Stuff You Should Know - How Skydiving Works

Episode Date: April 11, 2023

At 13,000 feet the ground is nothing but far-away squares of land, and you can even see some clouds below you. All of a sudden you find yourself plummeting downward. There are very few thrills like jumping out of a plane with a parachute.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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you get your podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of I Heart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's here, too, and that makes this Stuff You Should Know, good old-fashioned explainer edition. Yeah, this feels like a throwback. Yes, it does. I cannot believe we did not do this already.

I agree, and my stomach may have just been so loud that the microphone picked it up. I didn't hear it, but I want to hear it in the edit if it did. Oh, geez, wow, you're so hungry. So hungry. That was my mouth. I know. No, I already ate. You know, sometimes when you have a really empty stomach and you put, I made one of my

good hot bone broths, spicy bone broths. Oh, nice. And then for the next 30 minutes, your stomach's just screaming like, what is that? Or it's saying, thank you. Yeah, maybe thank you. I wish I knew, my whole life I wish I knew what my stomach was saying to me. What is your sphincter saying? You can usually tell.

You can usually tell how your stomach is feeling based on your sphincter. Your sphincter don't lie. Oh, man, is that a truism or what? Yes, it is. Sphincter's going to sphinct. Yep. Sphincter's fine. Let's move on.

Okay, then I think your stomach's saying thank you. Okay. So we are moving on, Chuck. We're going to move on. We're talking about skydiving today, and like I said, I'm surprised we hadn't done it already. I met a guy who has, I think he founded like one of the Navy's skydiving clubs, and he's a very nice man and asked if we'd ever done skydiving before, and I said, I don't know, and I looked and sure enough we didn't.

So here we are doing skydiving, and I think it's pretty appropriate. Well, first, have you ever skydived? I can't remember. No, I have not, and it's the kind of thing that like, I'm totally game to do. But I don't see myself making that initiative. But if someone got something together, I'd be like, yeah, sure, I'll jump out of a plane. I think that's how it typically happens. It's like a group, and there's one like initiator, and everybody's like sure, whatever, yeah.

But you have not, of course. No, I have. I have. Oh, wait. I feel like we've talked about this. What have you done? I went up to 13,000 feet and jumped out of a plane tandem. It was so, so scary.

The way up, everybody was laughing and joking, and I was just quiet, and somebody looked over and was like, Josh, your knuckles are pretty white, and I was like, that's super funny, right? And I was like, I don't think I even responded to that. I was too nervous. And we got up to 13,000 feet, and I had this giant dude strapped to my back. Yeah, that's what you want. And we're kneeling together at the opening of this plane, and I'm like, I'm not doing

this. And he's like, yes, you are. And we were out of the plane. And I don't remember the first couple of seconds. I think I've talked about this before. The first couple of seconds are just, my mind didn't form any memories, and then I kind of came to when we're plummeting toward the earth, and I was like, this is pretty great, actually.

That's amazing. How was this like 20 years ago or 10 years ago? Gosh, more than 20 years ago now that I think about it. Okay, so it's a long time ago. Yeah, I was in my early 20s, which is kind of the time you try it usually, because you have very little to live for at that point. Sometimes the seniors, the aged, yeah, they like to like, take a challenge box off, you know, and say, like, I'm going to go skydiving at 70 or whatever.

Yeah, I just saw, I think, like a mom and her son, son's 70s and the mom's 90s. They went skydiving. Not what I expected you to say. Yeah, they went skydiving. Wow. Well, good for them. So we are talking skydiving, Chuck. I strongly recommend trying it at least once.

One reason why is because it's gotten really, really safe. Like I wouldn't just say, like, go base jump. Like I would never tell somebody to go base jump. That is not at all safe. But people have been skydiving and investing and like figuring out how to make it safe for so many years that it has gotten pretty safe. Yeah. I think that's a great idea.

I mean, Ed has it at the end. He helped us out with this, but we may as well not bury the lead and say that in 2021, I guess was the most recent year, he could find something was 10 fatalities per 100,000 jumps, which is 0.28 deaths per 100,000, not 10 per 100,000. Right. Right. I already screwed it up. So less than a quarter of a person dies or just over a quarter of a person dies for

every 100,000 jumps, which is not bad. So yeah. And it's compared to the old days. It's really good. The old days being 2011, it was at 0.81, which seems high compared to 0.28, but it's actually pretty low. Like if you go back to the 60s, you're at like 11 and we're like under one here now. We're at just over a quarter.

So it's definitely gotten a lot, lot safer. Yeah. And we'll talk about the multiple redundancies and backup shoots and all that stuff. And I'm sure we'll probably, for the avid jumper, we'll probably get some of this slightly wrong. As we always do. But should we go back to the old days? Yes, let's, because people have been like, I want to jump off a high thing, but I want

to live. So how can I do that? And the parachutes kind of a, I think even if you're taking into account like hindsight, it's a pretty obvious low hanging fruit invention, but that doesn't mean that they knocked it out of the park immediately. They didn't understand exactly how to do it, but the idea of what to do came to a lot of people over the years. Yeah.

