SportTechie’s Athlete’s Voice series features the views and opinions of the athletes who use and are powered by technology. As part of this series, SportTechie chatted with Danny Cordido and Dusty Shaw of iFly Crucible, a professional indoor skydiving team, ahead of their appearance at the third-annual World Cup of Indoor Skydiving in Bahrain. Their two-person team finished 10th out of the 19 teams in their dynamic flying category.
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In October, iFly Austin indoor skydiving instructors Danny Cordido, 23, and Dusty Shaw, 28, stepped into an enormous glass cylinder in Bahrain. They were competing against the world’s top fliers in a sport that’s barely six years old.
Dynamic flying has been rapidly growing over the past few years as access to indoor skydiving tunnels, such as those operated by Team Crucible’s sponsor iFly, has expanded. Athletes are scored based on both technical and artistic merit. They fly in a three-dimensional space, held aloft in a vertical wind-tunnel.
Each team competes through two rounds. In the first round, the Speed Round, they have to complete a series of patterns that were randomly drawn before the competition began. They’re judged on technical performance in addition to speed. In the second round, the Free Round, teams have 60 seconds to perform their own choreography and can choose the music they fly to, or demo new moves in an effort to stand out from the competition.
Both Cordido and Shaw also have skydiving licenses but have logged less than 150 actual skydives combined. Instead, they’ve dedicated most of their professional and personal lives to the indoor tunnel, which demands a much more technical level of flying compared with the open sky. Currently, there are only a few hundred people in the world who can fly at their ability level.
Lights, Cameras, Action
Cordido: “Inside the tunnel we use whatever is at our dispense: mostly lights and cameras. What’s helped us is the development of [in-tunnel LED lights]: they put up dynamic lights for us and I think they’ll start putting them in every tunnel. They help us to maintain our formation and keep note of where we need to be in the tunnel for the dynamic lines.
Shaw: “It’s a lot of camera work. We have a camera [a Panasonic Lumix G7 with a 14-42 mm lens] set up on the outside of the wind tunnel and we’re always watching ourselves. We fly one minute then review for three minutes. We can see our form, what we busted on, and how fast we’re moving.”
Keeping Time
Shaw: “We have to see how fast we’re going so we always time ourselves. When we fly, the fastest time is the better. So let’s say we fly a 59-second line, we don’t know [our time] until we get out and watch the camera. We have a stopwatch on our phones and start it as we go in.”
Cordido: “At the competitions they set up lasers at the door so as soon as you get in it starts the timers then stops automatically when the last person exits.”
Tunnel Design and Conditions
Shaw: “There’s no way we could possibly be at our level now if we were in old-school tunnels. iFly’s creation of a 14-foot circular glass wind tunnel with faster fans has been incredible for us.”
Shaw: “We fly so much so we know what the wind fees like at like 10 or 15 different tunnels. Every tunnel flies totally different. In Austin, we have a softer net, versus iFly Westchester, which is very powerful. It depends on the technology of the tunnel and the evolution of the technology at the time the tunnel was constructed. The tunnel in Bahrain isn’t an iFly tunnel: it’s slower and has choppier winds. So we use an hour of training we have before the competition to just feel out the winds.”
Indoor Versus Outdoor Skydiving
Shaw: “The sport [of competitive dynamic indoor skydiving] is so small so everyone kind of knows each other. There’s only a select 500 people in the whole word that can fly in the open category just because it takes so much time and money to invest in that.”
Cordido: “The old school skydivers are surprised with how fast we accelerate because of the tunnel. You have to be a lot more precise in the tunnel because you have to maintain yourself within walls. In the sky, you may not notice errors and it may take longer to correct it. As far as skydiving goes, how many jumps you have equates to how much experience you have with the canopy [parachute]. I may be a better flier, but under canopy, [traditional skydivers] have the advantage. We’re in it together. If anything, we can work together to progress each other.”