How Skydiving Works

At 13,000 feet the ground is nothing but far-away squares of land, and you can even see some clouds below you. All of a sudden you find yourself plummeting downward. There are very few thrills like jumping out of a plane with a parachute.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey,
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck
and Jerry's here too, and that makes this Stuff you
should Know, Good Old Fashion Explainer Edition. Yeah, it feels

(00:22):
like a throwback. Yes it does. I can't cannot believe
we did not do this already. I agree. And my
stomach may have just been so loud that the microphone
picked it up. I didn't hear it, but I want
to hear it in the edit if it did. Oh geez, wow,

(00:42):
my mouth. I know, no, I already eight. You know,
sometimes when you have a really empty stomach and you
put I made one of my my good hot bone broths,
icy bone broths, and then for the next thirty minutes,
your stomachs just like screaming like what is that? Or
it's thank you? Yeah, maybe thank you. I wish I

(01:03):
knew my whole life. I wish I knew what my
stomach was saying to me. What is your sphincter saying?
You can usually tell us what you can usually tell
how your stomach is feeling based on your sphincter. Sphincter,
don't lie, Oh man is that a truism or what, Yes,
it is, sphincter's gonna spink yep it spinker's fine. That's

(01:26):
then I think your stomach saying thank you. Okay, so
we are moving on, Chuck, We're gonna move on. We're
talking about skydiving today, and like I said, I'm surprised
we hadn't done it already. Um. I met a guy
who has I think he founded like one of the
Navy's um skydiving clubs. And here's a very nice man
and asked if we'd ever done skydiving before, and I

(01:48):
said I don't know, and I looked and sure enough
we didn't. So here we are doing skydiving, and I
think it's pretty appropriate. Well, first, have you ever skydived?
I can't remember. No, I have not. And it's the
kind of thing that like, I'm totally game to do.
But I don't see myself making that initiative. But if

(02:10):
someone got something together, I'd be like, yeah, trurell, I'll
jump out of a plane. I think that's how it
typically happens. It's like a group and there's one like
initiator and everybody's like or whatever. Yeah, but you you
have not of course, no, I have I have Oh wait,
I feel like we talked about this. What have you done?
I went up to thirteen thousand feet and jumped out
of a plane tandem. It was it was so so

(02:31):
scary the way up. Everybody's laughing and joking and I
was just quiet, and somebody looked over him. He's like, Josh,
your knuckles are pretty white. And I was like, that's
super funny, right, And I was like, I don't think
I even responded to that. I was too nervous. And
we got up to thirteen thousand feet and I had
this giant dude strapped to my back. Yeah, that's what

(02:54):
you want. And We're kneeling together at the opening of
this plane and I'm like, I'm I'm not doing this
and he's like, yes, you are. And we were out
of the plane and I don't remember the first couple
of seconds. I think I've talked about this before. The
first couple of seconds or just my mind didn't form
any memories. And then I kind of came to when
we're plumbering toward the Earth and I was like, this

(03:15):
is pretty great. Actually, that's amazing how it was just
like twenty years ago or ten years ago, gosh, more
than twenty years ago now they think, Yeah, I was
in my early twenties, which is kind of the time
you try it usually because you have very little to
live for at that point. You know. Sometimes the you know, seniors,
the aged Yeah, they like to like take a challenge

(03:39):
box off, you know, and say like I'm gonna get
skydiving at seventy or whatever. Yeah, I just saw I
think like a mom and her son sons seventies and
the mom's nineties they went sky diving. Not what I
expected you to say. Yeah they went skydiving. Wow, look
good for them. So we are talking skydiving, Chuck. I
strongly recommend trying it at least once. One reason why

(04:00):
is because it's gotten really really safe. Like I wouldn't
just say, like go go base jump, Like I would
never tell somebody to go base jump. That is not
at all safe. But people have been skydiving and investing
in like figuring out how to make it safe for
so many years that it has gotten pretty safe. Yeah.
I think that's a great idea. I mean, Ed has

(04:22):
it at the end. He helped us out with this.
But we may as well not bury the lead and
say that in twenty twenty one, I guess was the
most recent year he could find something was ten fatalities
per one hundred thousand jumps, which is point to eight
deaths Now, I'm sorry, point two point two eight per
one hundred thousand, not ten per one hundred thousand, right right,

(04:45):
and already screwed it up. So less than a quarter
of a person dies or just over a quarter of
a person dies up for every hundred thousand jumps, which
is not bad. So yeah, and it's actually the old days,
it's really good. Yeah, the old days being two thous eleven.
It was at point eight one, which seems high compared

(05:05):
to point two eight, but it's actually pretty low. Like
if you go back to the sixties, you're at like
eleven and we're like under one here. Now we're at
just over a quarter. So it's definitely gotten a lot,
a lot safer. Yeah, And we'll talk about the multiple
redundancies and backup shoots and all that stuff, and I'm
sure we'll probably for the avid jumper, we'll probably get

(05:27):
some of this slightly wrong, because we always do. But
should we go back to the old days, Yes, let's
because people have been like, I want to jump off
a high thing, but I want to live, so how
can I do that? And the parachute is kind of
a I think, even even if you're taking into account
like hindsight, it's a pretty obvious low hanging fruit invention.

