The dangers of solo freefly

Freeflying solo has real benefits. You can focus entirely on your body position, the jump feels less rushed, and you can try new positions and put skills into practice without the pressure of messing up somebody else’s jump.

It also carries two key risks. First, you lose your reference. Nobody is falling beside you, so you can move horizontally without knowing it, into another group’s airspace.

Second, you lose the redundancy in altitude awareness a group gives you. If your audible fails on a group jump, the group still cues your breakoff: everyone turns and tracks, and you follow. If it fails on a solo, you face death. Missing breakoff head-down and taking an automatic activation device fire at that speed is probably not survivable.

This article gives you practical treatments for both risks.

Risk 1: you drift into another group’s airspace

Every group on the load falls down its own column of air, separated by the ground the aircraft covered between exits. The separation works while each group stays in its own column.

Freefly makes this risk much bigger than belly flying does. Vertical orientations fall much faster than a belly jump, and slightly off vertical you expose a massive aerodynamic surface, your belly or your back, to that much faster air, which can create enormous drive and enormous horizontal movement. The risk is unique to vertical flying: a solo freefly jump carries dangers a solo belly jump does not.

The drive is also fixed to your body. Hold one heading and it pushes the same way for the whole jump, so the drift builds without limit, toward jump run and the next group.

And you cannot see it happening. In a group, a competent freeflyer beside you, a coach at first, holds a stationary reference point: a backslide in head-up or a fore-and-aft drive in head-down shows immediately as movement against them. Solo, that reference is gone, and the sky gives you nothing to move against.

Most drop zones hold unfortunate lived memories of freefly soloists unintentionally moving up or down jump run into another group’s column.

One published account, from coach Alethia Austin, shows how it happens. A soloist exited after her tracking group, having declared a belly jump. In the air he flew a sit instead, without horizontal control, and he backslid through the whole jump, covering distance he never meant to cover. His canopy opened close to her group, on a load that had planned normal separation.

The Australian incident record logs the same pattern from the other orientation: a solo head-down drift incident appears in the 2014 record. The drift itself is silent, and the first sign is traffic. Austin’s account is one reason this curriculum briefs an expected drift direction before every solo jump.

The commonly taught answer is to turn off jump run and hold that heading for the working time. Holding any heading is a big ask of somebody learning a new and disorienting skill: early freefly work commonly tumbles, and you can see ground, sky and ground again inside a few seconds. A treatment that depends on heading discipline stops working at exactly the skill level that needs it most.

The treatment: fly a continuous slow turn

Fly your solo work in a continuous slow turn instead. Your drive is fixed to your body, so the turn points it through every direction in sequence and it adds up to roughly nothing. The turn contains your drift to about one carve-circle and keeps you in your own column. And it asks for no heading discipline: it keeps working while you wobble, fall out and recover, which is why this curriculum teaches it as the repeatable method.

Make the turn work:

• Keep it continuous. Run the turn through the whole working time. Pause it, or fly it unevenly, and you reopen the circle.
• Judge “static” by your ground track. Your path over the ground should trace a small circle or a tight cluster. A line walking off in one direction means you are driving.
• Use the ground reference carefully. The ground shows your drive and the wind’s drift combined. The whole airmass drifts downwind together, every group in it, so correct your drive and leave the wind alone. Chase the ground reference into wind and you push real drive toward the next group.

A partner reference also helps only partly, because two flyers facing the same direction can drift together. The turn treats the drift itself.

Before boarding, set your working heading 90° to jump run, brief the load on your expected drift direction, and confirm exit order and separation.

Risk 2: your audible fails and gives you no warning

In freefly you cannot lean on your visual altimeter the way a belly flyer can. A wrist altimeter is impractical to read head-up and all but impossible head-down, because of where your head and arms have to be. Head-down, you rely on your audible.

Audibles are highly reliable. They rarely fail, but when they do they fail silently: nothing alerts you during the jump, the device simply never goes off. On a group jump you would probably first learn of the failure when everyone around you turns and departs. Trained, you react instinctively, initiate your own breakoff, and only afterwards register that your audible never fired.

