Why Weekends Aren’t Enough For Skydivers

When you show up at our dropzone to make your first tandem skydive, you might be surprised at how busy the place is. You’ll see dozens of people in custom gear running around, bustling about the business of skydiving–and they’re not working. They’re playing. If you’re intrigued about what it might be like to have skydiving as a hobby, or how to get a skydiving license, you’ve come to the right place. At Skydive Perris, we have a thriving community of experienced skydivers.

There are a few things you’ll be interested to know about the typical life of a skydiver. Curious? Here are a few choice facts.

1. It’s Not Just A Weekend Thing (Depending Where You Go).

If you’re like most tandem passengers, you’ll come out to make a skydive on a weekend day when you have time to do the class and celebrate a job well done after the jump is over. For most sport skydivers, however, weekends are not enough.

“Fun jumpers” in many places are limited to weekends just because of plane availability, or they’re stuck on the ground by bad weather. A big dropzone in a place with mild, consistent weather–like our “home DZ” of Perris–is open all week long, year-round.

Skydive Perris is pretty special, actually. We’re one of the busiest dropzones on the planet, capable of sending up over 100 planes full of skydivers every single day we’re open. Because of that, people come from all over the world to jump here.

2. We Go Again And Again And Again And Again.

The average sport skydiver, on a good day at the dropzone, will jump five or six times over the course of a day, packing his or her parachute in-between jumps. Highly motivated skydivers can double that number–and a member of a team training for a skydiving competition can jump twenty times a day. (Yeah. That’s, like, totally exhausting.)

3. We Have A Bunch Of Different Ways That We Can Go About This “Falling” Business.

When you do a tandem skydive, you exit the plane and freefall in a belly-to-earth configuration. It’s super-rad and works brilliantly. That said–when you get your skydiving license and take it up as a hobby, you’ll find that there are a lot of other ways to skydive.

For example: you can choose to stay belly-to-earth, but get out of the plane in a group and make different formations with each other as you fall. (That’s called “relative work”.) You can freefall in a sitting position, standing up, with your feet pointed up and your head pointed down, or in any number of positions where your belly button isn’t looking down at the dropzone. (That’s called “freeflying”.) You can put on a wingsuit–the proper name for the “flying squirrel” suit you’ve undoubtedly seen on viral videos–or a tracking suit, and zoom along a more horizontal path. You can focus entirely on the many special methodologies of flying a parachute. You can even try indoor skydiving at a vertical wind tunnel like the one we have right on the Perris dropzone. There are so many ways to do it, you can have thousands of jumps and still experience a new skydive every time.

4. We Look At The World A Little Differently.

We think about purchases in the context of how many jump tickets the cost represents. We analyze every flag we see in terms of how windy it is for landing our parachutes. We pray for bad weather on days we can’t make it to the dropzone so the climate can “get it out of its system”. We plan our vacations around skydiving get-togethers (of which there are hundreds, all over the world!) We spend free hours adding new and exciting entries to our logbooks–aircraft types, new dropzones; new jumping buddies; new ways of getting out of the plane; etc. And we can’t think of a better way to relax and let off some steam than falling for 13,500 feet.

Leonardo Da Vinci summarized it best, really. “Once you have tasted flight,” he said, “You will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been, and there you will always long to return.”

Ready to become part of our skydiving community? At Skydive Perris, you can work towards a skydiving license through our accelerated freefall (AFF) course and learn to skydive solo. We look forward to welcoming you into our thriving skydiver community!