(05:50):
But that doesn't mean that they knocked it out of
the park immediately. There was they didn't understand exactly how
to do it, but the idea of what to do
came to a lot of people over the years. Yeah,
I mean, I think just even a kid jumping off
of a wall with an umbrella, like, there's this weird
human instinct of let me hold open a shoot like

(06:13):
thing and jump off of something, and that seems to
have certainly taken hold in France. France had a lot
of early jumpers, And then we talked for sure in
our Eiffel Tower episode about Franz Reichilt, who died in
nineteen twelve while testing a parachute design from the Eiffel Tower.

(06:34):
But before that, the first documented jump period was way
before that, in seventeen eighty three from an observatory in France,
And it seems like the French were just always experimenting
with you know, sort of the rigid like wooden framed
shoots and then silk shoots, and we'll talk about silk later.
It was a pretty good early choice for the fabric,

(06:57):
but it wasn't until the early nineteen hundreds that we
look at sort of the first modern parachute right right,
And this kind of gives you an idea of what
skydiving is like. The origin of skydiving came from a
carnival act, yeah, where a guy named Charles Broadwick whose
stage name was John Murray used to go up in

(07:18):
a hot air balloon and jump out of it the
way around was it? No, neither one of them are
really that stage namy. Now that I look at it,
I know exactly. It's just kind of two normal names.
But I guess he did. He thought John Murray didn't
have enough mustard to it or something. Yeah, So he
would go up in a hot air balloon and jump
out with a parachute of his own design, which apparently

(07:40):
was good enough to keep him alive. And he was
touring the US in the eighteen nineties early nineteen hundreds,
and he had two different wives who were assistance with
his act, but die in these parachuting accidents. Yeah, and
I don't know if that drove him to it or
if it was just I could see it driving driving

(08:01):
him to it. He really spent a lot of time
refining the parachute and the whole idea of a parachute
coming out of a backpack on your back. That came
from Charles Broadwick slash John Murray. Yeah. Yeah, he was like,
let's stop this thing in there. I'm not sure what
they were doing before. Were they just kind of holding it?
I think so, yeah, kind of like base jumping. I
think yeah, yeah, so they were a guess holding it.

(08:24):
Then he put it into a backpack again. I wish
I had a little more information about his wives dying,
if it was like, hey, you try this, or if
it was just genuine accidents. I think the first one
later on people said that it was more likely suicide. Yeah,
I think the first one in nineteen oh five. Okay,
but anytime there's two spouses that die that, I don't know,

(08:47):
that little suspicion is raised. It is definitely. But or
also talking about people engaging in the earliest forms of
sky diving, you know, so there's a lot of risk
to it, for sure, But the Milly obviously is where
a lot of the early parachuting went on. Obviously, in
World War One, I believe they developed the rip chord

(09:09):
by that point, right, yeah, where you pull like a
little handle and the parachute goes whoop out of the backpack.
They also came up with what's called the static line.
Like if you ever see in like a warm movie,
especially World War Two, those guys like clipping into a
line with like a rope, that's a static line, and
when that's just dropping guys right exactly, there's no this

(09:32):
isn't for thrills. This is for getting you behind enemy lines, right,
So they deploy their parachute immediately, and the static line
does that when you jump out, that line stays attached
to the plane for a second, and it's also attached
to your shoot so it just pulls your shoot out
immediately and then falls away and then you kind of
float to safety, hopefully behind enemy lines. So the static

(09:53):
line and the rip chord were both designed by the military,
and I guess people, I'm guessing from the military. That's
where people started getting like the idea of like we
should just do this on weekends too. Yeah, I have
a feeling that's what happened. I wouldn't be surprised if
retired military were some of the first instructors privately yea,

(10:15):
because they certainly jumped a lot, and that's the only
way you could get the kind of experience back then.
But I believe sites jumped down as the very first
skydiving center opened in nineteen fifty nine in the United States,
that it's still up and running today, which is pretty cool. Yeah.
An Orange, mass Oh, an Orange. I don't know why
Massachusetts has a town named Orange. Maybe it's just like

(10:37):
wishful thinking for orange shoes. Not Florida. I looked it up. Yeah,
because Florida is actually like kind of a huge state
for skydiving over the history of the sport too. But no,
Moorida's jump site is called Fall Foliage, Florida, right exactly,
Red Maple Leaf, Florida. But the sixties is when it

(11:01):
started to develop and then big time, And I'm glad
you love it. Don't just get then in the seventies,
you know, I remember, and I'm sure you do. Growing
up in the seventies and eighties, skydiving just seemed like
not like everybody was doing it, but it just seemed
like a big, hot, thrill sport, and that's where it
really kind of became refined, and people started pushing the

(11:23):
envelope and going higher and faster and doing crazier things
up there. And that's when like kind of modern skydiving
really came into its own. And there were two things
that happened that completely broke open skydiving from like an
arcane adrenaline junkie ex military recreation to like anybody can

(11:44):
come do this. One was they changed the design of
the parachute from that round, you know example of a parachute,
the old timey one where you couldn't control it, like
it was keeping you from plummeting to the ground and
you should be grateful for that. That was enough. But
then a person from Canada in the sixties came up
with the like the ram air parachute. Their name was

(12:08):
Domina Galbert and they were a kite designer and they said, hey,
these kites, actually you could turn them into a pretty
cool parachute. And so those kind of wing like wide, rectangular,
rounded parachutes that you see today that those are ram Air.
We'll talk a little more about them. So that was
a big one, because now you could control where you landed.

