New Experience: Indoor Skydiving

Yesterday I tried indoor skydiving for the first time, and it was quite fun! I did it at iFly, a company that provides those "flights" in many places in the country. It works this way: basically you have a really big vertical tube, with the approximate diameter of a large hot tub and as high as a four story building. Then, at the base of the tube (but outside of it) you have really powerful fans that make the air flow upwards in the tube at the speed of 85 mph (135 km/h). The middle section of the tube is made of thick plexiglass and it has a door. It also has a strong net where you can walk on if needed.

You put on a flight suit, a helmet, goggles and ear protection in order to do your flight. Before entering the tube, you are told about some gestures that the instructor will use (you cannot go solo until you make a number of initial flights) in order to tell you to assume the right posture: legs bent (but not too much), arms in front of you and head up. You wait for your turn and "fall" through the door into the tube and you immediately feel the force of all that air. The instructor holds you in place until you assume a stable posture, and then he proceeds to take you around the tube, spinning around and going up and down.

It really feels like flying! Additionally, I have done actual skydiving, and I can say that it gives the same feeling as when you're in free fall after jumping from the airplane. You stay in the tube for one minute and I can say that, at least to me, it felt like a very short minute (typically iFly sells two flights at a time, so you can enjoy a little bit more). To summarize, I liked it very much and I recommend the experience to everybody.





Location: Seattle, WA, USA

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

New experience: Coca-Cola made with AI

Image
AI seems to be all the rage these days: companies are trying to put "AI" into everything. Coca-Cola thought that it could get into it too, so... it released a new flavor of Coke "co-created with Artificial Intelligence". I tried it and... it tastes just like regular Coke, perhaps with some subtle different smell, but in the end it's a fizzy sugary drink just the same. I think that the biggest contribution of AI in this was telling the company to write "co-created with Artificial Intelligence" on the can.
Read more

Live Concert: Bad Hombres!

Image
This was a new experience for me in the United States: I had seen friends' bands playing in Brazil, but this was the first time that I saw a band composed of friends of mine presenting a live concert here in the US. The Bad Hombres, a band made from former colleagues from Microsoft, made a one night only presentation at the Rendezvous in Seattle (a small concert venue which I hadn't been before, so another first!) and played a bunch of cool music, including a lot of hits from the 80's (since there were a lot of 80's kids in the crowd). This event brought together a bunch of old Brazilian friends, so this was a wonderful occasion indeed. As a bonus, it was the first time that I saw live someone playing the  keytar . This was really a night to remember. 
Read more

Kayaking by the Boeing 737 MAX factory

Image
All the Boeing 737 airplanes you see around the world (including the latest version, the infamous MAX) come from just one location: the massive Boeing plant in Renton, at the southern tip of Lake Washington. It's a huge complex where you can see 737s in various stages of assembly and where there is a small airport from which the brand new airplanes take off. What most people don't know, however, is that squeezed between the plant and the airstrip there is a small (and very narrow) public park: the Cedar River Trail Park . It's a lovely little park on the east margin of the Cedar river that among other recreation facilities has a small boat launch, from which I launched my kayak today. It was a wonderful day for paddling on the lake and the waters were calm and transparent. The cool thing about paddling here is that you can get really close to some brand spanking new 737 MAXes: in fact, I could even see some Boeing employees working overtime on one of them this Saturday morn
Read more