I mean, I think just even a kid jumping off of a wall with an umbrella, like there's this weird human instinct of let me hold open a shoot like thing and jump off of something. And that seems to have certainly taken hold in France. France had a lot of early jumpers. And then we talked for sure in our Eiffel Tower episode about Franz Reichelt, who died in 1912 while testing a parachute design from the Eiffel Tower. But before that, the first documented jump period was way before that in 1783 from an observatory in France.

And it seems like the French were just always experimenting with, you know, sort of the rigid, like wooden-framed shoots and then silk shoots, and we'll talk about silk later. It was a pretty good early choice for the fabric. But it wasn't until the early 1900s that we look at sort of the first modern parachute, right? Right. And this kind of gives you an idea of what skydiving is like. The origin of skydiving came from a carnival act where a guy named Charles Brodwick, whose

stage name was John Murray, used to go up in a hot air balloon and jump out of it. I think it was the other way around. Was it? Yeah. But neither one of them were really that stage name-y now that I look at it. I know, exactly. It's just kind of two normal names. But I guess he thought John Murray didn't have enough mustard to it or something.

So he would go up in a hot air balloon and jump out with a parachute of his own design, which apparently was good enough to keep him alive. And he was touring the US in the 1890s, early 1900s. And he had two different wives who were assistants with his act, the dye in these parachuting accidents. Yeah. And I don't know if that drove him to it or if it was just, I could see it driving him to it.

He really spent a lot of time refining the parachute. And the whole idea of a parachute coming out of a backpack on your back, that came from Charles Brodwick slash John Murray. Yeah. Yeah. He was like, let's stuff this thing in there. I'm not sure what they were doing before. Were they just going to hold it yet?

I think so. Yeah. Kind of like base jumping, I think. Yeah. Yeah. So they were, I guess, holding it. Then he put it into a backpack. Again, I wish I had a little more information about his wives dying if it was like, hey,

you try this. Or if it was just genuine accidents. I think the first one later on, people said that it was more likely suicide. Yeah, I think the first one in 1905. Okay. But anytime there's two spouses that die, I don't know, a little suspicion is raised for me. It is definitely, but we're also talking about people engaging in the earliest forms of skydiving.

Yeah, that's true. So there's a lot of risk to it, for sure. But the military, obviously, is where a lot of the early parachuting went on. Obviously, in World War I, I believe they developed the ripcord by that point, right? Yeah, where you pull like a little handle and the parachute goes out of the backpack. They also came up with what's called the static line. If you ever see in like a war movie, especially World War II, those guys like clipping into a line with like a rope, that's a static line.

And that's just dropping guys, right? Exactly. So this isn't for thrills, this is for getting you behind enemy lines, right? So they deploy their parachute immediately and the static line does that. When you jump out, that line stays attached to the plane for a second and it's also attached to your shoot. So it just pulls your shoot out immediately and then falls away and then you kind of float to safety, hopefully, behind enemy lines.

So the static line and the ripcord were both designed by the military. And I guess people, I'm guessing from the military, that's where people started getting like the idea of like, we should just do this on weekends too. Yeah, I have a feeling that's what happened. I wouldn't be surprised if retired military were some of the first instructors privately because they certainly jumped a lot and that's the only way you could get the kind of experience back then. But I believe Ed sites Jumptown as the very first skydiving center opened in 1959 in the

United States that it's still up and running today, which is pretty cool. Yeah, an orange mass. Oh, an orange? I don't know why Massachusetts has a town named Orange. Maybe it's just like a wishful thinking. For Orange, you sure it's not Florida? I looked it up. Yeah, because Florida is actually like kind of a huge state for skydiving over the history

of the sport too. But nope. Florida's jump site is called Fall Fowledge, Florida. Right, exactly, Red Maple Leaf, Florida. But the 60s is when it started to develop and then big time, I'm glad you love that dumb joke. It was good. Then in the 70s, I remember and I'm sure you do growing up in the 70s and 80s, skydiving

just seemed like, not like everybody who was doing it, but it just seemed like a big hot thrill sport and that's where it really kind of became refined and people started pushing the envelope and going higher and faster and doing crazier things up there and that's when like kind of modern skydiving really came into its own. And there were two things that happened that completely broke open skydiving from like a arcane, adrenaline, junky, ex-military recreation to like anybody can come do this. One was they changed the design of the parachute from that round, you know, example of a parachute the old timey one where you couldn't control it.

Like it was keeping you from plummeting to the ground and you should be grateful for that. That was enough. But then a person from Canada in the 60s came up with the like the Ram Air parachute. Their name was Domina Jalbert and they were a kite designer and they said, hey, these kites actually, you could turn them into a pretty cool parachute. And so those kind of wing like wide rectangular rounded parachutes that you see today, those are Ram Air.

We'll talk a little more about them. So that was a big one because now you could control where you landed. And then the second thing was some dudes in the 70s, actually a couple initially, Peter Chase and Gloria Mabry who were married decided to try what's called tandem jumping, which is what I did where a more experienced person is strapped to a novice and you jump out together and the experienced person is the one who like pulls the ripcord and guides the whole thing. You're just basically along for the ride.

