The dangers of solo freefly

Freeflying on your own has benefits. You can put all your attention on your body position, the jump feels less rushed, and you can try new positions without the pressure of spoiling somebody else’s jump.

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

Second, you lose the altitude backup 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 your only audible fails on a jump on your own, nothing else tells you to break off. An AAD fire at head-down speed is a last resort, and the opening may not hold. That is why you wear two.

Risk 1: you drift into another group’s airspace

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

Vertical positions fall much faster than belly. Slightly off vertical, you present a large surface, your belly or your back, to that faster air, and it can drive you a long way sideways. A belly jump on your own carries far less of this risk.

The drive is fixed to your body. Hold one heading and it pushes the same way for the whole jump, so the drift keeps building along jump run toward the next group.

You can’t see it happening either. In a group, an experienced freeflyer beside you (at first, your coach) is your fixed reference, and a backslide or a head-down drive shows straight away as movement against them. On your own, the open sky gives you nothing to measure against.

Many drop zones have seen a freeflyer on their own drift along jump run into another group’s column. Coach Alethia Austin has written about one case. A jumper exited after her tracking group, having declared a belly jump. In the air he flew a sit instead, with no control of his horizontal movement, and backslid for the whole jump. His canopy opened close to her group, on a load that had planned normal separation.

The Australian incident record has a head-down drift on a jump flown alone in 2014. You can’t feel the drift, and the first sign is traffic. That is why The Freefly Project briefs an expected drift direction before every jump on your own.

The usual advice is to turn off jump run and hold that heading for the working time. That is hard while you’re learning. Early freefly work often tumbles, and you can see ground, sky and ground again in a few seconds, so holding a heading fails at the skill level where you need it most.

Fly a continuous slow turn

Fly your work in a continuous slow turn. Your drive is fixed to your body, so the turn points it through every direction and the pushes roughly cancel out. Your drift stays within about one carve-circle, inside your own column.

The turn needs no heading control, so it keeps working while you wobble, become unstable and recover to back-fly.

To make the turn work:

• Keep it going for the whole working time. If you pause it or fly it unevenly, the circle opens up.
• Watch your ground track. It should trace a small circle or a tight cluster. A line walking off in one direction means you are driving.
• Read the ground reference with care. It shows your drive and the wind drift together. The whole airmass drifts downwind with every group in it, so correct your own drive and leave the wind alone. If you chase the ground reference into wind, you add drive toward the next group.

A partner helps only partly, because two flyers facing the same way can drift together.

Before you board, set your working heading 90° to jump run, tell the load which way you expect to drift, and confirm exit order and separation.

Risk 2: your audible fails without warning

A wrist altimeter is hard to read head-up and close to impossible head-down, because of where your head and arms are. In freefly, and head-down especially, you rely on your audible.

Audibles are very reliable, but when one fails it fails silently. On a group jump you would probably first notice when everyone around you turns and tracks away. You follow, and only later realise your audible never fired.

On your own you can fly straight through breakoff. Head-down you can barely see the ground, so you can ride down to AAD height at head-down speed. An AAD activation at around 750 ft at that speed is likely to cause death or serious injury.

The Australian record has one case. A jumper suffered multiple vertebral fractures on a distracted jump flown alone, with the audible missing. In a group, somebody else’s breakoff would have given the cue the missing device could not.

Protect yourself

• Fly two working audibles, set to your briefed altitudes, on every freefly jump on your own. The second one replaces the backup a group gives you. In Australia, one working audible is required on every freefly descent.
• Use two different models where you can, or at least batteries of different ages, so one shared fault can’t silence both.
• Check the audibles on the climb, using a device that announces climb altitudes. The 2,000 ft beep when the seatbelts come off tells you the device works. The breakoff-altitude beeps higher up tell you the right profile is loaded. A 12,000 ft beep is a final check and your cue to start gear checks. A device that arms only in freefall gives no climb beeps, so check it the way the manufacturer describes.
• Learn every alarm tone until you know each one instantly. The most common failure in the record is a misread tone. One jumper mistook an alarm at around 8,000 ft for a 2,000 ft hard-deck tone and deployed at once, with another jumper close above. A second device adds tones, so it protects you only if you know each one.
• Add altitude information you can read in freefly. A colour-cue visual altimeter reads at a glance head-up, and a spoken-altitude device needs no looking at all. Head-down, plan as if the wrist altimeter isn’t there.

On a group jump, run and check your own audibles to the same standard. The group’s breakoff only backs you up if your own devices fail, so set them up as if nobody else were there.

Fly positions you can monitor yourself

Head-down, fly a daffy. This is The Freefly Project’s own recommendation, and no federation rule requires it. In a shelf both legs sit behind you, with nothing ready to stop a forward drive, so a bump can build into a runaway back angle. A straddle recovers from a disturbance through a brief moment out of control that ends in a daffy anyway. With nobody watching, that moment is where a cork can happen.

The daffy keeps your front leg out as a brake, and flying one known position means you always know what your body should be doing. Before your first head-down jump on your own, show your coach you can fly a daffy: tunnel video of a stable head-down daffy with turns, or a coach watching you hold it and fly a slow static turn.

Head-up, fly a sit or the recovery position, with a turn. A stand can drive you a long way sideways, and without a reference you can’t tell. The Freefly Project strongly recommends against standing on a jump on your own.

End the jump without tracking

A group tracks at breakoff because its flyers need distance from each other. On your own there is nobody to separate from, and moving across the sky is already the biggest hazard on the jump. Leave the track out of your breakoff.

Stop work at your briefed altitude. For head-down work on your own, 5,500 ft is standard practice, and always at least 1,000 ft above your planned deployment altitude.

Then, in either orientation: turn 90°, pause, go to back-fly, slow down, go to belly, and take at least 1,000 ft to lose the speed before you deploy. Save tracking for group jumps, where you practise it and need it.

What practice on your own can’t give you

Jumps on your own build position skill and altitude awareness. They can’t teach you to judge your own movement, because you can’t do that reliably from the inside. The fastest you have gone always feels fast, and a drive a partner would spot in seconds can run a whole jump unnoticed. They also can’t teach you to fly in traffic. That comes from coached and group jumps, at the pace the progression sets.

The full protocols for jumps on your own are in Freefly 100. 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. Rules for freeflying on your own 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. Check the current position where you jump, and fly the coached path where one is available.