(12:31):
And then the second thing was some dudes in the seventies,
actually a couple initially Peter Chase and Gloria Maybury, who
were married, decided to try what's called tandem jumping, which
is what I did, where a more experienced person is
strapped to a novice and you jump out together, and
the experienced person is the one who like pulls the

(12:53):
rip cord and guides the whole thing. You're just basically
along for the ride. And now, all of a sudden chuck,
it went from having to have tons of experience, possibly
a military background too, I'm going to show up, do
an hour long course and jump out of a plane
an hour later after I get there. And that's suddenly
people who are just complete amateurs who are curious could

(13:16):
show up in skydive. And that's really where the whole
thing blew open. In the seventies. Yeah, and that's I mean,
I have a feeling of skydiving. We're still at the
point where even if you needed one day of training
to come back the next day, the rate of people
trying this out would just plummet plummet. Probably not the

(13:37):
best words to use. But the fact that they made
it to where you can go you don't have to
know anything, and you can go out that same afternoon
and jump out of a plane. That's what really kind
of entice people, I think, to try it out. And then,
of course, like you said, just the fact that you're
you know, they show you how to use the gear,
and they walk you through that quicklike lesson, which I

(13:57):
imagine is just like let me handle anything. I'll walk
you through it all. When we come to the ground.
That's really the only other time where you need to
worry about stuff, which is you know what, like pull
up your feet so you don't break your legs, yes,
and I'll land for you and you'll kind of sit
on your butt, yeah, like you're strapped to the front
of the instructor like a baby, but not facing them.

(14:20):
They'd just be weird. You're both facing the same direction.
That's the romantic style. But you know they're they'll they'll
also going to be explaining kind of. It's not like
they just say here's what you do and just shut up,
like they're gonna say, listen, we're gonna be flying. It's
you know, ten to fifteen thousand feet and we'll be
going one hundred ish miles an hour when you jump out.

(14:43):
So all this stuff is just to sort of give
you the lay of the land, and it's I don't
think it necessarily helps you with your jump, but it
just you know, you know what's going on, you know
how high you are, you now fast you're going. Did
they even bring up terminal velocity? I don't know, but
this is what I proposed, I say, I don't remember
if they did or not, probably, but I say, we

(15:04):
take a break and pretend that it's the night before
your first jump, and then the sleep is the ad break,
and then when we come back, it's like waking up
and going to the airfield to participate in your first
guy dive. Ever, how about that? That's super exciting. Okay,

(15:47):
good morning, Chuck. It's time. It's time for your first
sky dive. So what are we gonna do. Well, we're
gonna do all the things we talked about in the
first segment, and then I'm going to jump out of
a plane, but your mind structure, so you're gonna be
strapped in my back right and this plane, by the way,
is going to be typically a prop plane. Yeah, you're not.

(16:11):
We're not jumping out of a gin or we know
it'd be such a bad idea. So you're jumping out
of a prop plane for a couple of reasons. One,
they're easy on the gas, and if you're flying people
up to skydive, you want to be economical with your gas.
And then they have a low stall speed, meaning they
can go to really slow speeds without their engine stalling out,

(16:31):
which is a problem. Although if you're ever going to
be on a plane that goes down, that's the plane
that you want to be on that's going down because
you're strapped to somebody with a giant parachute on their back.
But for the most part, when you're jumping out, you're
jumping out about one hundred miles an hour out of
probably a Beechcraft king Air with maybe fourteen other people,

(16:52):
and you're gonna be up there between ten thousand to
fourteen thousand feet. Like I said, I jumped out at
thirteen thousand and it seemed perfecto. And when you jump out, Chuck,
get ready to rumble. Yeah, you're you know, a terminal
velocity is what I mentioned before the break, and that
doesn't have anything to do with death. They picked a

(17:13):
very terrible word there to name it. But one hundred
and twenty miles an hour. And we'll talk more about
terminal velocity kind of throughout, but that is, you know,
regular human jumping out of a plane with their arms
and legs out, belly down, just sort of standard skydiving.
You can we've all seen James Bond movies and stuff

(17:35):
where they and well, terminal velocity I think was the
name of the movie with Charlie Sheen, right, I think
I saw that in the theater. Yeah, And it's the
coolest thing when you're a young kid and you see
someone tuck their arms in and put their head down
and all of a sudden they're flying through the air
faster than one hundred and twenty miles an hour. You
can learn how to do that stuff with training, but
typically one hundred and twenty is what you get up to.

(17:57):
Although when you out of a plane, you're going one
hundred miles an hour horizontally, so there's a period of
time where you're I guess following diagonally until you reach
the point where you're just following vertically. Right. They should
have a name for that. They do. It's called going
over the hill. No, I mean like a name like

(18:18):
terminal velocity, like, oh there something zone. I'm gonna call
it the diagonal okay, the diagonal zone, but more follows
an arc because when you jump out of the plane,
remember the plane's going one hundred miles an hour. You
were in the plane. Even though you just left the plane,
you're still going roughly one hundred miles an hour in
the same direction of the plane. But you slow down
so quickly that it's not like you're keeping up with

(18:40):
the plane even for a second. So you fall away,
but you're still kind of you've got like that horizontal
motion before you hit that arc and you start to
fall downward. And the whole reason there's such a thing
as terminal velocity is because of friction from the air.
And if you and a bowling ball jumped out of
the plane at the same time in a vacuum, you

(19:00):
would fall to the earth at the same rate. But
because of air friction, um you fall at different rates.
And like you said, it's about one hundred and twenty
miles an hour, and when you reach terminal velocity, you're
still going really really fast, about one hundred and twenty
miles an hour, but you're not speeding up any longer.
That's that's the difference. You're not accelerating any longer. And

