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Outside magazine, May 2001

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Skydiving
Slipstream Swing

Bored with the swan dive? Take a whirl with Olav Zipser.

by Martin F. Curry

DAVE MAJOR/AERIAL FOCUS

Jump masters: Freeflyers Fritz Pfnur and Summer McDowell say cheese 10,000 feet over Paris Valley, California.

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ONCE YOU'VE peeled your fingers off the fuselage, plummeting earthward at 120 miles per hour would seem to be as easy as falling off the proverbial log. Well, it's not, as any sky diver worth his or her weight in ripstop nylon will tell you. Owing to the endless earthbound rehearsals and complex logistics required to pull off precision geometric formations such as "the cat-diamond," competitive formation sky divers cope with a level of peer pressure that can quickly sap the joy out of dropping through the slipstream. "Formation sky divers yell at you if you're out of position," says Tony Uragallo, a jumpsuit maker based in Zephyrhills, Florida.

For this and other reasons, as many as 5,000 of the U.S. Parachute Association's 34,000 members now devote themselves to "freeflying," a more convivial style of falling in which participants stand at attention, flip head-down, and attempt complicated swing-dance-inspired gyrations with names like "the Spock" and "the Ferris Wheel." Suffice to say, it ain't as easy as it looks—it can take hundreds of jumps to do a perfect corkscrew head-down. But new sky divers, often excluded altogether from conventional free-fall teams (known as "formation loads"), are jumping right in. "With belly-flying, you're often left out in the cold," says Dave Starr, a sales rep with Square One Parachutes. "But with a couple of pointers in freeflying, you're actually out there entertaining yourself."

So, looking for a dance instructor? Meet Olav Zipser. He's only 35 and yet he's considered the father of freeflying. Zipser, who owns the First School of Modern Sky Flying in Pahokee, Florida, and who coined the term freeflying in 1986, is such a true believer he's taken to hosting the Space Games World Championships in Pahokee (May 23 to June 4), where human missiles from as far away as New Zealand come to bust some serious aerial moves. "With simple muscle variations," he says with the fervor of a prophet, "you can direct yourself all over the sky." I.e. there's more to life than the missionary position.