What Is A Skydiving Landing Like?

Landing your parachute correctly is one of the most important parts of a successful skydive, and also the most daunting. The good news is a little bit of the right training is all you need to stick a perfect-score skydive landing, whether you are jumping for the first time via a tandem skydive, or learning how to skydive solo. 

Let’s start with some information and skydiving landing tips to help you understand exactly what it’s like to return to the Earth after an adventure in the sky.

How Parachutes Work

The skydiving parachute – also known as a canopy – is a technology marvel that has been evolving for centuries. While the modern iteration of the parachute is much closer to an aircraft wing, early designs resembled giant umbrellas with wooden frames. Perhaps the most famous version of the parachute is the jellyfish-like round parachutes of the early days of military and sport jumping, made famous in movies and children’s toys.

Today’s square (or, more specifically, rectangular) designs give a parachute landing great precision, enabling the canopy pilot to seamlessly touch down in the exact desired spot. This is done by controlling the same forces that allow airplanes to fly – lift, drag, weight, and thrust.

Parachutes are built to always descend, but their efficient shape and the weight suspended underneath mean they have power that can be converted to lift at the right moment. Pulling down on the ‘brakes’ (one in each hand) causes the parachute to flare, or, in more familiar terms, level out and slow down.   

Flaring a parachute works almost exactly like an airplane wing during landing. By using the brakes to change the angle and shape of the parachute, the skydiver creates lift and lands as gently as hopping down from a single step.    

How Do Skydivers Know Where to Land?

Skydiving landings are more than just full-send and hope for the best. There’s actually quite a bit of science and planning that goes into a successful parachute landing. Skydivers learn early on how to calculate wind speed and direction, distance over the ground, and rate of descent to plan their parachute flight.

Changing weather and wind conditions mean that every day, and sometimes multiple times throughout the day, skydivers need to be paying attention to their environment and reacting to it. Planning starts from the best altitude and location to exit the airplane all the way down to which direction to take a final approach to landing.

Experienced skydivers, instructors, pilots, and even skydiving students will all assess wind and weather conditions to plan their location for each portion of the jump so that they can be as confident as possible in where they are going to land. 

Tandem Skydive Landings

When you make a tandem skydive, you are securely harnessed to your instructor at your hips and shoulders, almost like you’re giving your instructor a piggyback. As you can imagine, this makes for a creative landing strategy – it’s not easy for two people tied together to stick a stand-up landing! Instead of waddling around like a four-legged human sandwich, you and your instructor will slide into the landing on your butts.

Your instructor will give you the cue to lift your legs at the hips (like an L sit) as you approach the ground during your final approach. While there is a chance you’ll be able to land standing up with your instructor, most times folks slide into home base on their bum. As you can see from the miles of smiles on first-timers’ faces, it’s easy peasy and takes nothing away from the phenomenal feeling of flying through the big blue Long Island sky!

Solo Landings

Solo skydiving landings look a little more like what you’re probably used to when you think of someone touching back down to Earth. The coveted stand up landing is much more common in solo skydiving (though even experienced skydivers do their share of rolling in the dirt!), and some skydivers even make stylish landings their main focus.

Brand new student skydivers go through extensive training to learn the techniques needed to safely land a parachute, and their instructor even guides them down by radio the first few jumps. After that, landings are what you make of them! Some skydivers just plan to get to the ground as safely as possible so they can go up and do it again. Others turn landing into an art and study the discipline of high-performance landings, which can include speeds nearing 100 mph and some crafty tricks!

How It Feels

Skydiving is a feeling unlike anything else in the world, and each portion of the skydive even has its own unique sensations. Most people associate skydiving with the freefall portion of the jump, but the fun doesn’t end once the speed is over and you have deployed your parachute.

Canopy flight feels amazing in its own right. Some like it mild and relish in the peaceful glide back to terra firma; others like it wild and zip through the air, keeping the adrenaline pumping. Even the landing comes with unmatched excitement – feeling the ground getting closer, seeing the blades of grass zip by your toes, and then finally slowing down and gently plopping back to Earth. 

The skydive landing isn’t just the end of a jump, it’s another part of the process worth reflecting upon and celebrating! The only way you can get to the landing, though, is to take the leap! Ready? Come jump with us!