Flight Patterns - Part 3/4: Wind
Apr 19
Written By Gabriel Donaldson
Let’s imagine that you are a plane, in a park or on a lawn, with your arms extended, grumbling the sounds of engines and running in circles, either to the right or to the left. Or, if you have a little model plane or want to use a pencil, that’s fine, too :-). Think about the wind, think about your experience with it, about the temperature, the expected weather. Hold your pencil or model plane in front of your face, like it’s flying towards you, and blow on it. Imagine the wind lifting and sustaining the flight of the makeshift aircraft. Imagine the wind flowing over and under the teardrop shaped wings leading to “lift” and feeling the sensation of a planes propulsion forward into it.
Smokejumpers consider the drift that the crepe paper streamers display on their way from fifteen hundred feet AGL to the ground preceeding jump operations. Which way did they go? Where did they land? What are the landmarks? They consider the mountains, ridges, rivers, bodies of water. Where will I fly my canopy with the least amount of risk? They consider the depth of the parachute’s stall point and align themselves with the small patch of earth littered with rocks, cactus, streamers: the “jump spot”, or what will likely be home for a while, and ponder: what is the safest way to get from this precarious little place above the earth, down to that little patch of dirt that no one else really wants to deal with?
As these questions drift in and out of a Smokejumpers mind, and as they’ve come out of their “checks” they are now preparing to do two things:
Safely secure airspace and
Fall or move into a flight pattern.
The first jumper will orient themselves into the wind, grab a riser (the webbing that holds the parachute together near the three ring apparatus) and proceed to do “bomb turns” either to the right or left, watching their altimeter sink from three thousand feet to two thousand fee, to fifteen hundred, a thousand feet, before they release the riser and quickly face the wind again.
Depending on the wind speed, the jumper will either align themselves upwind or downwind of the jump spot, through a carefully selected pattern of flight, turning and flying either to the right or left for a setup, base and final leg. These are called “right” or “left hand patterns”, and they’re fun to observe, even as a passenger on a plane. Flying into the wind is the ideal outcome (remember blowing on our model plane to give it lift) and the reason for this is that the RAM-AIR parachutes that are used by most Smokejumpers “fall forward” at certain velocities depending on wind and canopy inflation. It’s a large nylon wing and operates in many of the same ways that an airplane wing does, with “throttle”, brakes, venturi influences and more. Flying with the wind can lead to terrible outcomes ranging from veering off the flight path of the jumpspot, moving at extremely high velocities (making landings pretty terrible, sometimes), or being forced to make unplanned micro decisions upon final approach that involve crashing into trees, rivers, rocks, cactus, tree stobs, cow shit, cows, the list goes on.
Flying into the wind can be tricky, too, if the winds are high. Smokejumpers are taught to fly and land in all scenarios, including backward flight, which, as it turns out, is a lovely way to land or stick a “stand up” with a soft landing. WIth reverse flight, the Smokejumper is looking over their shoulder of choice while “backing” into the jump spot, rather than driving forward into it. This final approach is happening at between five hundred and eight hundred feet AGL, and once the Smokejumper has committed to their final approach, it’s ill-advised, if not a washable offense, to do last minute canopy adjustments that are dynamic, such as a “button turn”.
The final approach is actually one of the funnest parts of jumping, to some, because it allows the jumper the opportunity to fine-tune and perfect their adjustments, approach and landing: it’s a creative, intuitive, and reactive process. It’s also a place where a lot of things can go wrong: a stall released too close to the ground (think about the canopy of the parachute acting as a fixed point for a pendulum falling to the ground and the jumper is the little ball on the end, swinging violently up and down towards the earth . . . this is what happens when you come out of a stall), a downdraft from a neighboring thunder cell, an increase or decrease in anticipated wind speed, or last minute blind obstacles show up that couldn’t be seen from the plane. Also, the earth begins to “arrive” a lot more quickly than it appeared at three thousand feet, and a jumper is constantly adjusting their “sight picture”, kind of like their flight dashboard, in order to adjust their speed (penetration) and stall points (sink) for a safe and effective landing.