And now all of a sudden Chuck, it went from having to have tons of experience, possibly a military background to I'm going to show up, do an hour long course and jump out of a plane an hour later after I get there. And that's suddenly people who are just complete amateurs who are curious could show up in skydiving. And that's really where the whole thing blew open in the 70s. Yeah. And that's, I mean, I have a feeling of skydiving we're still at the point where even if you

needed one day of training to come back the next day, the rate of people trying this out would just plummet. Plummet for sure. Probably not the best words to use. But the fact that they made it to where you can go, you don't have to know anything and you can go out that same afternoon and jump out of a plane. That's what really kind of enticed people, I think, to try it out. And then of course, like you said, just the fact that you're, you know, they show you

how to use the gear and they walk you through that quick like lesson, which I imagine is just like, let me handle everything, I'll walk you through it all. When we come to the ground, that's really the only other time where you need to worry about stuff, which is, you know what, like pull up your feet so you don't break your legs and I'll land for you and you'll kind of sit on your butt. Yeah. Like you're strapped to the front of the instructor like a baby, but not facing them. That'd just be weird.

You're both facing the same direction. That's the romantic style. But you know, they'll also going to be explaining kind of, it's not like they just say, here's what you do and just shut up. They're going to say, listen, we're going to be flying at, you know, 10 to 15,000 feet and we'll be going a hundred ish miles an hour when you jump out. So all this stuff is just to sort of give you the lay of the land. And it's, I don't think it necessarily helps you with your jump, but it just, you know,

you know what's going on. You know how high you are, you know how fast you're going, did they even bring up terminal velocity? I don't know, but this is what I proposed Chuck. I say, I don't remember if they did or not probably, but I say we take a break and pretend that it's the night before your first jump and then the sleep is the ad break. And then when we come back, it's like waking up and going to the airfield to participate in your first skydive ever.

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or wherever you get your podcasts. Good morning, Chuck. Good morning. It's time. It's time for your first skydive. So what are we going to do? Well, we're going to do all the things we talked about in the first segment, and then I'm going to jump out of a plane, but you're my instructor, so you're going to be strapped

in my back. Right. And this plane, by the way, is going to be typically a prop plane. Yeah, we're not jumping out of a jet, are we? No. That would be such a bad idea. So you're jumping out of a prop plane for a couple of reasons. One, they're easy on the gas, and if you're flying people up to skydive, you want to

be economical with your gas, and then they have a low stall speed, meaning they can go to really slow speeds without their engines stalling out, which is a problem. Although if you're ever going to be on a plane that goes down, that's the plane that you want to be on that's going down because you're strapped to somebody with a giant parachute on their back. But for the most part, when you're jumping out, you're jumping at about 100 miles an hour out of probably a Beechcraft King Air with maybe 14 other people, and you're going to be up there between 10,000 to 14,000 feet.

Like I said, I jumped out at 13,000, and it seemed perfecto. And when you jump out, Chuck, get ready to rumble. Yeah, you're, you know, terminal velocity is what I mentioned before the break, and that doesn't have anything to do with death. They picked a very terrible word there to name it, but 120 miles an hour, and we'll talk more about terminal velocity kind of throughout. But that is, you know, regular human jumping out of a plane with their arms and legs out, belly down, just sort of standard skydiving.

You can, we've all seen James Bond movies and stuff where they, and well, terminal velocity I think was the name of the movie with Charlie Sheen, right? I don't remember that, I think I saw that in the theater. Yeah, and it's the coolest thing when you're a young kid and you see someone tuck their arms in and put their head down, and all of a sudden they're flying through the air faster than 120 miles an hour. You can learn how to do that stuff with training, but typically 120 is what you get up to, although when you jump out of a plane, you're going 100 miles an hour horizontally.

So there's a period of time where you're, I guess, falling diagonally until you reach the point where you're just falling vertically. Right. They should have a name for that. They do. It's called going over the hill. No, I mean like a name like terminal velocity, like the something zone. The death hill.

I'm going to call it the diagonal zone. Okay, the diagonal zone, but it more follows an arc because when you jump out of the plane, remember the plane's going 100 miles an hour, you were in the plane, even though you just left the plane, you're still going roughly 100 miles an hour in the same direction of the plane, but you slow down so quickly that it's not like you're keeping up with the plane even for a second. So you fall away, but you're still kind of, you've got like that horizontal motion before you hit that arc and you start to fall downward.

And the whole reason there's such a thing as terminal velocity is because of friction from the air. And if you and a bowling ball jumped out of the plane at the same time in a vacuum, you would fall to the earth at the same rate. But because of air friction, you fall at different rates. And like you said, it's about 120 miles an hour. And when you reach terminal velocity, you're still going really, really fast about 120 miles an hour, but you're not speeding up any longer.

That's the difference. You're not accelerating any longer. That would be pretty cool. It would be pretty cool. And you can actually do that when you become a skilled skydiver, you can hit terminal velocity and then like go from, say, belly to, like you said, a 45 degree angle and start free falling again. Like you can stop and start your free fall just by moving your body and changing the

amount of friction that you're providing the air that you're plummeting through. Yeah. When you get down there, and this is something I kind of never knew the exact numbers on, but you know, when that, when that shoot opens, it looks like a pretty violent reaction when it jerks you up. It's going to slow you down very, very quickly to the point where you're going to be feeling about 2.75 G's of your body. I think Ed said you're decelerating by about 30 meters per second.

