October 11, 2023 – Skydiving

Earlier this month, a 104-year-old Chicago woman made history by breaking the World Record for the oldest skydiver. She sadly died just a week after her historic jump.
The modern parachute was invented in the late 18th century by a Frenchman named Louis-Sebastien Lenormand. He made the first recorded public jump in 1783, when he leaped from the tower of the Montpellier observatory using a 14-foot parachute with a wooden frame. He thought his invention would help people stuck in burning buildings escape unharmed. He coined the word “parachute” two years later. He used the Latin prefix para meaning “against” and the French word chute for “fall”. So parachute literally means a device “against a fall”.
Skydiving traces its beginnings to French aeronaut Andre-Jacque Garnerin, who made several descents from a hot air balloon in 1797. Today of course, most skydiving is done from a plane. Typical jump altitudes range from 7,500 to 15,000 feet above the ground, with a freefall time (the time between jumping out of the plane and the parachute being deployed) of between 40 and 85 seconds.
The military first used parachutes on tethered observation balloons in World War I. Today, modern militaries use them to deploy airborne forces and supplies, and they’re commonly used by special forces.
Tandem skydivers will fall around 120 mph. But if you’re flying solo, you can adjust your body position to either increase or decrease your fall rate. According to Guinness World Records, the fastest speed recorded for a freefalling skydiver was just over 329 mph! As far as the highest freefall parachute jump, a former Google executive broke the record in 2014 when he made a jump from the stratosphere. He was 135,890 feet high and the fall lasted 15 minutes.
Humans aren’t the only ones who skydive – dogs do too! In 2016, a German Shepherd named Arrow became the world’s first skydiving antipoaching dog. He jumped with his handler from an airforce base near Pretoria, South Africa. Arrow was chosen as a puppy for his temperament and was trained first to repel from a helicopter (attached to his handler, of course), before training to skydive. Arrow is part of an elite team of dogs that are specially trained to take down poachers in Africa. They’re trained to sniff out the poacher, attack, and hold them down until more help arrives. Around 100 of these dogs have been used in game reserves all across Africa, and in one region they caught more than 100 poachers in 18 months! Learn more here.