(19:21):
that would be pretty cool. It would be pretty cool.
And you can actually do that when you become a
skilled skydiver. You can hit terminal velocity and then like
go from say belly to like you said, a forty
five degree angle and start free falling again. Like you can.
You can stop and start your freefall just by moving
your body and changing the amount of friction that you're

(19:42):
providing the air that you're plummeting through. Yeah, when you
get down there, and this is something I kind of
never knew the exact numbers on, but you know that
when that shoot opens, it looks like a pretty violent
reaction when it jerks you up. Um, it's gonna slow
you down very very quickly. Yes, to the point where

(20:02):
you're going to be feeling about two point seven five
g's of your body. I think ED said you're decelerating
by about thirty meters per second per secondly, Yeah, that's
what I said. No, I think it's per second per second, oh,
per second per second. Yeah. Prosecco, prosecco, what is per
second per second even mean, that's what I'm saying, Like,

(20:22):
I don't know what it means either, but when you
say it like that, it's like, wow, that must be
really fast. They had to say per second twice. They're like,
we couldn't even come up with a better term for that,
so we're just doubling up on it. Slap another per
second on it. So that is that is a really
quick slowdown, and eventually you'll get down to about I mean,
when you're landing, you're in the like the fifteen to

(20:43):
eighteen mile an hour zone. Not bad at all. I mean,
especially going from one hundred and twenty miles an hour
about two hundred miles an hour if you're tandem to seventeen.
That's pretty gentle comparatively speaking. And like you said, when
that shoot opens, you stop, you stop accelerating downward or
even hitting terminal velocity, and now you're accelerating upward even

(21:04):
though your body's still falling downward. So that's negative acceleration,
and that's what you're doing as you kind of start
to slow down and hit that seventeen mile an hour
thing and then land and Chuck, I know that we've
completely abandoned the whole story. But congratulations on your first skydive.
You did really well. Oh boy, that was a lot
easier I thought I thought it was going to be.
And technically, now I think about it, you've done skydiving,

(21:27):
it's just been indoor skydiving and you did great. Yeah,
I mean we have to mention that. I think we
have no way around it. We did a parachute emergency
short stuff and I know for a fact we mentioned
it in that. Yeah, but if anyone's curious, Josh and
I did a Toyota commercial years ago, back when people
cared about us representing their brand and we used to

(21:47):
get those calls occasionally. Yeah, and we were put in.
They flew us out to LA and we shot a
mile neighborhood. It was super cool and one of the
things we did was go to a wind tunnel one
of those indoor jump facilities and you know, sort of
explain something while we were doing that, and it's online
and it was super fun and you get to see
Josh take a little indoor spill, which is still makes

(22:09):
me laugh every time I see. I was thinking about
how much they had to cut out of that commercial
to preserve that spill of mine and just how badly
the director and producer wanted to make sure that stayed
and that was a lot of work. I'm sure to
keep that in. So it was it was hard to do.
It was harder than I thought it was going to do,
just to stay stable, definitely, And as evidence by what

(22:31):
happened to you, you just you got a little caddywompus
and all of a sudden you just got funking to
a wall. Yeah. I don't remember anything after that. Yeah,
because I guess the commercial ends, oh, you're a good sport,
and of course they use that in the commercial. So
let's say, Chuck that you're like, I want to do
that every day of my life, for the rest of
my life. You can do that. You can take on

(22:52):
skydiving as a hobby, not making Toyota commercial skydiving as
a hobby, right, that'd be great. And there's a couple
of ways you can go. One's actually really hard to find.
The other one is you can find it at any
place you go skydiving. There are two different types of
training that are going to get you to the same place.
Which is a Class A license from the United States

(23:14):
Parachuting association. Yeah, and I a D is one instructor
assisted deployment, and then AFF seems like the way more
common one, which is accelerated freefall. Accelerate freefalls when an
instructor jumps out with you, but not tandem style. They're
not attached to you, but they're with you kind of

(23:34):
making sure everything goes great, but you're you're in control
of everything. I still don't quite get what I a
D is. Are they Is that a static line thing? Yes,
So the instructor acts as the static line. They have
your parachute and they are staying on the plane and
when you jump out, they pull your shoote so immediately.

(23:56):
So your first several it isn't fun. It's very deliberate.
They want to teach you like landing essentially U first,
So your first jump is at like thirty five hundred
feet which is really low, and then you just move
yourself up and up and up, and then I think
with both courses, after about six jumps, you finally make
your first solo freefall jump. Okay, And that's the goal

(24:19):
for most people if they want to really get into it, yeah,
is to just be able to go to a place
I imagine you have to pay them a little something, right,
you have to sign over your first born. Well, you
have to pay for the plane and stuff. But even
if you have all your own gear, they're still fees involved. Yes, Um,
I think I calculated about thirty five hundred bucks, which

(24:40):
from what I saw it looks pretty right to me. Um,
unless they get your light fully licensed uff right, Yes,
the course is about eighteen hundred, say two thousand, and
then to get all the way to your license, with
all the exams and all that stuff, it's about thirty
five hundred the thing. No, and equipment is expensive, as
you might assume. We're talking about equipment that keeps you alive.

