Matthew Anderson asked:




Understanding the mechanics of skydiving will help you be a better diver, and it is an interesting topic to study in any case. The most important aspects of these mechanics are acceleration and gravity. Make sure you have both of them on your side at all times!

Gravity is the easier one of the two to understand since we all deal with it every day. You can't throw a ball into the sky and expect it to stay there. Gravity throws it right back at you. So if you jump out of an airplane, you should just keep dropping towards earth like the ball does, right? Not if you equip yourself with a parachute; otherwise you would end up on the ground, and not bounce back like a ball.

We all remember the famous experiment by Sir Isaac Newton, who wondered why the apple he threw always came back to earth. This was the discovery of the principal of gravity, which is the foundation of thermodynamics. Leonardo da Vinci expanded upon this theory to explain the forces of gravity and even demonstrated that flying should be possible with the right application of thermodynamics. Thanks to both Newton and da Vinci, we have a better understanding of these concepts.

Gravity is the part of the law of attraction. A larger object will have more attracting force than a smaller one, and the earth, a very large object, has a strong force. A small skydiver in the sky has relatively no gravitational attraction compared to the earth, so he will be pulled towards it. It would be an interesting world if the earth were pulled towards other objects in the sky such as skydivers and planes. But this is the basic physical principal that rules skydiving.

The other concept that intrigued Sir Isaac Newton was how fast or slow the apple fell to the earth. This is the concept of acceleration. The longer something falls, the more the gravitational pull becomes, so that an object will fall faster and faster the longer it falls. Drop a penny from shoulder height and not much will happen to the penny. Drop it from a skyscraper, and it will become a ballistic missile that will badly injure someone on the ground, or be crushed when it lands. The reason is that it gained speed and strength as it fell further and "accelerated".

The parachute a skydiver uses has the power to slow the diver down so that he does not become the crushed penny. It does this by slowing the acceleration of the diver and allows him (hopefully) to land gently on the ground as gravity pushes him towards it.

skydiving rules

Matthew Anderson asked: Skydiving has an interesting history that can take up a whole volume, but this article will attempt to give a brief synopsis of that history. Most people consider skydiving a product of the twentieth century, but its history actually goes further back than that. The Chinese attempted parachuting in the 10th century, a thousand years before we did. Of course, there were no airplanes, so the Chinese did what we would today call base diving; that is, they jumped off outcroppings or other formations that would allow them to float from a height to the ground. And then, of course, we have the drawings of Leonardo da Vinci, who illustrated a pyramid shaped parachute on a wood frame. As an active sport, however, parachuting is much more recent. The first person to attempt to parachute was Frenchman Jacques Garnerin, who jumped from his air balloon at the end of the 18th Century and did tricks on the way down and stupefy the crowds by landing safely on the ground. In the 19th century, an intrepid woman, Kathie Paulus became famous for skydiving in Germany at the end of the 19th Century and is now famous for these feats and her demonstrated skills. Once the airplane was invented, skydiving took on a whole new form. The airplane made it possible to dive from greater heights at greater speeds, allowing for more range in the movements in the air. A woman named Tiny Broadwick became the first woman to jump from a plane (in 1913) and to dive free fall (in 1914). Skydiving was not called skydiving until the middle of the 1950s, when Ronald Young coined the phrase. It had been called parachuting prior to this and was primarily used by the military to land troops in inland locations, or for pilots to bail out of their planes when necessary. This was first done successfully in 1922, and has now become a standard for small plane pilots. Once World War I was over, parachuting became a sport, which we now call skydiving. After World War II, this form became more and more of a hobby and less and less of a military maneuver. Soldiers were now trained in parachuting and enjoyed the thrill so much they continued on for fun. From this, teams and competitions were formed. Skydiving schools started popping up in the late 1950s and now it is a recognized extreme sport enjoyed by many.

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