Per second. And eventually, yeah, that's what I said. No, I think it's per second, per second. Oh, per second, per second. Yeah. Per second, per second. What does per second, per second even mean? That's what I'm saying.

Like, I don't know what it means either, but when you say it like that, it's like, wow, that must be really fast. They had to say per second twice. They're like, we couldn't even come up with a better term for that, so we're just doubling up on it. Just slapping another per second on it. So that is a really quick slowdown, and eventually you'll get down to about, I mean, when you're landing, you're in the like the 15 to 18 mile an hour zone, I think, right?

Yeah, it's not bad at all. I mean, especially going from 120 miles an hour, about 200 miles an hour if you're tandem to 17, that's pretty gentle comparatively speaking. And like you said, when that shoot opens, you stop accelerating downward or even hitting terminal velocity, and now you're accelerating upward even though your body's still falling downward. So that's negative acceleration, and that's what you're doing as you kind of start to slow down and hit that 17 mile an hour thing, and then land.

And Chuck, I know that we've completely abandoned the whole story, but congratulations on your first sky dive. Thank you. You did really well. Oh, boy. That was a lot easier than I thought it was going to be. And technically, now that I think about it, you've done skydiving, it's just been indoor skydiving.

You did great. Yeah. I mean, we have to mention that. I think we have. There's no way around it. We did a parachute emergency short stuff, and I know for a fact we mentioned it in that. Yeah. But if anyone's curious, Josh and I did a Toyota commercial years ago, back when people

cared about us representing their brand, and we used to get those calls occasionally. And they flew us out to LA, and we shot in my own neighborhood, it was super cool. And one of the things we did was go to a wind tunnel, one of those indoor jump facilities, and sort of explain something while we were doing that. And it's online, and it was super fun. And you get to see Josh take a little indoor spill, which still makes me laugh every time I see it. I was thinking about how much they had to cut out of that commercial to preserve that

spill of mine, and just how badly the director and producer wanted to make sure that stayed in. That was a lot of work. I'm sure to keep that in. It was. It was harder than I thought it was going to do just to stay stable. Definitely. And as evidenced by what happened to you, you got a little caddywampus, and all of a sudden

you just got flunked into a wall. Yeah. I don't remember anything after that, because I guess the commercial ends. You're a good sport, and of course they use that in the commercial. So let's say, Chuck, that you're like, I want to do that every day of my life for the rest of my life. You can do that. You can take on skydiving as a hobby, not making Toyota commercial skydiving as a hobby.

Right. That'd be great. And there's a couple of ways you can go. One's actually really hard to find. The other one is you can find it at any place you go skydiving. There are two different types of training that are going to get you to the same place, which is a Class A license from the United States Parachuting Association. Yeah.

And IAD is one, Instructor Assisted Deployment. And then AFF seems like the way more common one, which is Accelerated Freefall. Accelerated Freefall is when an instructor jumps out with you, but not tandem style. They're not attached to you. But they're with you, kind of making sure everything goes great, but you're in control of everything. So, I still don't quite get what IAD is. Are they, is that a static line thing?

Yes. So, the instructor acts as the static line. They have your parachute and they are staying on the plane. And when you jump out, they pull your chute. Immediately. Immediately. So, your first several... Well, that's not fun.

It isn't fun. It's very deliberate. Like, they want to teach you, like, landing essentially first. So, your first jump is at, like, 3,500 feet, which is really low. And then you just move yourself up and up and up. And then, I think with both courses, after about six jumps, you finally make your first solo freefall jump. Okay.

And that's the goal for most people, if they want to really get into it. Yeah. Is to just be able to go to a place. I imagine you have to pay them a little something, right? You have to sign over your first born. Well, you have to pay for the plane and stuff. But even if you have all your own gear, there's still fees involved. Yes.

So, I think egg calculated about 3,500 bucks, which from what I saw, looks pretty right to me. And that's to get your fully licensed up, right? Yes. The course is about 1,800, say, 2,000. And then to get all the way to your license with all the exams and all that stuff, it's about 3,500. The thing is...

But does not include equipment. No. And equipment is expensive, as you might assume when you're talking about equipment that keeps you alive. So, like your parachute might be a couple grand, three grand, helmets can get pretty expensive and altimeter is $400, so it starts to add up really, really quickly. You can pick up a used altimeter on Craigslist though, I'm sure it's fine. If you get into this, a word of advice for me, do not cheap out on your equipment.

In particular, your altimeter. Yeah. I would imagine. So, you can go through this whole thing and I don't know how long it takes. I actually didn't get a sense of that. But when you get your license, you're like, what do you mean license? Is the government going to come a recipe? No.

But if you show up to a skydiving place and you say, I want to jump, they'll say, well, we need to see your license. And if you have your A license on you, they'll say hop aboard and you can pack your own parachute. You can do jumps. I think you can do water jumps, which seems like, I don't know. I guess water jumps are probably really difficult because you can get wrapped up in sink if you're not careful. Yeah.

