Happy birthday Melanie!

Miss Melanie, of course, is one of Blue Skies Mag’s amazing contributors, and has been with us from the start. Inspirational, courageous, giving, loving, hilarious, and awesome, Melanie has helped our little magazine in more ways than we can count. We’ve heard from so many of you that her words impact your lives, too. So, join us in wishing this beautiful woman a great birthday and another fantastic year!

PS – Maybe a good birthday gift would be to like her Highcomms.com Facebook page ;)

PPS – We have a $5 reward for any information on how in hell #6 got so lucky.

Team Polte is a brand new team from Finland. Team member Lauri says, “The concept of Polte is to have fun and fly free, and share it to the world by videos and photos. That’s how people can really see what Polte and skydiving is all about. Our future plans include competing and get more involved in different skydiving events around the world and arrange our own events in Finland. At the same time we offer services for companies to promote their products in form of videos, photos and stories.”

Team Polte: (l to r) Matti, Tuomas, and Lauri

• Lauri Aapro
• Tuomas Hulkkonen
• Matti Miilumäki
• Jonne Kuoksa

We can’t wait to see what comes out of Finland and Team Polte!

Well there’s nothing like raising awareness for our Troops. Throwing yourself off some insane mountains, buzzing the cliff face in a wingsuit and having a ton of fun is certainly a great way to do so.

In the build up to Veterans Day on 11 Nov (the funny British way of saying November 11), our British colleagues sell red poppies and everyone around the country wears one in recognition of those that have served. Our friends Jump4Heroes have emblazoned their gear with Poppy logos in an effort to get the message out in their own ‘extreme’ way. Our favorite video of theirs shows some pretty darn cool wingsuit proximity flying in the Italian mountains. Check it out and click ‘like’ if you support their efforts.

Apparently the “latest trend in extreme sports” is extreme hotel booking. Is this a thing at your drop zone now? Are we all behind the extreme trend power curve?

Either way, it’s a fun commercial with the always adorable JT Holmes:

You could be just as awesome.

Want to join them in the ranks of awesome people who write for us? Talk to me! Email me, Lara, at lara@blueskiesmag.com.

Filmed on location at Chicagoland Skydiving Center, featuring Dean Ricci, Melanie Curtis and Sydney Owen.

Photo by: Despair, Inc.

Getting into competitive canopy piloting is no easy feat, as many bruised bums and battered skydivers can attest to. The siren song of whistling 300 HMA lines is irresistible to many and just about every day a guardian angel gets a workout as the next Nick Batch/Greg Windmiller/Jay Moledzki (pick your favorite) stabs out of the corner for the first time.

In order to provide an environment where canopy pilots can train safely and receive proper coaching and feedback, John Nolan has established Canopy Piloting Training Series (CPTS). The CPTS will serve FLCPA pilots and provide quality training events for the pilots participating in the FLCPA league meets.

Their first event is coming up next weekend and will be hosted at the Raeford Parachute Center September 2nd-4th. Wold class canopy pilot (and Golden Knight) Greg Windmiller will be the event coach. Participants will train on 5′ inflatable course markers on the Raeford pond in Speed, Distance and Zone Accuracy. This event will serve as a great training event for the upcoming USPA Canopy Piloting Nationals (Skydive Spaceland, TX, September 14th-17th) but non-competitive pilots will also given opportunity to be coached in high performance landings.

Watch this space for future announcements and updates from their camps, and check out the CPTS Facebook page for more information and camp dates.  We wholeheartedly support this kind of initiative and applaud John for taking this project on.

Cost for coaching is $100 per day, or $200 for all three days. Interested participants can contact John Nolan by e-mail or communicate through their Facebook page. The fee covers coaching and video debrief of every jump, refreshments, an event DVD (containing photos and edited videos to take home to learn from), catered meal (Saturday) and indoor air-conditioned packing.

The CPTS would like to acknowledge and thank Sun Path Products, SkySystems USA, Performance Designs, Alti-2 and Vigil for supporting this event.

John Nolan performs the weedwhacker flawlessly.

We had the competitors interview each other. They each chose 2-3 questions from the following list, plus 1 of their own:

* What does it take to be a Big Boy?
* What is your best pickup line?
* How do you stay safe while going all out?
* Explain why, aerodynamically, this event is being held at Mile-Hi Skydiving in Colorado?
* What is your occupation?
* What color and size are your big boy pants?
* Do you shave your balls? (Tutti wants to know)

Enjoy.