(25:02):
So like your parachute might be a couple grand, three grand,
helmets can get pretty expensive. An altimeter is four hundred dollars,
so it starts to add up really really quickly. You
can pick up a used altimeter on that crazy. I
would sure, I would like if you if you get
into this, A word of advice for me, do not

(25:24):
cheep out on your equipment, in particular your altimeter. Yeah,
I would imagine. So, Um, you can go through this
whole thing, and I don't know how long it takes.
I actually didn't get a sense of that. But when
you get your license, you're like, what do you mean license?
Is the government going to come a recipe? No, But
if you show up to a skydiving place you say

(25:47):
I want to jump, they'll say, well, we need to
see your license, and if you have your a license
on you, they'll say, hop aboard and you can pack
your own parachute. You can do jumps. I think you
can do water jumps, which seems like I don't know.
I guess water jumps are probably really difficult because you
can get wrapped up and sink if you're not careful. Yeah, right,

(26:09):
what was the um? There was some action movie where
dude dejects from a plane and lands and water and
like has to like it's lost consciousness and has to
come to and get out of the parachute UM rigging.
So I think the first top gun. I mean that's
how Goose died. Right, Yes, this person survives. I keep

(26:31):
seeing Bruce Willis, but I don't think it was Bruce Willis.
I don't know, but you were you were saying, you
don't know how long you can get this class eight,
how long it takes you need twenty five freefall jumps,
five group dump group jumps, and some other training. So
I would imagine even if you're really eager and cooking

(26:52):
like this takes a matter of months. Yeah, that seems
to get all those in. Yeah, for sure. I guess
you go every day if you were really like I
had to learn fast. Yeah, which I mean, that's what
I'm saying. I wonder what's the rush? Absolutely right, exactly,
Well you want that rush, that's the rush. Oh that's true. Uh,
the b license sounds interesting because you can do night jumps.

(27:16):
Which it's funny ED put this together person. I think
he said the night jumps was the only thing he
said that interested him, right, he says it's the only
thing that that um makes him kind to want to
do this, right, is a night jump. But you have
to do you have to invest a lot before you
get into night jumps because that's your class. Is really
scary to me, it is super super scary. Um. One

(27:36):
thing I thought was pretty cool is the USPA has
um training uh and like kind of differently structured courses
to help people with disabilities get their licenses too, which
I thought it was pretty great. Totally. So, um, you
mentioned night diving, which sounds really cool, Like you're just

(27:58):
you're jumping out at night, and like, you know what
cities look like from an airplane. Imagine if there's nothing
between you and the city but air, that must be
pretty awesome, right, That's one of many things you can do.
So once people started getting into skydiving in the seventies,
they're like, how can this be more dangerous? How can
this be more thrilling? And they came up with a
lot of different interesting things. Yeah, they're like, hey, you

(28:19):
want to be on the evening news, why don't Why
don't thirty of us get together on the first day
of spraying and make big flowers in the air by
doing something called formation flying. Yeah, or just let's sit
around until we hit our nineties and take our seven
year old sons with us. Yeah, exactly. Formation flying or
relative work or belly flying a couple of other names.

(28:41):
That is when again, usually you see it on the
evening news when people go up and they all get
together to set a record or just join hands and
legs into funt shapes up in the air on their
way down. Imagine, it's a great group activity for the
enthusiast of skydiving. Yeah, you're looking up and say, oh,
it's a flower. Yeah, we do flowers last time. Gary

(29:04):
always wants to do flowers. When can we make the
amper sin right, I'd like to see that. So the
thing about floormation flying that's belly down right, you said,
there's another one called free flying, where it's vertically oriented,
not belly oriented, which is horizontal, and they do all
crazy looking Yes, they'll also sometimes. One of the reasons

(29:26):
they call it free flying is because they'll there won't
be like a plan. A group of them will kind
of hang out and just figure out together, kind of
like breakdancing but midair, except you're doing a tea party exactly. Yeah.
Or they do surfing, um, like you'll surf on somebody's back,
all sorts of really cool stuff, and you can also
get some crazy speed as we'll see. Um. There actually

(29:48):
is something called skysurfing where you don't use your friends back.
You actually use like a snowboard. Yeah, and you connectly
because it's a snowboard. You're suddenly putting out, like you know,
form resistance to the air, um, and that friction can
allow you to do some pretty sweet tricks. Once you
get good at skysurfing, yeah, like standing on that thing

(30:10):
and spinning around, yeah, or doing loop to loops in
the air. I don't know why that always cracks me up,
but skysurfing always that was kind of fun. And it
sounds like I'm making fun of it. I'm not. It's
it is cool, but I'm just trying to think of
you know, the first guy that was like, they're always
trying to combine their loves of the extreme things that

(30:32):
they love, you know, like let me put a wingsuit
on a motorcycle or whatever like all that. The other
people on the plane were like, why do you have
your surfboard? And he just watch. There's another one called
tracking that I thought was pretty delightful. Now, is this
just the James Bond thing. Yes, it's it's just moving

(30:55):
away from where you jumped out, moving away from the plane.
But that happens innately, right you move, Yes, the plane
moves away from you. This is you purposely, purposely moving
away from the plane yourself by by positioning your body
at different angles. So you're suddenly like shooting off to

(31:17):
the west or shooting off to the northeast. And this
is like a this is a practical skill that you
need to have just as a basic skydiver, but people
have turned it into new feats of amazingness, like how
far can you go? How fast can you get there?
Seeking through the air? Sure, like their landing spot is

