The bridge part of the course is essentially split into 3 parts:

Part one: ground school

This consists of several classes during which you will learn the basic skills required to exit from an object safely. We will discuss canopy flight and landing, and some emergency situations that you might encounter. The focus will mainly be on your first PCA’d (Pilot Chute Assist) jump from the bridge as we don’t want to overload you with information about more advanced techniques. The pendulator at the BASE House will be used to ensure that you are familiar with the exit, and you can practice until you feel comfortable with the muscle memory. We will walk the landing area and make sure you are happy with the hazards, and discuss the possible canopy flight patterns. This ground school phase generally takes around a day to complete.

Landing area

Part two: jumping!

We will head to the bridge as a group, and jump one at a time into the landing area below. The first few jumps will be PCA, giving you more time under canopy and less opportunity for poor body position to adversely affect the opening sequence.

Once we are all happy with the PCA method of deployment, we will move onto handheld freefall. The bridge is only 370ft so we do not recommend first BASE stowed exits on your initial FJC here – it is only 4.8 seconds to impact from the exit and if you take a 2 second delay this only gives maybe a second or two to sort out any problems such as bridle wraps! When we move onto the second part of the course in Italy we will use the stowed method of deployment.