Tandem skydiving is a relatively new concept, and the first real two-person under one parachute skydive happened in 1977(1). Then some clever parachute engineers in the US started along the innovation road and in 1983, the first properly engineered tandem system was jumped by its inventor. Four years later in 1987 a US patent was awarded to Ted Strong for the dual hawk system. Today there are about a million people worldwide who make their first jump this way, every year and that number is rising fast. That sounds like a lot and of course it is, but when there are six billion people in the world, we realise we are just scratching the surface. Like to know a more about what happens on a tandem skydive? there is a full section on our site.
Before Tandem skydiving, if you wanted to experience free fall, you had to either go through the conventional (or traditional) static line course and then progress through its stages and do a minimum of six jumps before you could be cleared to do a three second freefall – that’s what we ‘in the trade’ call a ‘hop and pop’ or a ‘clear and pull’ (depends on which side of the world you hail from). That’s a whole three seconds in free fall! (wow!) Not really much to get into, and when I went free fall it for the first time (a long time ago) I was more concerned about making sure I pulled the ripcord for my parachute and that I stayed stable. (2) I have to say that my first free fall was a tense time for me and I suspect for many others. I really wish we would have had the option to try a tandem first and it would have prepared me very well for what fun was to follow (and it is fun, take my word for it).
The other alternative, also relatively new (developed in the US by Ken Coleman, approved in 1980 and introduced to UK in 1984) is the accelerated freefall course, which gets you up to twelve thousand feet or more on your first skydive with two specially trained instructors holding onto your harness throughout after a whole day ground school. In some countries, such as Australia a tandem skydive is incorporated into the AFF system to give an early taste of the free fall aspect and get over any ‘sensory overload’ and also get used to altitude awareness and pulling the parachute for yourself. If you’d like to know more about accelerated free fall, otherwise known as AFF, there is a full section here.
The other option for people to taste some free fall was (and still is) to jump off a tall building, aerial, bridge or cliff. That’s called a BASE jump and it’s clearly outside of the scope of this site and definitely not recommended by us until you get licensed and further advanced in skydiving and even then only after you take some specialist training).
1. I’m an engineer and a skydiving instructor. In this piece I’m not talking about tandem parachuting or paragliding or soaring or anything which doesn’t involve free fall, and I’m not talking about things which were only ever drawings and may never really have been jumped. I’m talking about reality in the context of modern tandem skydiving.
2. It's very important to stay stable and face to earth before, during and after the parachute is pulled, to enhance the chances of a ‘clean’ deployment that doesn't tangle on anything.