Right? What was the, there was some action movie where a dude ejects from a plane and lands in water and like has to like, it's lost consciousness and has to come to and get out of the parachute rigging to survive. Well, I think the first hop gun, I mean, that's how Goose died, right? Yes. This person survived. I keep saying Bruce Willis, but I don't think it was Bruce Willis.

I don't know. But you were saying you don't know how long you can get this class A, how long it takes. You need 25 free fall jumps, five group jump, group jumps and some other training. So I would imagine even if you're really eager and cooking, like this takes a matter of about months. Yeah, that seems to get all those in. Yeah, for sure. I guess you'd go every day if you really like had to learn fast.

Yeah, which I mean, that's what I'm saying. I wonder what the, the absolute right. Exactly. Well, you want that rush. That's the rush. Well, that's true. The B license sounds interesting because you can do night jumps, which it's funny, Ed, put this together for us.

And I think he said the night jumps was the only thing he said that interested him, right? He said it's the only thing that, that makes him kind of want to do this. Right. It's a night jump. But you have to do, you have to invest a lot before you get into night jumps because that's your class really scary to me. It is super, super scary. One thing I thought was pretty cool is the USPA has training and like kind of differently

structured courses to help people with disabilities get their licenses too, which I thought was pretty great. Totally. So, you mentioned night diving, which sounds really cool. Like you're just, you're jumping out at night and like, you know, what cities look like from an airplane. Imagine if there's nothing between you and the city, but air, that must be pretty awesome. Right?

That's one of many things you can do. So once people started getting into skydiving in the seventies, they're like, how can this be more dangerous? How can this be more thrilling? And they came up with a lot of different interesting things. Yeah. They're like, Hey, you want to be on the evening news? Why don't, why don't 30 of us get together on the first day of spring and make big flowers

in the air by doing something called formation flying? Yeah. Or, or just let's sit around until we hit our nineties and take our seven year old sons with us. Exactly. Formation flying or relative work or belly flying, a couple of other names. That is when, again, usually you see it on the evening news when people go up and they all get together to set a record or just join hands and legs into fun shapes up in the air

on their way down. Imagine it's a, it's a great group activity for the enthusiast of skydiving. Yeah. You're looking up and say, Oh, it's a flower. Yeah. We took flowers last time. Gary always wants to do flowers. When can we make the ampersand?

Right. Oh, I'd like to see that. So the thing about formation flying, that's belly down, right? You said belly down. There's another one called free flying where it's vertically oriented, not belly oriented, which is horizontal. And they do also crazy looking. Yes.

They'll also sometimes, one of the reasons they call it free flying is because they'll, there won't be like a plan. A group of them will kind of hang out and just figure out together, kind of like break dancing, but midair. Except you're doing a tea party. Exactly. Yeah. Or they do surfing.

Like you'll surf on somebody's back, all sorts of really cool stuff. And you can also get some crazy speed as we'll see. There actually is something called sky surfing where you don't use your friend's back. You actually use like a snowboard. Yeah. And you can actually, because it's a snowboard, you're suddenly putting out like uniform resistance to the air. And that friction can allow you to do some pretty sweet tricks once you get good at sky

surfing. Yeah. Like standing on that thing and spinning around. Yeah. Like a loop-de-loops, making an ampersand in the air. I don't know why that always cracked me up, but sky surfing always, that was kind of fun. And I sound like I'm making fun of it. I'm not.

It is cool, but I'm just trying to think of, you know, the first guy was like, they're always trying to combine their loves of the extreme things that they love. You know, like let me put a wingsuit on a motorcycle or whatever. Right. Like all that stuff. The other people on the plane were like, why do you have your surfboard? Right. And he goes, what?

Just watch. There's another one called tracking that I thought was pretty delightful. Now is this just the James Bond thing? Yes. It's just moving away from where you jumped out. Moving away from the plane. But that happens innately, right? You move, yes, the plane moves away from you.

This is you purposely moving away from the plane yourself by positioning your body at different angles. So you're suddenly like shooting off to the west or shooting off to the northeast. And this is like a, this is a practical skill that you need to have just as a basic skydiver. But people have turned it into new feats of amazingness. Like how far can you go? How fast can you get there? Yeah.

I get that. Sure. Like their landing spot is a really far away. And so they try and go as horizontally as far as they can go. Yes. To hit a certain spot. And also if you're doing formation flying or free flying, you need to be good at tracking because you have to get away from one another before you deploy your shoots or else you're

going to end up on an earth sandwich together. Yeah. And speaking of speeds, I believe the current speed record, now we said terminal was 120, 29 miles per hour is the current record for someone shooting through the air with a straight James Bond-like body. Yeah. And kilometers per hour. That's a mind boggling number two, I'm sure.

I don't quite get what cupping is. Is that just what we did in the wind tunnel? Like regular trying to resist the air? Yeah. Well, you're making like an arch out of your body. And when you do that, you kind of make yourself into a parachute and you go up, right? So let's say you've got four other people and you just finished making a flower to Gary's dismay and you all need to get away from one another.

