Wednesday, 9th December

This morning we woke to blue skies, sunshine and moderate winds and it was the start of a very busy day for all (or nearly all) the skydivers.  At the Horse DZ the 8-Way Formation Skydiving and VFS were able to make their first competition jumps, as were the Canopy Formations 2-Way Sequential teams.  The Freefly artistic jumpers continued their event whilst the Speed Skydivers got on with going fast.

The draw for the second round of the 8-Way had world record promise about it.  The 8-Way Formation Skydiving record of 31 points in the 50 seconds working time was set at the first FAI World Air Games in Turkey, 1997 by the Golden Knights and had been broken by them earlier this year at the US Nationals, could they break it again?

I took this picture of them creeping the round.  They then went up and gave us a NEW WORLD RECORD of 33 points.  The draw was F=L=D=G=P.

At the end of the day, and the completion of round 5 there was a quite a spread between the top 3 teams in the 8-way with USA on 111 points, Russia on 93 and France on 83.  In the VFS again after 5 rounds it is Canada, 90 - France 93 - and Belgium 68.

It was announced by the Great Britain team that they were withdrawing from both Canopy Formations events due to the injury to their Camera flyer.  The 2-Way Sequential also made their first competitive jumps today - at  the end of the day they also completed 5 rounds and France have 107 points, Russia, 91 and Sweden 82.

Artistic Events Freefly completed 6 rounds today, the last round is still being judged so check out the Live Results link above to get the latest scores.

Speed Skydiving continued to go fast - or at least their competitors did, with Marco Wiederkehr consolidating his lead after 5 rounds with 1467.62

Out at the Beach DZ Accuracy Landings continue and the conditions today began to divide the field. 

At the end of the day and the end of Round 4 we had only 2 competitors with 0.00 scores, 4 with 0.01 and 4 with 0.02 - with both Russia and Czech Republic jumpers tied in 1st place with the Belarusian, Italian, Czech Republican and Croatian competitors 0.01 cm behind.  For the female event we have three Chinese girls with a tied score of 0.02 cms.

It has been a good day, everyone is glad to be back in the sky and it is nice when a team does well, as everyone congratulated the USA Golden Knights 8-Way team on their new World Record.  Regan Tetlow was there with the TV crew - obviously pre-warned of the possibility - you can see it on the Live-Stream TV going out from Skydive Dubai.  The link is on the World Air Games web-site - reached from the link at the top of the page.