Incredible skydiving tricks

Two posts today since I've been so remiss. Long time friends and readers know I had a years long fling with skydiving. Never got very good at it but I hung around the scene long enough to know an incredible achievement when I see one. Like breaking this world record for vertical skydives.

OTTAWA, Ill. (AP) — Falling at speeds of up to 220 mph, a group of nearly 140 skydivers shattered the vertical skydiving world record as they flew heads-down in a massive snowflake formation in northern Illinois.

Three judges representing the Federation Aeronautique Internationale, the international air sports agency, certified that 138 skydivers created the formation Friday evening over Ottawa, about 80 miles southwest of Chicago. It took 15 attempts over three days for the team to break the previous record of 108 skydivers, which was set in 2009.

There are very few skydivers who could pull this off without killing somebody on entering the formation. At those speeds you can't afford to make a mistake. And it's impossible to explain how hard it is to even make that formation when they're diving vertically. It's a million times harder than when they do it while they're falling flat. And even those formations aren't that easy. You have to log a whole of lot jumps before anyone will even let you try it.