Here at acceleratedfreefall.com we're always trying to look forward to the future of skydiving and especially at helping you to get through your own first jump. Even so, it's still interesting from time to time to take a look at some of the history and background of skydiving, possibly with a wry smile and a few comments (groans?) about the clothing and the shape of parachutes. The attached Thruxton Archive gives a warm, sweet and rather nostagic viewpoint of the way things used to be in skydiving and we'd like to thank Jacqui Wright (the Parachute Technician, also known as a 'Rigger' at Thruxton) for assembling this wonderful piece of history.
I jumped at Thruxton as a 17 year old student and I remember many of these characters well. You'll see that most of the photographs are showing free fall equipment which looks very military in style and colour, that's because it was! Most of the kit in those days had been purchased from military surplus because that was the best available at the time. Specialist civilian parachute technicians and manufacturers built up experience on these systems and started to innovate and build new designs and these have evolved to the specialist equipment used today.
On this site you won't see any accelerated free fall or tandem, and thats because the era of this site was before that time. Having said that, I may have been one of the last people to teach AFF at Thruxton DropZone before it closed. I took my nephew Steve Sumner on his ground school and then up to 12,000ft for his 16th birthday present, an AFF level one skydive. Assisting me on that skydive (there must always be two AFF instructors on levels 1-3) was Tim Mace, one of the top skydivers in the world and who was later selected to join the space programme as a Cosmonaut.
Things have moved on since Thruxton days, helping us all to be safer and have more fun. It's still nice to look back occasionally and look at how things have progressed.
