Testing Newton's Law: the navy's new free-fall school

All Hands, August, 2004 by Shane T. McCoy

At 2 a.m., 35,000 feet above the earth, a U.S. Navy Special Warfare (NSW) team pours out of an aircraft into the icy night. At this altitude, no one on the ground is aware that a small team of men and their equipment are falling through the darkness at more than 120 mph.

The team doesn't feel the cold or notice their air comes from oxygen tanks. Their minds are on the basics--turn right, check altimeter, turn left, check altimeter, track toward the rest of the team. Freefall is short when the earth is rising to meet you.

After falling 30,000 feet, ripcords are pulled and a quick rush of air is heard as canopies deploy--then silence.

In scant moonlight the men maneuver into formation and steer into the wind for a landing. Fifty feet above the earth, they let their packs dangle below their feet. As the pack hits the ground, each man is cued to flare his parachute to land as softly as possible in the dark. The team, yards apart, quickly pulls in their chutes and digs shallow holes in which to bury their chutes and oxygen tanks.

Only a handful of people in the world possess the skills needed to pull off a mission like this, and even fewer can teach these skills.

Until last year, the Army, in Yuma, Ariz., trained Navy Special War teams to freefall. Today, the Navy has its own free-fall school, Strategic Air Operations (SAO), which allows more Sea, Air, Land (SEALs) and Special Warfare Combatant-craft Crewmen (SWCC) to free-fall qualify than ever before.

"At one time in a given platoon, out of 15 guys, you might have had two to four free-fall qualified," said Master Chief Boatswain's Mate (SEAL) Lu Lastra, the school's senior enlisted advisor. "The number of billets we were getting at the jump school in Yuma were just not enough to satisfy our current mission requirements for the SEAL teams. We plan on getting 100 percent of our SEALs qualified."

This is no small task. NSW is one of the few sectors of the Navy currently increasing its numbers. More than half of the active SEAL platoons are forward deployed now, the most since the Vietnam War.

"The great part about this course is the instructors. They have been around these students, the industry and drop zones for years," Lastra added. "Their ability to train and conduct accelerated free-fall (AFF) with these students is incredible."

The instructor's are one of the most unique parts of training at SAO, as most are civilians. The instructors teaching the course are professional skydivers with thousands of jumps each. Some are national champions, and others are former Special Forces members from the United States and abroad.

SAO conducts two phases of training in the desert just outside of San Diego. The static line school teaches the basics of jumping and landing. SAO condenses the Army's 21-day course into tour days. "We teach it in less time, because we [only] teach static-line parachuting," said Alan Fink, owner of SAO. "We also don't get into the physical fitness programs here, because the students have already done it."

Static line school is the prerequisite to free fall. When making a static line jump, tile student's ripcord is pulled by a line attached to the parachute upon exiting the aircraft. According to Fink, "If a person is not able to make the static line jumps, there is no room for them in the more intense free-fall school."

Upon progressing to free-fall school, students enter a whole new world. "It feels more like flying than falling," claimed one of the students.

"During static line school, time outside of the plane is spent under the canopy, steering toward the landing zone," said Fink. "In free fall if your knees bend too much, you are flying backward, too straight and you're flying away from your team."

"It's very fast paced," said a member of SEAL Team 8. "The first jump, I was so focused on procedures I didn't see or hear anything. Each jump after that as my circle of awareness expanded, I was able to see more as things slowed down."

The key, say instructors, is for the student to look where they want to go before they start to turn, focus on their goal, relax and be sure to arch. After a jump, many of the students could not recall what had happened other than, "Something went wrong." This is where new technology helps out.

Every instructor skydives with a digital video camera mounted on his helmet to record each jump. Following the jump, a student reviews the video to see exactly what was right and wrong. "I didn't know what my legs were doing," claimed a student. "Later, I saw them all over the place in the video; I had been focusing oil my upper body."

After seeing their mistakes, students have a chance to correct them before being tested. Every student has three chances to pass each phase of the school. If they can't get it right by the third try, they are dropped and may repeat the course again.

"I failed the course the first time I went through because of bad exits during our rucksack (ruck) test," said a member of Special Boat Team 20. "Luckily, I was able to get back here again and this time I passed, because I was more relaxed."