Taking Place This Week In Overton, NV

The top Wingsuit flyers from around the globe have gathered at Skydive Fyrosity in Overton, NV to compete in one of the most challenging skydiving competition – 2nd FAI World cup of Wingsuit Flying.

This week, 50-70 athletes from over 10 countries and five continents will test their mental and physical strength against each other in two disciplines; Performance Flying and Acrobatic Flying.

The 2nd FAI World Cup of Wingsuit flying will crown the best wingsuit pilot – the fastest, the toughest and the most accurate one will take the gold.

The 2nd FAI World Cup of Wingsuit Flying consists of 2 separate events: Acrobatic Event and Performance Events. The Acrobatic Competition Event consists of team of three people, two acrobatic performers and a one camera operator capturing the performance on video.

The team will exit the aircraft at 12,500 above the ground and the performers have a working time of 65 seconds to demonstrate to the judges their ability and acrobatic skills, consisting of flyovers, flips, turns, relative flight. The Artistic event has seven rounds (jumps) and is judged for accuracy of performance, artistic performance, completion of the formations, grips, and quality of the camera work.

The camera operator and the image the competitor camera person delivers is part of the acrobatic performance. Each jump is considered one round, one round is considered complete when all competitors have successfully completed the jump for each round including re-jumps.

The Performance Event is an individual competitor event consisting of three tasks – Speed, Time and Distance. Each task consists of three rounds (jumps) for the total of nine competition rounds (jumps).

The performance event does not have aerial video, however ground-to-air video can be used if such equipment is available. Therefore, the performance event is judged by a state-of-the-art GPS system which records the performance of each competitor delivered to the judges after each jump for evaluation.

Once the data is downloaded into the software and evaluated the person going the fastest, furthest and spends the most time in the air is declared the winter in each task. The aircraft exit altitude is 12,500 feet above the ground up to 4 miles away from the landing area. The beginning of the performance evaluation starts at 9,842.5 ft above the ground and ends at 6,561.6 ft. The competitor performing the best within the 3,280 ft evaluation window gets the gold medal.

The competition runs through November 9th.

(Source: Skydive Fyrosity news release. Images from file)

FMI: www.SkydiveFyrosityLasVegas.com, www.fai.org