Darin, Louie, Blikkies, Greg and Pablito = UPT Rigging Studs

We stopped by the UPT rigging loft the other day and found not one, not two, but all FIVE of the hot UPT rigging geniuses! If you’ve ever wondered who was behind your Vector or Sigma, wonder no more. Now you can easily identify them, should you ever run into one at the drop zone. Say thanks and get them some cake – we hear they like that.

In honor of the last American space shuttle launch, our July Jump a Random Skydiver is astronaut Fred Leslie. He and his wife Kathy were on the Discovery launch jump (a peculiarly Florida tradition of skydiving at the same time a space shuttle launches). We didn’t have room for everything Fred and Kathy talked about with us, so here is a little extra, because pixels don’t cost…much.

Fred and Kathy Leslie jump with the shuttle Discovery | Photo by Curt Bartholomew

photo by Curt Bartholomew

“The launch is one of the best things. You do a lot of training in simulators and you also train on the vehicle. When the vehicle goes out to the pad you’ll go out there and strap in and do sort of a dirt dive, [practice] some emergency exits in the thing. It’s usually very active, there are still engineers out there putting things in, checking things out and there are a lot of trucks going by and all kinds of activity. But when you go out on a launch day…nobody’s there. Except just a few people, and they strap you in, real tight, and then they leave. They close the hatch, and I had a window seat, so I could see the white room, that’s the little room you walk in to. And you can see it kind of slowly moving away. And you know that, hey, we’re serious, we’re gonna go.

“But our flight did delay several times. We got called out twice and didn’t go. It is a huge letdown. You’re very ready to go, psyched up, ready to do what you’re supposed to do and then they say, ‘Oh, we’re not going.’ And so it’s tough. The first time was a mechanical problem, and the second time was a weather problem. The first time, we counted down to T-minus twenty minutes and the second time we counted down to T-minus five minutes. And then we held, and held, and then finally said we’re not gonna go. And one something about that is that when they say you’re not going, it takes about an hour to get back out. The crew has to come all the way back out, unlock the elevators, safe the vehicle, come back up, open the hatch, un-strap you, and help you out. But if you go…you’re there in eight and a half minutes. So it’s a lot better to go than to get back out.”

Is there anything remotely comparable to going to space?

“Well, I mean skydiving is something you can do every weekend. Even if you’re a professional astronaut, you’re not going to fly in space every weekend. Typically they’ll make a flight and they may wait five to ten years for the next one…So there’s a long time between flights, typically. But skydiving, you can do that every weekend if you want to. And there’s some stress in skydiving, like important positions and everyone’s counting on you and you’re gonna be on video. You know, you have to concentrate on that just as well. On the shuttle, during the ascent, most of it is automated, so you’re just kind of letting the computer do its thing. And if there’s some emergency, you have some things to do. If we lose an engine and we cannot turn around to land, or we cannot get it to the Transatlantic Abort Site, which is in Zaragoza, Spain, then we would bail out, so we do wear parachutes.”

Emergency procedures?

“If you ever see the crew, when they’re getting in, they’re wearing a harness and inside, on the seat, is a parachute. So when you’re inside and you lay down, they connect a parachute to risers and some side links. If, for some reason, you cannot make it to a hard surface runway, in the even that there’s a problem—you lose an engine, have a power failure, something like that—the orbiter doesn’t float, so you would have to get out. My job was to extend a spring loaded pole below the side of the hatch—there’s a hatch with an explosive bolt that blows off— my job was to pull the release and extend that pole outside the vehicle. Then we would connect what is essentially a static-line to that and we would roll out. It would be automatic from there, there’s a parachute that opens, a 26’ round canopy. It’s small so you are going to hit hard. The intention is to land in water. The suit, the one we wear for the ascent is about 70 pounds, so yeah, you’re gonna hit kinda hard. But not as hard as if you’d stayed in the vehicle.”

And, if you’ve read this month’s issue, you know Fred is the subject of a great conspiracy:

If you still can’t get enough, here’s even more – the full, unedited interview. Beware, it took place on the deck of Skydive DeLand during big-way landings, so there is a considerable peanut gallery:

Download audio file (AstronautJARSinterview.mp3)

This one comes to us from the Arizona Vertical Challenge and Niklas Daniel. Post your best captions in the comments!

your caption here | photo by Niklas Daniel