(31:38):
a really far away, and so they try and go
as horizontally as far as they can go, yes, to
hit a certain spot. And also if you're doing formation
flying or free flying, you need to be good at
tracking because you have to get away from one another
before you deploy your shoots or else you're gonna end
up on earth sandwich together. Yeah. And speaking of speeds,

(31:58):
I believe the currents bead record now we said terminal
was one twenty three twenty nine miles per hour. Yeah,
is the current record for someone shooting through the air
with a straight James Bond like body. Yeah, and kilometers
per hour. That's a mind boggling number two. I'm sure

(32:19):
I don't quite get what cupping is. Is that just
what we did? And the wentz on a like, yes,
regular trying to resist the air. Yeah, you're you're well,
you're making like an arch out of your body and
when you do that, you kind of make yourself into
a parachute and you go up right. So let's say
you've got four other people and you just finished making
a flower to Gary's dismay, and you all need to

(32:42):
get away from one another. There's different ways to get away.
So Gary shoots off to the northeast. He's all mad,
you shoot off to the west able your biblical friend
and cups. So he goes upward all of a sudden
to put some vertical distance between you two. And then
Kane Abel's brother ironically right makes himself into like a

(33:04):
missile and shoots downwards. So now there's even more vertical
distance between all of you, vertical and horizontal distance. All
of that is considered tracking. That's so cane. Yeah, Cane's
like here I go. I mentioned the wingsuit. That is,
when you've seen the people who look like flying squirrels
in the air, it is it's a wingsuit. It's a

(33:26):
suit that has a webbing between the arm pits and
between your legs, and that just creates more wind resistance,
but it also creates something called a burbal in the biz,
and that is the dead air behind you, sort of
like when a race car has that dead or not
even a race car. You know, a big semi truck

(33:47):
on the highway, Yeah, has as an area of dead
air behind it where a car can draft for either
more speed or to use less fuel or both. But
that is a burbal in the parlance of skydiving, right,
and apparently in the verbal like wingsuiting is is a
pretty tricky thing. Obviously, it takes tons I think two

(34:09):
hundred dies before you're allowed to put on that squirrel suit.
But the verbal makes it hard to or just a
little trickier to get the shoot out properly in the
verbal yes, so yeah, I wingsuits sound pretty awesome, but
that's not that's well beyond my limit, I think. No, well,
you just don't wanted Scott have two hundred times to

(34:30):
get there? No, probably not, Probably, it's a lot. So
remember I said, tracking is like a basic thing that
people have turned into, you know, feats of amazingness. They've
they've done the same thing with the actual parachuting part
called canopy flying. There's swoopers, there's gliders, there's people who
um go on like an obstacle course over water, and

(34:53):
it's pretty cool. Apparently, when you swoop correctly, you make
a sound when you come in for your landing, okay,
And I've seen video of people that you can pick
up some real speed if you angle your canopy your
parachute the right way, and they'll go from like really
really fast ten feet above the ground to like almost

(35:13):
still with the softest landing you've ever seen, you know,
a second or two later. It's really neat. Yeah, that
is cool, and that's where a lot of the accuracy
skydive when we talked about, happens when you're a canopy
flying and you really want to nail that bull's eye.
One other thing they do that's awesome is that your
canopy has straps on the top, and sometimes a bunch

(35:35):
of people will coordinate so that each one's strapped in
by their feet to the canopy below them. So it's
a big chain of people skydiving, which sounds so dangerous,
but yeah, I'm sure so cool. Now the kind eye
would be interested in more so than an airplane even is.
And you need a B license for this, so there's

(35:57):
no getting around doing the series of steps to get there.
But the hot air balloon jump. And at first I
was like, well, who cares, what's a big deal, But
as we mentioned When you go out of that plane
in a hundred miles an hour, you've done it. I'm
and you blacked out for the first few seconds. I
imagine it's like just a big sort of violent rush

(36:19):
of air and sound and you don't really quite know
what's going on at first. But you jump out of
that hot air balloon, it's dead silent. You actually experience
a true freefall from the jump. Yeah, like you know,
you would on an amusement park ride, right, And the
silence of it and the stillness of it really is

(36:39):
appealing to me. Yeah, it's not until you start to
really pick up speed that like the air makes a
sound running past you. That's pretty cool. It does sound
pretty cool for sure. So that's called no airplane skydiving
or hot air balloon skydiving, which is pretty cool. There's
another one that's like that, but it's up way higher.
It's called space dive. And if you watch the Felix

(37:02):
bomb Gardener two thousand and twelve jump that I was
looking back at that. So we're talking. You know, if
you go up in your skydiving and it's uh, like
like what I did, I did thirteen thousand feet, which
is really high. You're up there so long you're freefall.
So you're following about one hundred and seventy six feet
per second, which means that you're in free fall from

(37:24):
the time you jump out of the plane till the
time that you you pull your rip cord or the
guy strapped to your back does m forty five to
sixty seconds of that. That sounds about right. That's at
thirteen thousand feet and then pulling it about five thousand.
So m Felix bomb Gardner jumped out at one hundred
and twenty seven thousand feet. What was his freefall? How

(37:46):
long was that? I think it was several minutes actually,
And remember he famously got into like this horrible tailspin
that they're like, well this guy might be a goner.
But even more impressive than that, he entered he hit
mock one point two five, which means he broke the
sound barrier. He was the first person to do it
without a plane, and he which is about eight hundred

