SKYDIVING SIMULATOR WILL SOAR
WITH HELP FROM NASA OUTREACH PROGRAM

    
     COLEMAN, Fla. (April 22, 2004) – Within the next few years, skydiving teams will be able to train in a unique mobile skydiving simulator developed by FreeFlight International, Inc. with help from the NASA-funded Space Alliance Technology Outreach Program (SATOP).

SATOP provides free engineering assistance to small businesses with technical challenges through the donations of expertise from 49 Space Alliance Partners.

Frank Arenas, FreeFlight International president, approached SATOP for assistance in creating a vertical wind tunnel (VWT), or skydiving simulator, that would allow a team of people to practice skydiving without requiring a huge facility to house the device.

“Skydiving simulators have revolutionized skydiving training,” Arenas said. “Jumpers can now acquire the skills that used to take hundreds or even thousands of high-altitude freefalls in as little as a few hours. Skydivers of all ability levels use VWTs.”

The specific technical challenge Arenas faced was to determine what type of propeller and engine power would be needed in order to produce the amount of thrust to lift a team of people, instead of just a single skydiver as current VWTs do. 

SATOP started by contacting Andrew Hahn at NASA Langley Research Center, who provided Arenas with basic information concerning the ducted fans used at Langley. SATOP then turned FreeFlight's challenge over to Amir Hirsa, a professor with Alliance Partner Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), in Troy, N.Y. 

Hirsa researched different propeller manufacturers and determined what revolutions per minute and how much thrust would be necessary to achieve FreeFlight’s goal to lift a team of skydivers into the air.  He also consulted a well-known propeller manufacturer for propellers that would produce these results.

“SATOP was extremely helpful in providing engineering expertise in air-flow and system designing engineering at a level that we could not have afforded in the commercial market with our R&D budget,” Arenas said.

The help Arenas received from SATOP has enabled him to begin a proposal to the U.S. military for team skydiving machines to be deployed around the world to keep military parachutists in top training condition while waiting for missions.  This constitutes the start of a new business line for Arenas and will provide a new and more cost effective avenue of training for military personnel and skydiving enthusiasts.

The next step for Arenas will be a production model of the mobile skydiving simulator and he is looking for equity investors to begin actual production.  He plans to have the next generation machine built and running for demonstrations in the next year.

“SATOP was pleasure to work with – extremely polite and helpful – and I would highly recommend it to other small businesses,” Arenas said.  “As both an inventor and a small business owner, I can tell you that my skydiving simulator would have taken much longer and cost more to get ready for production without SATOP’s help.”