Tunnel to sky: converting your skills

A tunnel gives you minutes of continuous flight where a skydive gives you seconds. You can work on one control at a time, and your coach can fix your position while you fly. The tunnel leaves out everything around the flying on a skydive, so coming back to the sky safely starts with knowing which skills carry over.

What carries over

Position work carries over well, and it builds faster in the tunnel than in freefall. That covers back-fly and the recovery position drill, the neutral sit and its turns, and transitions from back to head-up.

It also covers fall-rate control, head-down off the net with turns each way, sit to head-down flips, and the mechanics of the approach and the dock.

Tunnel time can replace some of the practice jumps in a course. The final jumps that finish a course are always sky jumps. Getting to a solid static head-down often takes somewhere between 10 and 20 hours of tunnel time, depending on whether you are also working on dynamic skills. The hours are a guide. The standard is the coach’s checklist.

Tunnels also teach head-down positions in their own order. Many teach the daffy first and the shelf second. Flyers who learn head-down in the sky more often start with the straddle. Arm positions learned in the tunnel sometimes need adapting once you have a rig on your back.

What only the sky teaches

The tunnel gives you no altitude awareness, gear or pin checks, exit, hill, jump run, breakoff, tracking or deployment. Big-way traffic, exit stacks and staged breakoffs only exist in the sky, and a tunnel cannot recreate them.

That is why the final jumps of every course here are flown in freefall. They include the breakoff, the track and the deployment.

You can fly very well in the tunnel and still be new to everything around the flying on a skydive.

Coming back to the sky

Work through this every time you come back from a tunnel block:

1. Keep up a regular yearly skydive count alongside your tunnel time, so your sky skills stay current.
2. Expect your altitude awareness to have faded on the first jumps back from a long tunnel block, and step the intensity down. Belly jumps, higher pulls and time under canopy rebuild the sky picture.
3. Wear two audibles and check your visual altimeter often while that awareness comes back.
4. Learn how traffic works on a load, one step at a time, before you get on big vertical jumps.
5. On exit, think gear, pins and jump run.
6. Get your container ready for freefly: a tight pilot chute pouch, and pins checked more than once. Most manufacturers’ ratings do not cover freefly deployment speeds, so check the gear itself.

Worn pouches keep coming up in the incident record. Whatever the label says, check the pouch itself. A worn pouch can let the pilot chute out early, and in head-up that premature deployment happens fast.

Bring your position skills from the tunnel, and rebuild altitude awareness, gear checks and breakoff in the sky.

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Advisory, educational content. Tunnel curricula and level systems vary between operators. Train with a qualified freefly coach, and comply with your federation and drop zone.