(38:07):
and forty three miles per hour. All right, I just
looked it up real quick. What you don't usually do?
He he was in prefall for four minutes in nineteen
second man, that was crazy and then his record was
broken by a guy named Alan Eustace to two years later.
I don't think that. I don't know, Yeah, I don't either.
Felix bomb Gunner definitely got the press for that. Pretty cool. Yeah,

(38:31):
he did it first. I'm sure that guys like oh man,
no one, he've been batter t to my jump. Well, actually,
another guy, Colonel Joe Kittinger did it first in the sixties.
It was just like a gas balloon. Yeah, he does
space jump, which is I mean again, remember there was
like eleven deaths per hundred thousand jumps for a regular
skydiving and this guy's up and at a gas balloon

(38:53):
one hundred thousand feet above the Earth doing it. So
hats off to all those people who've ever jumped out
of a balloon in space. All Right, I guess we
can take a late second break here and talk about
this equipment we've been harping on. Yeah, all right, we

(39:37):
mentioned the equipment money that you can spend and the
rabbit hole to get the coolest helmets and goggles. The
first thing that you want as a parachute. If you're
a beginner, you're canopy. It's gonna be a little bit larger,
make you go a little bit slower. Yeah, back in
the day, we said they were silk because silk has
a very high strength to weight ratio. And it's also

(40:00):
and here's sort of the key, it's a very tight weave.
Because you know, you can't jump out with a gauze parachute,
it's not going to do much to slow you down.
So that tight weave of the silk really helped. And
then they eventually moved to nylon, of course, and that
nylon even usually has a coating on it to make
it even more nonporous. And we mentioned the big round

(40:22):
early parachute compared to the shape they have today today
they have and it's not only for flying cool and
doing you know, having more maneuverability, but they are formed
into different cells, as you will see if you look
at a parachute jump in. Those cells are sort of
a redundancy in themselves because if like one thing goes
wrong in a part of the parachute, you still got

(40:43):
plenty of parachute left. Yeah. What I didn't know I
ran across some research is the sides in the back
of the ram air parachute are sewn up, but the
front is open, so that air enters those cells and
puffs them up and creates a bit of buoyancy from
what I can tell, Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, it's
pretty cool. So that again, that just completely changed everything
when they came up with UM that type of parachute.

(41:07):
Another parachute that really comes in handy is your reserve parachute.
So there's there's UM they've kind of updated the technology
on this. Before I don't know, you probably had to
be carrying a Rambo knife in your teeth when you
jump so that you could cut your shoote to release
your your shoot from you so you could release your
reserve canopy. Now there's like just a little pull chord

(41:30):
and the like all of your shoot that's failed falls
away your initial canopy and then you can pull your
reserve shoot pretty easily from there. Some of them even
have a thing where when you pull that chord and
your main canopy goes away, it actually pulls your reserve
shoot out like it's a static line basically, which is
probably good because I'm sure you're a little bit panicked

(41:52):
maybe when your shoot UM doesn't doesn't work when it fails,
even though you know you have a reserve shoot that's
got to be. You know, you're down one, You're down
to your last one. Now this is your back up. Yeah, absolutely, Um,
the harness and the container is what it's. The little
backpack is called that everything is packed in. Yeah, and
of course you want to have someone that knows what

(42:13):
they're doing doing that. I'm sure there are many many
instructional lessons involved for you to get to the point
where you can pack your own. And they say, even
when you're packing your own, it's not the kind of
thing where you should pack it and just like leave
it in your closet for a few years and jump again. Like,
you should probably repack that thing just to make sure
everything is as it should be. Yeah, your reserves SHO

(42:34):
has to be packed by a licensed instructor and they
have you have to unpack it and repack it every
one hundred and eighty days to make sure that it's
in good condition. So, yeah, you don't want that thing
getting that's hung up. No, that's no joke. The altimeter,
I told you, that's the thing that tells you what, um,
where you're at above sea level, So you know when

(42:54):
polar ripcord usually it's three thy thirty feet and the louder.
Some of them will will make a sound in your ear,
in your helmet. Some of them have really big numbers.
Just kind of wear like a watch on your wrist. Again,
do not cheap out on your altimeter. Okay. Also, do
not go to Craigslist to pick up your AAD. That's

(43:16):
your automatic activation device. That is the redundancy on the
redundancy if you're doing if Gary flies over in mid
stem formation, kicks you in the head by accident, and
you're passed out up there and Gary can't get back
to you, you have a device that is set to
automatically pop your shoot out at a preprogrammed altitude based

(43:41):
on how fast you're going. You really want that thing
to be set up correctly. You know. Some people say
Garry didn't even really try to get back to you. Yeah,
that's what I saw, and it's all on my GoPro
one thing. I saw. This what the AAD is. If
you go up an airplane and for some reason you
don't jump out, you better remember to turn if you're
a d because when the airplane hits like seven hundred feet,

(44:03):
it's going to activate your pairs in the airplane. Yeah,
that's that's no good. And then you got your jumpsuit
which protects your skin, and then you've got your helmet
and goggles, which are absolutely essential. Yeah, and you put
all those things together, you're ready to go skydiving. Yeah,
what's the little uh? It doesn't a little mini parachute

(44:25):
come out at first, and that pulls the main shoot. Now, Yeah,
so the pilot shoote just kind of pilot shoot. Yeah,
it catches enough air that it can pull your shoot
out of your container, out of your deployment bag, your
d bag they call it, Yeah, they do. And then
one thing that that can happen if your shoot just
opened from like nothing to open like in a second,

(44:48):
it's going to pull you up and possibly break your shoulders,
do all sorts of terrible stuff to your growing, and
you don't want to do that. So they've actually created
something called a slider which holds the chords together and
then as the shoot opens up, it kind of slides
further and further down, so it controls the opening of
your shoot to make it a much more pleasant experience.

