My Airborne Training Journal

Day 6, 10 MAY 2023

I'm super late. I know. I didn't mean to wait this long. Yesterday was incredibly exhausting. We reached heat cat 5 again.

Yesterday I was practicing landing drills. We learned how to land if we're moving left, right, and forwards. We still have to learn how to land going back.

So, there are 5 points of contact that have to hit the ground. The balls of your feet, the calf, the thigh, the butt, and then your pull-up muscle. From there you need to kick up and over so you're on your back.

The technique is rather easy in all honesty, but hard to carry out. When you first land on your left. Before anything, you pull on the risers to your right to slow yourself. Once you hit the ground on the balls of your feet. You push your right knee into the left, exposing the calf, thigh and butt points of contact while simultaneously turning your body so the left side pull-up muscle hits the ground next.

Sounds easy, really isn't. We did a few Ground exercises before they had us leap off and edge. Once we got three reps in, regardless if they were good or not, we moved onto the Zipline training. We'd fall when ordered and had to perform the landing procedure. We had to get 2 consecutive good landings with three attempts in total.

Landing to the right was similar to landing to the left except you pull on the left risers, push your left knee into the right, and turn your body so your right pull-up muscle hits the ground. It's now that I realized that I forgot about what you do with the risers.

When you pull them, you bring them to your chest. Once you land, you move your hands above your face, not touching the risers still in your hand. Like you're about to fight someone. Once you land, you detach the parachute immediately since it can drag you.

We'll be doing dragging drills on the 12th. Yeah, this week is all about setting up the fundamentals of everything and the next is tower practice. Google says it'll be thunderstorms all next week, but I doubt that. I was going to go into a forward landing, but I'll do that later. See y'all later!