#staticline

A weekly snap shot of activities at the Peterlee Drop Zone including more of those 100 Tandem Jumps made during the 5 days Wed 5 - Sun 9 April 17 with www.SkydiveAcademy.org.uk

Combat dive school took me a long time to talk about but the next school should go a little bit quicker.  After dive school all pararescue jumpers move on to airborne school so they can learn how to static line jump.  I will give a little bit of a brief summary and what it is like in airborne school and what you do in airborne school.  Most of my information comes from PJ’s themselves or documentaries about PJ’s. Mike Maroney is a big source for me becomes he talks about his experience all the time when he was a PJ.

           Airborne school is an army school.  What I hear is that the PJ’s like to call this air force appreciation school because the air force gets a lot more funding and they say the food is better as well as the living conditions.  Since combat dive school is a special operation school, they have good instructors and great food so that does not prepare you for airborne school at all.  Airborne school happens at Fort Benning in Georgia so depending on the time of year you go it can be really hot or really cold and can make your time there really miserable.

           The main objective of airborne school is static line jumps.  Static line jumps is when you are in a big cargo plane with your team, or “stick” as they are called,  and you jump out of the plane.  The cord that opens your parachute is attached to a line in the plane so when you jump out it automatically pulls your chute for you.  Static line jump is mainly meant for low altitude jumps into enemy positions and is meant to put a lot of soldiers on the ground as quickly as possible.  This usually happens when there is a chance of taking anti aircraft fire.  You use a different kind of chute when you static line jump instead of free fall.   In free fall you use a parasail that you can control and can give you a slow descent or fast descent.  The chute you use during static line jumps were built for paratroopers and are not controllable and can drop you from the sky really fast.  People can get injured very easy from static line jumps because they can fall into trees or just not have the right technique to land.