4-Way Formation Skydiving – how do we compete?

A skydiving competition can appear like a very strange event to those not initiated in the sport, but like most competitions it primarily consists of teams and judges. Each 4-way team consists of five skydivers, four to build formations and a camera man to capture the action. The judges decide who wins each round based on the video evidence submitted by the camera man.

A competition typically consists of 10 rounds where each round is a single skydive made by each team from an aircraft at an altitude of 10,000ft. The judges decide beforehand what formations will be included in each round and some examples are below;

Each round consists of 5-6 formations drawn at random from a pool of almost 40 different formations. The sequence of formations is a critical element of the round as each team has to decide what the fastest possible way to complete each sequence is. Once they have decided on their approach, they will try to repeat the sequence as many times as possible during each round.

After jumping from the plane, the team have 35 seconds to complete as many formations as possible while videoing them. The camera man is critical to the success of the team because the judges only score the team on the basis of the video. Each formation successfully completed in the correct sequence and captured on video is awarded 1 point. At an agreed altitude (typically 3,500ft), the team fly apart from each other in a superman-style body position (a skill known as tracking) and deploy their parachutes to land safely and present their video to the judges.

It is difficult to understand the skill involved in building formations in freefall until you realize that the team are falling towards the ground at speeds in excess of 120 miles per hour (or 200km per hour). This is equivalent to building formations in a Category 3 Hurricane.