#accelerated freefall

Not long to go now until the big leap into the unknown.

In all honesty, I'd completely forgotten about the fact that the jump was only around the corner. It only hit me when Sally, my proposed skydiving instructor (from Skydive Hibaldstow), sent an email to me and the two other people who will be with me at the ground school for training. It was just a brief hello to remind us to bring our medical forms with us and telling us what to wear, along with telling us what to expect on the training day.

At the bottom of the email was an attachment of the AFF1 course notes, which the instructor added were the same ones that we would use in the classroom, and that we should read up beforehand.

There's a lot of stuff to take in.

The AFF1 is the first level of the accelerated freefall course. Anybody who wants to qualify as a skydiver for kicks has do go through eight levels of this madness. Even at the first level, you're still expected to know everything about your chute and what looks normal, how to deploy the bastard and the drill to initiate if something goes wrong. That's before you even get on the plane. At the end of the day, when you jump at the first level, you're expected to deploy your own chute.

I'll say again that I've never done a jump in my life. And that includes a tandem, which I'm assuming 99% of people do before they decide to do the AFF1. It's not a prerequisite however. I've always been one to push myself. I've had people go on at me before about doing a tandem jump, and I'm not putting them down or anything, but they have had no responsibility whatsoever during the entire jump besides listening to instructions and just enjoying the plummet down to earth. It takes real guts for somebody to even think about doing the AFF1. Going through the rest of the course notes, towards the end it starts going on about what to look out for in terms of chute malfunctions and annoyances; I'm expected to sort any of those out myself if those things happen. On my first jump. If it happens.