How Long Does Indoor Skydiving Last?

Once, Albert Einstein was asked to describe his theory of relativity for an audience who couldn’t really do the calculations on “E equals MC squared.” He had a pretty awesome answer for that one:

“Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute. That’s relativity.”

Makes perfect sense now, right? If you’ve ever had to give a timed presentation in front of a high-pressure audience, you know how much harder that is to do than, say, have a conversation with a friend on the phone.

Here’s where that simplified theory of relativity really starts to get interesting, though: the moments where you’re seriously having the time of your life, creating epic positive memories. Those times, for some reason, feel both impossibly short and impossibly long, all at once. The same is true with how long an indoor skydive lasts. Here’s why time flies when you fly.

Tunnel Flying Expands Your Cognitive Capabilities

When people arrive for indoor skydiving and discover that indoor skydiving is booked in increments of minutes, they’re often a little surprised. Hear this, though: A minute in the “windytube” is hardly a minute at all. Not, at least, in any way you’re used to thinking about it.

Indoor skydiving is a fully 4-dimensional sensory experience that removes you completely from the context of physics as you have come to know it over the course of the rest of your life. When you do something as new-to-you as that, your brain has a lot of catch-up to do. Your brain will have to literally build new connections in order to process the experience. That process has the squash-and-stretch effect that Claudia Hammond describes in her book, Time Warped, about how our internal clocks differ from the “official” clock on the wall. It’s a pretty cool concept on the page and an even cooler concept when you experience it firsthand.

Tunnel Flying Expands Your Physical Capabilities

Make no mistake: Indoor skydiving is a workout! Most non-athletes find that a couple of minutes of flying is enough to noticeably tax their muscles. You’ll work parts of yourself you didn’t even know existed. Even once you’ve spent enough time in the ‘tube to have strengthened each and every one of those sinews, It is a rare flyer indeed who can train their indoor skydiving chops for more than three or four sessions in a day. (That said: Lots of us earn our ice packs and ibuprofen trying!)

Tunnel Flying Takes Time to Do Well

If the amount of time you’re flying is a matter of minutes, why do you need to plan hours around being here with us? Well: tunnel flying is challenging enough that we need to school you up with some serious prep, y’all.

The first thing you need to know is that this’ll take a minute. The indoor skydiving wind tunnel is a real sport with real excitement and real skills involved, not a roller-coaster where you’re strapped in and sent off without so much as a how-do-you-do. In order to fly, you’ll need to go through a short “ground school” to brief you on safety and procedures. You can expect it to take about half an hour after your 10-to-20-minute check-in time for your instructor to run you through the proper body position and communication methods while you’re inside the wind tunnel. (Spoiler: There’s no talking in there. The wind is loud.) Once class is out, you can expect to spend about ten minutes putting on your indoor skydiving gear. Only then will you slip into the airflow.

Once you’re done, there’s a good chance you’re going to want to watch everyone else fly: the first-timers; the kid birthday parties; the hard-charging skydiving athletes working on their fancy moves. It’s addictive–ask anybody! …And make sure you leave some time in your schedule for a meal at our very own Bombshelter Bar & Grill. You’ll work up an appetite in there, and the Bombshelter knows just how to whet it.

Tunnel Flying Is Still A Great Value

When is a minute not a minute? When you’re comparing it to other kinds of minutes and contrasting the value, of course. If you’re new to indoor skydiving, you’ll purchase a first-timer package that will include somewhere in the range of 2-6 minutes per person of flight time. When you consider that traditional out-of-a-plane skydiving freefall clocks in at roughly 60 seconds, you’ll start to see the dollar signs light up: In the wind tunnel, you’re already getting two to eight times that amount of time in the airflow playground. While skydiving is incredibly worthy of its price tag, we think you understand what we’re trying to demonstrate, here.

Now that you have a better understanding of how long indoor skydiving lasts, the next step is to try it for yourself! Make your reservation today, and you’ll see how indoor skydiving can change your relationship to the humble minute. We’re looking forward to spending our time with you!