There's different ways to get away. So Gary shoots off to the northeast, he's all mad. You shoot off to the west, Abel, your biblical friend, and cups. So he goes upward all of a sudden to put some vertical distance between you two. And then Cain, Abel's brother, ironically, makes himself into like a missile and shoots downward. So now there's even more vertical distance between all of you. Vertical and horizontal distance.

All of that is considered tracking. That's so Cain. Yeah. Cain's like, here I go. I mentioned the wingsuit. That is when you've seen the people who look like flying squirrels in the air, it's a wingsuit. It's a suit that has webbing between the armpits and between your legs. And that just creates more wind resistance.

But it also creates something called a burble in the biz, and that is the dead air behind you, sort of like when a race car has that dead, or not even a race car, a big semi-truck on the highway, has an area of dead air behind it where a car can draft for either more speed or to use less fuel or both. But that is a burble in the parlance of skydiving. And apparently in the burble, like wingsuiting is a pretty tricky thing. Obviously, it takes, I think, 200 dives before you're allowed to put on that squirrel suit. But the burble makes it hard, or just a little trickier, to get the shoot out properly in

the burble. Yes. So, yeah, wingsuits sound pretty awesome, but that's well beyond my limit, I think. Oh, no. Well, you just don't want to scot at 200 times to get there. No, probably not. Probably not. It's a lot.

So remember I said tracking is like a basic thing that people have turned into feats of amazingness. They've done the same thing with the actual parachuting part called canopy flying. There's swoopers. There's gliders. There's people who go on like an obstacle course over water. And it's pretty cool. Apparently when you swoop correctly, you make a whew sound when you come in for your landing.

And I've seen video of people that you can pick up some real speed if you angle your canopy, your parachute the right way. And they'll go from like really, really fast, 10 feet above the ground, to like almost still, like the softest landing you've ever seen, you know, a second or two later. It's really neat. Yeah. That is cool. And that's where a lot of the accuracy skydiving we talked about happens when you're canopy

flying and you really want to nail that bullseye. One other thing they do that's awesome is that your canopy has straps on the top and sometimes a bunch of people will coordinate so that each one's strapped in by their feet to the canopy below them. So it's a big chain of people skydiving, which sounds so dangerous, but I'm sure is so cool. Now the kind I would be interested in more so than an airplane even is, and you need a B license for this. So there's no getting around doing the series of steps to get there.

But the hot air balloon jump. And at first I was like, well, who cares what's the big deal? But as we mentioned, when you go out of that plane at 100 miles an hour, you've done it and you blacked out for the first few seconds. I imagine it's like just a big sort of violent rush of air and sound and you don't really quite know what's going on at first. But you jump out of that hot air balloon, it's dead silent. You actually experience a true free fall from the jump.

Like you would on an amusement park ride. And the silence of it and the stillness of it really is appealing to me. Yeah. It's not until you start to really pick up speed that like the air makes a sound running past you. That's pretty cool. It does sound pretty cool for sure. So that's called no airplane skydiving or hot air balloon skydiving, which is pretty

cool. There's another one that's like that, but it's way higher. It's called space diving. And if you watch the Felix Baumgartner 2012 jump, I was looking back at it. Look at that. So we're talking, you know, if you go up in your skydiving and it's like what I did, I did 13,000 feet, which is really high. You're up there so long, you're free fall.

So you're falling about 176 feet per second, which means that you're in free fall from the time you jump out of the plane to the time that you pull your ripcord or the guy strapped to your back does 45 to 60 seconds of that. That sounds about right. You're at 13,000 feet and then pulling at about 5,000. So Felix Baumgartner jumped out at 127,000 feet. What was his free fall? How long was that?

I think it was several minutes actually. And remember, he famously got into like this horrible tailspin that they're like, well, this guy might be a goner, but even more impressive than that. He hit Mach 1.25, which means he broke the sound barrier. He was the first person to do it without a plane, which is about 843 miles per hour. All right. I just looked it up real quick, which we don't usually do. He was in free fall for four minutes and 19 seconds.

Man, that was crazy. And then his record was broken by a guy named Alan Eustace two years later. I don't think I even knew that. I don't know. Yeah, I don't either. Felix Baumgartner definitely got the press for that. Pretty cool. Yeah.

I was like, oh, man, no one even paid attention to my jump. Well, actually, another guy, Colonel Joe Kittinger, did it first in the 60s. It was just like a gas balloon. Yeah, he did a space jump, which is, I mean, again, remember, there was like 11 deaths per 100,000 jumps for regular skydiving. And this guy's up in a gas balloon 100,000 feet above the earth doing it. So hats off to all those people who've ever jumped out of a balloon in space. All right.

I guess we can take a late second break here. So late. And talk about this equipment we've been harping on. Yeah. I'm Eva Longoria. I'm Maite Gomez-Rajon. We're so excited to introduce you to our new podcast, Hungry for History. On every episode, we're exploring some of our favorite dishes, ingredients, beverages

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Apparently, this guy Juan Mendes, he was making these tacos wrapped in these huge tortillas to keep it warm, and he was transporting them in a burro, hence the name the burritos. Listen to Hungry for History with Eva Longoria and Maite Gomez-Rajon as part of the Maicultura podcast network available on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. In 1973, Penhouse Magazine launched Viva, one of the first erotic magazines for women. It was staffed by feminist writers and featured full frontal male nudity. It was going to try to be for women what Penhouse was for men.

