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IT'S the ultimate gravity sport - falling through the atmosphere at more than 250 mph with only a parachute to save you from oblivion.
The sport of skydiving is not as accessible as most extreme sports but there are many centres in Britain where you can get off the ground.
Competitions take place at club, regional, national and international level in the UK and unlike most competitive sports, skydiving allows men and women to compete on a equal footing – the only limits to success being your own determination to win.
The British National Championships is an annual event at which the national team for the following year’s competitions are selected.
The basic sport involves jumping out of an aircraft at 3,000 feet and attempting to land on a 5cm disc situated on an electronic recording surface.
Distance from the "disc" is measured in centimetres up to 16cm. The aggregate distance over a number of rounds denotes placement with the lowest total distance placed first.
This is the oldest of the competitive disciplines, where parachute development has enabled competitors to achieve greater accuracy with today’s top competitors training on a 3cm disc.
But there are also other disciplines such as free-fall gymnastics, in which competitors are judged on how quickly and precisely they perform set routines of loops and turns.
A popular discipline within clubs is team formation skydiving, where four to eight people perform a series of predetermined formations as many times as possible with a given time period (four people, five seconds; eight people, 50 seconds).
Canopy formation is another variation for teams, where members link their parachutes together to form predetermined designs as many times as possible within a set time.
Other variations include freeflying where competitors jump as a team of two plus a camera flyer and show a choreographed sequence, and skysurfing, where participants ride the aerial waves, quite literally surfing across the sky in a discipline with massive spectator appeal.
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