The sky is a great place to hone your problem solving skills
Life in the Sky
Much of my life has been spent in the sky. I have accumulated over 700 skydives while teaching basic free fall and competing professionally for the US Air Force. I have accumulated almost 2,000 hours flying the C-17 and various other aircraft. I have flown in combat and was a certified instructor pilot. I have flown as a flight test engineer in the T-38 and the F-16. I have flown wingsuits, gliders, and even flown in and jumped out of a hot air balloon. I have 40 BASE jumps, and counting, and have experienced a number of life-threatening situations in the sky. I have found that the sky teaches you lessons that you can’t learn anywhere else.
Skydiving
As a member of the Air Force Parachute Team, Wings of Blue (PTWOB), I accumulated over 600 skydives (with a couple hundred additional jumps I did on the side). I am still a current, USPA licensed skydiver. The main objective of the Air Force Parachute Team is to instruct Airmanship-490, the Air Force Academy’s premier free fall skydiving course. During my 3 years as a team member and instructor, I sent thousands of trainees out of the airplane for their first, unassisted free fall skydives. I awarded just as many free fall jump wings (for competing 5 successful jumps). In addition to instructing AM490, I was on the Air Force competition skydiving team. I was on the four-way relative work skydiving team named Air Force Euphoria (though our chosen name that never got approved was Air Force 8-Ball -we still have this name tattooed next to our PTWOB patch…).
As a member of AF 8-Ball, I got to compete in collegiate nationals and USPA nationals. We trained our absolute butts off, and in the 2013-2014 season we took home the bronze medal in the advanced category at USPA nationals (the best an Air Force 4-way team has ever done, to this day). We were the first AF 4-way team that trained hard enough over two years to compete in the advanced category, as opposed to the intermediate category. The teams that took home silver and gold in that category that year each had over 10 years of experience competing together. We were definitely the underdogs. At collegiate nationals that year, we swept the 4-way competition and won gold by a long shot, and set a collegiate world record for the most points ever scored in a single dive -a record that still holds, today.
I skydive for personal reasons, too. Once I graduated from the Academy and left the Parachute Team in 2014, I kept skydiving. I enjoy flying wingsuits and tracking suits. I use skydiving to keep my skills sharp for BASE jumping, too. Sometimes I even compete for fun! I recently won bronze in the expert category during a canopy accuracy competition in Texas.
BASE Jumping
I started BASE jumping in 2014 when I graduated from the Air Force Academy. BASE jumping is a very dangerous sport and requires special approval from the military. The activity is unregulated (there is no regulating agency like USPA for skydiving). Most skydivers, in fact, think BASE jumping is crazy, and say they would never do it. It requires different gear and different skills. A base rig has no reserve parachute, no AAD and has a much, much smaller margin for error. Jumping from lower altitudes is actually much more dangerous than jumping from higher altitudes. You have less time to deploy your parachute, deal with issues and react to the surrounding environment. You are also often near objects that could harm you, like a cliff or a building, instead of being in the open sky like you are during a skydive.
I take BASE jumping safety very seriously. Even still, accidents can happen. I will eventually discuss one of my personal BASE jumping accidents in the blog.
Flying Aircraft
The C-17 is my baby. I got to fly her all around the world. The nickname for the C-17 is the moose, because the sound it makes while being fueled sounds like a moose call. I also think it kind of looks like a moose when viewed from the front, because of the high wing root and the winglets.
I was fortunate enough to upgrade all the way to instructor pilot while flying the C-17. I got to land on dirt strips, evade missiles, airdrop paratroopers and equipment and fly some missions I still can’t talk about. You can check out the blog to find out more about some of the incredible experiences I had as a moose driver.
Flight Test Engineering
I was selected to take the Air Force Academy’s undergraduate flight test engineering course during my senior year. It was a 4-credit hour class that consisted of 50% classroom time and 50% time flying in aircraft at the airfield as an FTE.
For the class capstone, we spent a week at Air Force Test Pilot School at Edwards AFB, collecting flight test data in the T-38 and other aircraft. I, personally, got to test the stall characteristics of the F-16 as well. It was an incredibly rewarding experience, and I gained a ton of knowledge about flight testing and technical report writing.
Wingsuits, Gliders, Other
Wingsuit skydiving is one of my favorite types of skydiving. To me, it is flight in its purest form. I feel the same way about flying gliders. I have gotten to do a little bit of glider flying, including on the north shore of Oahu. I hope to get a glider type rating added to my pilot’s license.
Tracking, like wingsuiting, is the art of flattening your body in free fall and leaning forward to create an angle of attack and achieve forward drive. This is a difficult skill to perfect. It is a crucial skill in formation skydiving and big wall BASE jumping, as well.
“Other” encompasses any other way to explore the sky. I have flown in and jumped out of hot air balloons. I have launched small payloads in home made rockets. I have climbed into the atmosphere by way of Mount Everest (only to base camp). There are so many ways to explore the sky. One might say the sky is the limit…