(45:10):
And that's the one that you use for just a
solo a skydiving. There's another one called a drogue shoot
they use for tandem, right, and that is it's sort
of like a pilot shoot, but is bigger than a
pilot shoot. Right. Yes, it's in between pilot SHOOTE and canopy. Yeah,
and that is deployed, I mean kind of right afterward,
right right after you job. I don't know when the

(45:32):
drogue is deployed or not, because they could be because
the rip chord is pulled by the instructor. It's not
like the drogue pulls the main canopy out right. But
the reason the drogue is bigger is because even though
a bowling ball and a person would fall together at
the same speed to Earth in a vacuum, mass does

(45:54):
count when you add air friction. And when you're tandem,
you're presenting the same amount of surface area to the
to the resistance to the air as you are if
you're solo, because the person's on your back, but you've
got about double or more the weight. So you do
hit that terminal velocity at a higher speed of about
two hundred miles an hour, and you need a bigger

(46:15):
canopy and a larger drogue shoot to um to make
it again a pleasant experience when the canopy opens. Yeah,
and you also, you know, I think people what they
want is at freefall time. Yes, and I'm sure they're
maybe not guaranteed, but I'm sure they're sort of promised
five to a minute. Yeah, yeah, And I mean, like

(46:36):
it's that's not to say that the floating from a
parachute is. It's just a totally different experience, and you
go from one to another in like almost the blink
of an eye. It really does happen really fast, and
you're hollomating toward Earth. It's really really surprisingly cold up there.
And then all of a sudden, you know, your shoot
opens and you stop falling, and you're you're no longer

(46:58):
belly down, your your feet are angling, and you're just
kind of gliding along, floating on air. It's gotten quiet.
All of a sudden, you actually feel the temperatures start
to get warmer as you get closer and closer to
the earth, and you just get set down. It's it's
just an amazing experience. There's nothing else like it that
sounds great. I gotta try it out. I hope you do, man,

(47:19):
let me know. If you do, I'll watch you. We
would do it again, though, if I did it right.
I'm not sure Youmi would let me at this point. Really,
She's just like, why bother? You've done it? Yeah, she
did it once too. We actually kind of are like,
we did it once, we don't need to do it again.
This has made me want to do it again, but again,
I probably will just stay on the ground and watch you. Okay, Well,

(47:41):
I certainly love knowing what a life experience feels like,
so maybe I'll do it. Okay, Well, while we wait
for Chuck to do it, how about we do a
listener mail. Let's do it quick correction by the way,
And this is something that embarrassed that we forgot. But

(48:02):
in the cave episode where what was his name that
was trapped in the cave, Floyd Collins. Yeah, I could
think of a Felix bomb gardener, and we kept talking
about how cold it was like for fourteen degrees or whatever.
Obviously the temperature in the cave is because it's underground,
is a pretty static, steady number. That is not what

(48:23):
it's like on top of the ground. So I don't
understand that because there was ice mixed in with the
mud and the rock in sand cave, I don't know
what to tell you, my friends, it's possible sand cave
was a little more open to the surface. I don't know.
Maybe I saw it in multiple places that there was
plenty of ice to contend with, all right, but I

(48:47):
get you with you. I saw people groaned or shouted
at their their phone or whatever. It's like that that
was the one thing that was it That the cave
supposedly has a steady temperature and we don't even know
that that's true. Everybody, that's true, all right. So this
is the email, and it's about another correction that boy

(49:07):
you certainly heard from the bitters lovers of the world. Yeah,
when you said nobody wouldever just drink bitters, apparently a
lot of people drink bitters, and a lot of people
in Wisconsin drink bitters. Hey, guys, well, listening to the
most recent episode on tomorrow, amused by your exchange about
bitters being alcoholic. Chuck was amazed at bitters contained alcohol
at all and was confused while I was in grocery

(49:30):
stores and Josh explained that nobody would drink a bottle
of bitters. You said and said you put money on it. Yeah, well, Josh,
it sounds like you need to do a tour of
the wonderful state of Wisconsin. I could summarize this article
about the longest operating tavern in Wisconsin and number one
consumer of bitters in the world, but it's incredibly well written.
Read this while I take an ad break. And this
was from Kevin Pep Rocky and it was from Atlas Obscura,

(49:55):
Washington Island, Wisconsin bitters shots. What's the name of this thing?
How a tiny Wisconsin island became the world's biggest consumer
of bitters? Amazing? Ellis obscure rocks. They're great. And we
heard from plenty of people who said that not only
in Wisconsin but other places, like a shot of bitters
was a thing. Yeah, not only that, there's cocktails based

(50:17):
on angostura as the main ingredient, like an idea and
a half of bitters, which is crazy. Yeah, it's not
like I'm new to this whole thing either. I just
had not heard that at all. I'm not going to
try it or anything like that, but I'm impressed. I
hadn't heard this stuff either, So you know, we're learning
to I love that, Chuck, I love it. Well, if

(50:37):
you want to get in touch with us, like Kevin
Pep Rocky, Kevin Pep Rocky, and all the people who
wrote in erroneously about the cave temperature for Floyd Collins.
You can send us an email send it off to
stuff Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com. Stuff you Should Know
is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcast It's my

(51:00):
heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows.