I really don't know what motivates someone to jump out of one plane and freefalls into another falling plane - then jump out of that one and skydive to the ground!
Docking in mid-air is one of the last skills a skydiver learns on the way to receiving his "A" license. I had to repeat that lesson four times before I finally got it. I've been working on it with a friend of mine who's roughly the same skill level (most definitely not an instructor) for a couple of weeks and finally succeeded.
This is a really neat trick. As for the motivation--does "because it was there" still count for anything?
Jason is talking about docking with another skydiver in freefall, obviously. That's a fundamental part of sport skydiving. Docking with a plane is not.
For anyone interested, I have some examples of freefall docking here, and you can see the original plane-chasing experiments and other nutty skydiving business on Joe Jennings' DVD "Good Stuff" at JoeJennings.com.
This is a really neat trick. As for the motivation--does "because it was there" still count for anything?
For anyone interested, I have some examples of freefall docking here, and you can see the original plane-chasing experiments and other nutty skydiving business on Joe Jennings' DVD "Good Stuff" at JoeJennings.com.