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I just loved looking at it. How did a scrappy group of feminist journalists get involved with a porn king at the height of the sexual revolution? What were they trained to say, and were they doomed to fail? Listen to Stift on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm David Eagleman. I have a new podcast called Inner Cosmos on iHeart. I'm a neuroscientist and an author at Stanford University, and I've spent my career exploring

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Listen to Inner Cosmos with David Eagleman on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right. We mentioned the equipment, money that you can spend, and the rabbit hole to get the coolest helmets and goggles. The first thing that you want is a parachute. If you're a beginner, you're canopy is going to be a little bit larger, make you go a little bit slower.

Back in the day, we said they were silk because silk has a very high strength to weight ratio, and it's also, and here's sort of the key, it's a very tight weave because you can't jump out with a gauze parachute, it's not going to do much to slow you down. So that tight weave of the silk really helped, and then they eventually moved to nylon, of course. And that nylon even usually has a coating on it to make it even more non-porous. And we mentioned the big round early parachute compared to the shape they have today. Today they have, and it's not only for flying cool and having more maneuverability, but

they are formed into different cells, as you will see if you look at a parachute jump. And those cells are sort of a redundancy in themselves because if like one thing goes wrong in a part of the parachute, you still got plenty of parachute left. Yeah, what I didn't know, I ran across in research is the sides in the back of the Ram Air parachute are sewn up, but the front is open. So the air enters those cells and puffs them up and creates a bit of buoyancy from what I can tell. Yeah, that makes sense.

Yeah, it's pretty cool. So again, that just completely changed everything when they came up with that type of parachute. Another parachute that really comes in handy is your reserve parachute. Yeah, you want to. So they've kind of updated the technology on this. Before I don't know, you probably had to be carrying a Rambo knife in your teeth when you jump so that you could cut your chute to release your chute from you so you could release your reserve canopy.

Now there's just a little pull cord and all of your chute that's failed falls away, your initial canopy, and then you can pull your reserve chute pretty easily from there. Some of them even have a thing where when you pull that cord and your main canopy goes away, it actually pulls your reserve chute out like it's a static line basically, which is probably good because I'm sure you're a little bit panicked maybe when your chute doesn't work when it fails. Even though you know you have a reserve chute, that's got to be, you know, you're down one. You're down to your last one now.

This is your last backup. Yeah, absolutely. The harness in the container is what it's the little backpack is called that everything is packed in. Yeah. And of course you want to have someone that knows what they're doing doing that. I'm sure there are many, many instructional lessons involved for you to get to the point where you can pack your own.

And they say even when you're packing your own, it's not the kind of thing where you should pack it and just like leave it in your closet for a few years and jump again. Like you should probably repack that thing just to make sure everything is as it should. Yeah, your reserve chute has to be packed by a licensed instructor and you have to unpack it and repack it every 180 days to make sure that it's in good condition. So yeah. You don't want that thing getting hung up. No, that's no joke.

The altimeter, I told you that's the thing that tells you where you're at above sea level. So you know when to pull a ripcord, usually it's 3,000, 3,500 feet. And the louder some of them will make a sound in your ear, in your helmet. Some of them have really big numbers, just kind of wear it like a watch on your wrist. Again, do not cheap out on your altimeter, okay? Also do not go to Craigslist to pick up your AAD, that's your automatic activation device. That is the redundancy on the redundancy. If you're doing, if Gary flies over and in mid-stem formation, kicks you in the head

by accident and you're passed out up there and Gary can't get back to you, you have a device that is set to automatically pop your chute out at a pre-programmed altitude based on how fast you're going. You really want that thing to be set up correctly. You know some people say Gary didn't even really try to get back to you. Yeah. And that's what I saw. And it's all in my GoPro.

One thing I saw with the AAD is if you go up an airplane and for some reason you don't jump out, you better remember to turn off your AAD because when the airplane hits like 700 feet, it's going to activate your parachute in the airplane. Yeah, that's no good. And then you got your jumpsuit, which protects your skin. And then you've got your helmet and goggles, which are absolutely essential. And you put all those things together, you're ready to go skydiving. Yeah.

What's the little, it doesn't a little mini parachute come out at first and that pulls the main chute now? Yeah. So the pilot chute just kind of... Pilot chute. Yeah. It catches enough air that it can pull your chute out of your container, out of your deployment bag, your D-bag, they call it.

Everything. Yeah, they do. And then one thing that can happen, if your chute just opened from like nothing to open, like in a second, it's going to pull you up and possibly break your shoulders, do all sorts of terrible stuff to your groin. And you don't want to do that. So they've actually created something called a slider, which holds the cords together. And then as the chute opens up, it kind of slides further and further down.

So it controls the opening of your chute to make it a much more pleasant experience. And that's the one that you use for just a solo skydiving. There's another one called the drogue chute they use for tandem. Right. And that is... It's sort of like a pilot chute, but it's bigger than a pilot chute, right? Yes. It's in between pilot chute and canopy.

