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George Pilkington |
August 1999 |
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George Pilkington |
August 1999 |
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People in the Sport George Pilkington How long have you been jumping, how many jumps do you have and what level have you achieved?Started 4 February 1982, now have 2200+ jumps.
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 Photo By Andy Ford |
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And now you're into freeflying, how good are ya? I am bad. Very bad. But I've been worse! I love it though. I love not dirt diving and the freedom of freeflying. I have a need to progress in what I do. And freeflying gives me that quest to be doing things better all the time. Do you think you'll stop flat flying? No. Not at all, I really enjoyed Brit100 and I'm going to the world record. The beauty of skydiving today is that, if you can get to a level of competence in flat flying and freeflying, then you can do anything. |
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was the best thing about Brit100? It was all wicked. The aircraft formation flying was just mind blowing. The 100-way was a superb build, I didn't see any shit going down anywhere. Perfect vibes. The mood on the ground afterwards was like no other jump I can ever remember. And because a lot of people landed out it just seemed to go on and on. Adrian Nicholas flying underneath. That was something else. The footage is spectacular. And all that stuff on the website. Storming. Everybody working together. I am really looking forward to the video. Simon Ward. He is definitely the man, isn't he? He has got so much PR out of this, British skydiving doesn't know what's hit it. He is such an asset to skydiving! He should be employed by the BPA and paid a fortune to sort us out for the millennium because he'd probably have it done by the middle of next week. (Laughs) Well, that's a little optimistic, even for me! How did you get involved with Speed Racing? Speed racing only became possible with the massive sample rate of Evolution, its ability to store the data and signal the start and end of the vertical mile. Speed racing is a bit of a blast. You get very scared in the plane on the way up. Get out of the door, accelerate as fast as you can, blast into the measured mile, cover the distance in the shortest amount possible, flare out, dump and save your life. Chappy (Ian Chapman), who had done the fastest time in the world, 286 mph, was saying how much of a rush he got out of it. I looked around the bar and saw all these other speed racers with beaming faces. Chappy had pushed his limits further than he had ever gone before ... but so had all these other people, they had all gone faster than they had before, so relatively they had all gone 286 mph!! And they all had smiles. What about the safety side of speed racing? Sometimes racers don't really take what they are doing seriously enough. It always scares me far more than any other sort of skydive Ð and I am scared on all of them, which is why I've got a black visor! You have to make sure that your head and your equipment are all in the right places and are staying there. You might not hear your Evolution because of the extra wind speed. We are planning to use LED's at the next speed racing but you have to have your wits about you and use your eyes. You must understand what you are doing. You are driving this dragster towards the ground as fast as you can; don't expect to get any help from anything but yourself. Otherwise you're putting yourself in an unnecessary risk category. How do you feel about safety in skydiving? I love skydiving Lesley but I respect it like nothing else. We do it because we want to have fun and we do it because it is the most fun we can have. But it is also probably the most dangerous situation we consciously place ourselves in. We do it voluntarily but it can take our lives in a heartbeat. I know skydivers all over the world and the longer you are in the sport the more friends you seem to lose. Of course you know more people by then but often people don't seem to comprehend what it is that they are doing. I see jumpers at Quincy flying around, hooking themselves into RV's and each other left right and centre, all trying to land in the same area. They obviously don't understand how dangerous what they are doing is or they wouldn't be doing it! I just want to make skydiving as safe as possible. To manufacture an audible alti which gives you all the information you need, when you need it, to skydivers all around the world, every time they jump, gives me an enormous amount of pleasure. Do you get lots of letters and emails of appreciation? (Laughs) No, this is skydiving! But I do get some and they mean a lot. Do you think you might have saved a life with your product? The answer to that question has to be 'No' but I have helped skydivers save their own lives. Time-Out cant save your life, it just bleeps in your ear. What you do then is up to you. How
did you develop the Time-Out? |
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So, I thought, what did I myself, personally need? Break-off indication
to tell me to leave my friends and go and save my life; I need to know where
2,500 feet is because if I haven't deployed by then, I need to do so; and
I also need to know where 1,500 feet is cos I ain't going lower than that
before I start reserve procedures. So I developed the perfect product for
me and it just so happens thousands of other skydivers think it's exactly
what they need too. I had lots of input from my friends who are mostly very
experienced skydivers, we gave the digital whizz kid a brief on what we
had come up with and the Time-Out was born. Thanks for the commercial break, what else do you do for safety? During Brit100 I gave talks on safety from break-off down including hook turning. The theory being that we don't encourage hook turning but, we know people are going to do it, so we teach them how to do it safely. You need to gently learn the fine art of swooping your canopy, not just boogie on down and swing on a toggle! How long do you think it takes to swoop your canopy? 1,000 swoops. Not a thousand jumps; a thousand swoops. How do you start? With straight-in shots for 50 jumps. 45 degree turns into a straight in shot for 150 jumps. 90 degree turns and 180 degree turns in your own time after that. But it took until I had 1,500 jumps until I felt I had an understanding of what I was doing. But you can still make mistakes. Even Rickster makes mistakes. You just have to make sure that, if you make a mistake you still have the margin to correct it. The key in swooping is to go nowhere near your limit. Just go to your limit minus a deal-with-it card. We all know there is a time for hooking and there is a time for leaving it well alone, like, going into a tight demo with a brand-new Velocity. There's a time for holding, a time for folding and a time for running away! Explain the concept of deal-with-it cards Well, Cool Cat (Rob Colpus, from Cold-Puss) reckons there are 'lucky' skydivers and 'unlucky' skydivers. The only difference is that lucky skydivers carry a deal-with-it card. Unlucky skydivers get taken out, or have a bad exit or a shoddy briefing and they screw up and don't get in. So-called 'lucky' skydivers have the same shit go down but they chuck a 'deal-with-it card' in these situations, get back up or whatever they need to deal with the shit, and still do their job successfully. In other words, the deal-with-it cards are actually experience, awareness and the determination never to give up, always keep skydiving. What would you say to people who say swoopers are just posers? I remember once I was flying my model plane and I caught it as it was coming into land. The dude next to me looks at me and says 'Poser' My response was to say, "Why is that Posing? I'm not doing it for you, I am doing it for me. It makes no difference to me if you're here or not. If you weren't here, I'd still be doing it. How is that posing?" In the same way, ask yourself if you'd still be hooking in if all those babes weren't cruisin' around at the DZ. If you'd still land the same way on your own, you're not posing. If you'd just do a straight-in shot, then you're posing. Posing is pointless. If you have to pose you are probably placing yourself in the unnecessary risk category. If you swoop for yourself, you will do it within your own limit. Do it for yourself, don't do it for anyone else. George was talking to Lesley Gale |
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