At the Australian indoor skydiving championships the wind tunnel is your personal bottle of sky where you can prolong the simulation of freefall
G
iven the name, you would think that the sky is an integral part of the skydiving experience. The most integral, in fact. Yet tucked away in iFly facilities around the globe, hurtling through imperiously large wind tunnels, indoor skydivers might just disagree on a technicality.
The tunnels offer a prolonged simulation of skydiving’s freefall in 200km/h wind. The results, a spectacle to behold, with acrobatic flips and dizzying turns that seem to laugh in the face of gravity. They haven’t removed the sky, exactly. They’ve simply bottled it.
Kyra Poh, a competitor in this weekend’s Australian indoor skydiving championships, knows this equation all too well. “Indoors is like: unlimited time, limited space,” Poh says. “In the sky, we have unlimited space, but limited time.”
