Rocky and it was from Atlas Obscura, Washington Island, Wisconsin bitters shots. What's the name of this thing?

How a tiny Wisconsin island became the world's biggest consumer of bitters? Amazing? Ellis obscure rocks. They're great. And we heard from plenty of people who said that not only in Wisconsin but other places, like a shot of bitters was a thing. Yeah, not only that, there's cocktails based on angostura as the main ingredient, like an idea and a half of bitters, which is crazy. Yeah, it's not like I'm new to this whole thing either. I just had not heard that at all. I'm not going to

try it or anything like that, but I'm impressed. I hadn't heard this stuff either, So you know, we're learning to I love that, Chuck, I love it. Well, if you want to get in touch with us, like Kevin Pep Rocky, Kevin Pep Rocky, and all the people who wrote in erroneously about the cave temperature for Floyd Collins. You can send us an email send it off to stuff Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com. Stuff you Should Know

is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcast It's my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.