We look at tandem jumping in this installment of our go skydiving guide.

One of the commonest ways for beginners to enter skydiving is tandem jumping. This involves a novice and an instructor being attached by a harness before exiting the plane and descending together.

The two parachutists remain attached until after the landing and the instructor is in complete control of the jump, the free fall and the canopy release. He or she pilots the paired skydivers both horizontally and vertically through the entire jump, so the novice can just enjoy the skydiving experience.

Tandem jumping allows a novice to be initiated into skydiving with a minimum of training, risk, and anxiety. Many beginners use this as a stepping stone to static line or accelerated freefall skydiving, and ultimately to solo jumping. Tandem jumping also tends to be the cheapest option as a novice requires very little pre-jump instruction and need neither purchase nor hire equipment.

Whereas other jump programs require several hours of ground instruction, tandem jumping can be participated in on your first day. There’s still often some amount of training on the ground required for tandem jumping though, since there’s a certain amount of cooperation needed to exit the plane safely and descend properly, but this will normally take just a few hours.

Within a few seconds of the two jumpers exiting the plane, the instructor will release the drogue – a small pilot chute. This helps slow the descent to the normal free fall speed of roughly 120 mph (193 kph). Without the drogue, the combined weight of the student and the instructor would result in a descent speed of about 200 mph (321 kph), a speed that no novice jumper should experience.

At about 3000 feet (914m) above ground level, the instructor will pull a cord, releasing the main parachute canopy. Once the chute is fully deployed, the rate of descent will slow down and will be about 10 mph (16 kph) when the tandem jumpers land.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 14th, 2009 at 7:10 pm and is filed under qualifing Sports. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.