Page 40 - Wish Stream Year of 2019

Exercise FREEFALL CADET
12 Intermediate term Officer Cadets from RMAS deployed on Ex FREEFALL CADET, a week period of Adventure Training, to
Seville, Spain. After a day of ground training at Netheravon, all of the Cadets were keen to put their new skills into practice.
We arrived at the sunny Skydive Netheravon centre knowing that we’d be learning skills essential to staying alive for the following week. After meeting the instructors, we were issued with jumpsuits, parachute canopies, practice harnesses (which we’d become very familiar with), our stylish goggles, altim-
eters and a logbook full of blank pages waiting to be filled.
The ground training was eye-
opening. As beginners, we were
amazed at the level of detail and
amount of skill required for a
jump. The teaching was engaging
with a variety of classroom-based
theory lessons and practical aspects; not only did we learn the drills, but we learnt the reason and importance for each movement. An exam- ple of such a skill was the Parachute Landing Fall (PLF) which is used when you don’t perfectly time your landing. It may have felt and looked peculiar at first, but once we got the knack of it, it felt more natural and gratefully so – the majority of us had to use it for our first landings!
Each day in Seville started with a refresh skill session using our practice harnesses. We would go through the routine of each jump always asking: “Is it big?”, “Is it rectangular?”, “Is it free from damage?”. We would cover the drills for when the answer to one of the questions was “No”. The solu- tions would vary from scissor kicks
to pulling the reserve; luckily only the former was required during the trip. On our first day of jump- ing, the conditions were perfect. After winning the game of fives, OCdt Bowen was the first to jump. After final kit checks and managing to fight the force from the propellers onto the plane, she was set. The plane took nine minutes to reach a height of 15,000ft before the green light shone and the doors opened. Each jump had roughly
As beginners, we were amazed at
the level of detail and amount of skill required for a jump.
38 SANDHURST