Becoming a freefly coach

Study material for a developing coach. Nothing on this page confers a rating or any authority to assess. The approval is granted by your national federation, on the recommendation of the people who supervise you.

Most freefly coaches were coaching before they held anything that said so. They were doing one-on-ones with beginners, taking friends of friends on their first head-up jumps, and answering questions in the packing area, because somebody has to and nobody else was.

That is worth saying plainly rather than pretending otherwise. It is also the argument for going and getting the approval: the informal version happens anyway, and the approval is what puts structure and accountability around it.

Australia: the Freefly Coach approval

Australia is unusual in having a discipline-specific freefly coach approval. Most national bodies have generic instructional ratings and leave freefly to whoever is experienced.

The pathway is documented in the Australian Parachute Federation’s own material, principally its coach assessment and appointment document and the regulatory schedules. In outline it asks for:

• Substantial experience, including a senior certificate class, a meaningful descent count, and the freefly crests for the orientations you intend to coach.
• A chief instructor’s selection and recommendation. You are vetted before you are trained, which is the part people forget.
• An approved course of training.
• An assessment with a written component and a practical component.
• A probation period, then reconfirmation on a cycle with minimum recent activity.

Two features of the assessment are worth knowing in advance. It examines coaching technique in its own right, separately from regulations and separately from flying skill, which is a clear signal that the sport treats coaching as real content. And it has a section specific to freefly, on top of the general material every coach candidate sits.

The document itself is published by the federation and is the authority on all of this. Read the current version rather than any summary, including this one, and note that it is updated periodically.

What is worth doing before the course

The assessment is not something to cram. Most of it is knowledge you either use or you do not.

• Learn the regulations properly, particularly around separation, altitude requirements, group sizes and what a training descent requires. These are the questions where a wrong answer matters.
• Be able to teach, not just fly. The material in this section of the site exists for that: principles of instruction, briefing a coached jump, the debrief and reading your student.
• Know your operational procedure cold. See operational procedures for coaches.
• Coach under supervision first. Assist an existing coach, take the debrief while they take the brief, and get their feedback on your feedback. This is the single most useful preparation available and it costs nothing.
• Be honest about your own flying. A coach cannot assess a standard they cannot fly. Work out which orientations you are genuinely current in.

The competency units in this project’s tracks are also written to be used this way. They state the standard a coach is judging against, which makes them a reasonable checklist for working out where your own flying sits before you start assessing anybody else’s.

Elsewhere, briefly

The picture varies enormously, and it is worth knowing if you travel or coach visitors. There is a fuller treatment in freefly qualifications around the world.

United States. There is no freefly rating at all. The generic Coach rating exists and is genuinely a pedagogy qualification, with adult-learning content, lesson design and structured feedback, but it is not freefly-specific. Freefly guidance sits in the manual as recommendations, so in practice the standard is set by the drop zone.

United Kingdom. Coaching is a separate track from the instructor ladder. Alongside a long-standing freefly coach qualification there is now a tiered, externally accredited coaching system developed with the national coaching body, which explicitly does not teach the mechanics of any particular technique. It teaches coaching, and expects you to bring the flying.

Canada. A tiered system where the freefly-specific level is largely technical, and the actual coaching pedagogy lives in the generic lower levels, which plug into the national coaching certification programme.

The pattern across all of them: the coaching craft and the freefly technique are almost never taught in the same place. One organisation owns the pedagogy and another owns the discipline knowledge, and the coach is left to join them up. That gap is the reason this section of the site exists.

After the approval

The approval is a beginning. Two things keep it meaningful.

Currency, in the sense of actually flying what you teach, not just meeting a renewal minimum.

Somebody watching you coach. Every well-developed instructional system in aviation and in skydiving has standardisation built in, where instructors are periodically observed and recalibrated against each other. Freefly coaching mostly does not, which means you have to arrange it yourself. Ask another coach to watch a session and tell you what they would have done differently.

That request is uncomfortable and it is the fastest way to get better at this.

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Advisory, educational content, not regulatory advice. Coach approval requirements are set by your national federation, vary between countries and change over time. Always work from the current published requirements and your chief instructor’s guidance.