Solo, you can fly straight through it. Head-down you can barely see the ground, so riding down to automatic-activation height at head-down speed is a credible event, and an activation at around 750 ft at that speed will almost certainly end in death or serious injury.

The record documents it. An Australian jumper suffered multiple vertebral fractures on a distracted solo jump flown with the audible missing. In a group, somebody’s breakoff would have supplied the cue the missing device did not.

Protect yourself

• Fly two functioning audibles, set to the briefed altitudes, on every solo freefly. The curriculum treats this as mandatory best practice. In Australia the regulations require one working audible on every freefly descent; the second replaces the redundancy a group gives you.
• Use two different models where practical, or at least different battery ages, so one shared fault cannot silence both.
• Check the audibles on the climb, on a device that announces climb altitudes. The 2,000 ft climb beep when the seatbelts come off confirms the device works. The breakoff-altitude beeps heard higher on the climb confirm the right profile is loaded. A 12,000 ft beep gives a final check and the cue to start gear checks. A device that arms only in freefall gives no climb beeps; verify it by the manufacturer’s method.
• Learn each alarm’s tone cold. The documented common failure here is the flyer, and no number of devices fixes it. The record includes a flyer who mistook an alarm at around 8,000 ft for a 2,000 ft hard-deck tone and deployed immediately, with another jumper close above. More devices means more tones. Learn each one and the second device protects you; confuse them and it adds risk.
• Add altitude information you can actually get in freefly. A colour-cue visual altimeter reads at a glance head-up, and a spoken-altitude device gives you altitude with no looking at all. Head-down, treat the wrist altimeter as unreadable and plan on that basis.

One boundary on the reasoning: the lost group backstop explains why solo is more exposed. It is never a reason to lean on anybody else’s device in a group. Run and check your own audibles to the same standard on every jump.

Fly positions you can monitor alone

You are your own only reference on a solo, so the curriculum narrows solo work to positions you can monitor yourself.

Fly solo head-down in a daffy. This is the project’s argued position; no federation rule requires it. The mechanics: a shelf holds both legs behind you with nothing staged to arrest a forward drive, so a bump builds a runaway into a back angle. A straddle recovers from a disturbance through a brief uncontrolled moment that resolves into a daffy anyway, and on an unmonitored solo that moment is the cork risk.

The daffy stages your front leg as a built-in brake. And flying one known position means you always know what your body should be doing, which matters because you are your own only reference for position and drift. Before your first solo head-down jump, demonstrate daffy ability: tunnel video of a stable head-down daffy with turns, or a coach watching you hold the position and fly a slow static turn.

Fly solo head-up in a sit or the recovery position, with a turn. A stand can generate large horizontal drive that you cannot detect without a reference, so the curriculum strongly discourages standing on a solo.

End the jump without tracking

A group tracks at breakoff because its flyers need distance from each other. You have nobody to separate from, and your movement risks are already the biggest hazard on the jump, so the curriculum removes movement from your breakoff.

Cease work at your briefed altitude; for solo head-down work, 5,500 ft is standard practice, and always at least 1,000 ft above your planned deployment. Then, in either orientation: turn 90°, pause, recover to back-fly, slow down, transition to belly, and dissipate speed over at least 1,000 ft before you deploy. Save tracking for formation jumps, where it is needed and practised.

What solo practice cannot give you

Solo jumps can build position skill and altitude discipline. Two things stay out of reach.

You cannot assess your own movement reliably from the inside. The fastest you have gone always feels fast, and a drive that a partner would expose in seconds can run a whole solo jump undetected. That is why the drift protocol relies on geometry instead of feel.

And you build traffic judgement in traffic. The skills that keep you safe near other people develop on coached and group jumps, at the pace the progression sets.

The full solo protocols, with their criteria and the knowledge standard behind them, live in Freefly 100, and the pieces have their own pages: two audibles and altitude awareness, the vertical recovery position, corking and the speed differential, and exit order and separation.

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Advisory, educational content. Solo freefly rules differ by federation and drop zone: in Australia, freefly training runs under a Freefly Coach with drop-zone approval, and an audible altimeter is required on every freefly descent. Confirm the current position where you jump, and fly the coached path where one is available.