Finishing the AFF

Level six of the AFF is "The Fun Jump" - the first time where the goal is to deliberately lose stability in the air to prove that you can save the situation yourself. Since I've been stable pretty much immediately upon exit every jump, I felt super nervous about this jump.

As usual, I kept going over the dive flow in my head all the way up to altitude and once in the door I felt myself focusing on the task at hand once again. I dived out of the airplane headfirst, almost flipped to my back but managed to save the situation by throwing my feet against my butt, and levelled out. I thought "Well, here we go" and did my backflip, which was hardly graceful but served its purpose of making me unstable, and I quickly regained stability as intended. Finally, I performed my first delta-track (a technique to create horizontal separation between jumpers before deployment of the parachute), and my instructor later told me that I actually did manage to get enough speed that he could track along next to me. All in all, it was another successful jump and I moved on to the last jump before the solo levels.

Knowing that all other levels had gone well, and that jump seven was just a combination of the things I'd already been doing, I felt much less nervous while ascending in the plane. However, clouds had started moving in and suddenly it was decided that we would be jumping from 2700m instead of 4000m to avoid the clouds. This would give me 900m to complete the entire dive flow before pulling my parachute. Thinking about it made me a whole lot more nervous, but also determined to be at my best and avoid having to redo a level. Apparently I hid my anxiety so well that my instructor expressed surprise upon hearing that I had felt stressed. Anyway, through some combination of luck and stubbornness, I completed the entire dive flow and was cleared for solo jumps!

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