And that is deployed, I mean, kind of right afterward, right? Right after you jump. I don't know when the drogue is deployed or not, because the... It could be, because the rip cord is pulled by the instructor. It's not like the drogue pulls the main canopy out. Right. And the reason the drogue is bigger is because even though a bowling ball and a person would fall together at the same speed to earth in a vacuum, mass does count when you add air

friction. And when you're tandem, you're presenting the same amount of surface area to the resistance to the air as you are if you're solo, because the person's on your back. But you've got about double or more of the weight. So you do hit that terminal velocity at a higher speed of about 200 miles an hour, and you need a bigger canopy and a larger drogue chute to make it, again, a pleasant experience when the canopy opens. Yeah.

And you also... I think people... What they want is that freefall time. Yes. And I'm sure they're... Maybe not guaranteed, but I'm sure they're sort of promised, 45 to a minute. Yeah. And I mean, that's not to say that the floating from a parachute is a totally different experience.

And you go from one to another in almost the blink of an eye. It really does happen really fast. And you're fallomiting toward earth. It's really, really surprisingly cold up there. And then all of a sudden, you know, your shoot opens and you stop falling and you're no longer belly down, your feet are dangling, and you're just kind of gliding along, floating on air. It's gotten quiet all of a sudden. You actually feel the temperature start to get warmer as you get closer and closer to

the earth, and you just get set down. It's just an amazing experience. There's nothing else like it. That sounds great. I gotta try it out. I hope you do, man. Let me know if you do. I'll watch you.

You would do it again, though, if I did it, right? I'm not sure Yumi would let me at this point. No, really? She's just like, why bother? You've done it. Yeah. She did it once, too. You're like, we did it once, we don't need to do it again.

This has made me want to do it again, but again, I probably will just stay on the ground and watch you, okay? Well, I certainly love knowing what a life experience feels like, so maybe I'll do it. Okay. Well, while we wait for Chuck to do it, how about we do a listener mail? Let's do it. A quick correction, by the way, and this is something that I'm embarrassed that we forgot, but in the cave episode where, what was his name that was trapped in the cave?

Floyd Collins. Yeah. I could think of a Sphilix bomb gardener, and we kept talking about how cold it was, like for 14 degrees or whatever. Yeah. Obviously, the temperature in the cave is, because it's underground, is a pretty static steady number that is not what it's like on top of the ground. So I don't understand that because there was ice mixed in with the mud and the rock in

Sand Cave. I don't know what to tell you, my friends. It's possible Sand Cave was a little more open to the surface. I don't know. Maybe. I saw it in multiple places that there was plenty of ice to contend with, but I get it. I saw people groaned or shouted at their phone or whatever. It's like, that was the one thing, that was it, that the cave supposedly has a steady

temperature, and we don't even know that that's true, everybody. That's true. All right, so this is the email, and it's about another correction that, boy, you certainly heard from the bitters lovers of the world when you said, nobody would ever just drink bitters. Oh, I was wrong about that. Apparently, a lot of people drink bitters, and a lot of people in Wisconsin drink bitters. Hey, guys, we're listening to the most recent episode on tomorrow, amused by your exchange

about bitters being alcoholic, and Chuck was amazed that bitters contained alcohol at all, and was confused while I was in grocery stores, and Josh explained that nobody would drink a bottle of bitters. He said, he said, you put money on it. Yeah. Well, Josh, it sounds like you need to do a tour of the wonderful state of Wisconsin. I could summarize this article about the longest operating tavern in Wisconsin and number one consumer of bitters in the world, but it's incredibly well written.

Read this while I take an ad break. This was from Kevin Peprocki, and it was from Atlas Obscura, Washington Island, Wisconsin bitters shots. What's the name of this thing? How a tiny Wisconsin island became the world's biggest consumer of bitters. That's amazing. Atlas Obscura rocks. They're great, and we heard from plenty of people who said that not only in Wisconsin,

but other places, like a shot of bitters was a thing. Yeah, not only that, there's cocktails based on Angostura as the main ingredient. I had no idea. Yeah, like an ounce and a half of bitters, which is crazy. Yeah, it's not like I'm new to this whole thing either. I just had not heard that at all. I'm not going to try it or anything like that, but I'm impressed. I hadn't heard this stuff either, so, you know, we're learning too.

I love that, Chuck. I love it. Me too. Well, if you want to get in touch with us, like... Kevin Peprocki. Like Kevin Peprocki and all the people who wrote in erroneously about the cave temperature for Floyd Collins, you can send us an email. Send it off to StuffPodcasts at iHeartRadio.com.

Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeart Radio. For more podcasts on my heart radio, visit the iHeart Radio app. Podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. In August 2023, hip-hop officially turns 50 years old. A genre that broke out of the streets of the Bronx has become the most popular genre in music and now dominates global culture. iHeart Podcasts networks presents 50 years of hip-hop podcasts, a series that follows the evolution of rap and hip-hop.

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We have a new comedy podcast called No Autographs Please. Every week, hilarious guests join us for a chat. And then we improvise a first date based on the real first dates listeners have submitted. And of course, it all ends with us making a homemade peanut buttered cake for our guests. Listen to No Autographs Please on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.