posted Apr 2nd, 2012 - The NSL News pointed out during the aftermath of the Paraclete XP Outdoor Championship 2012 that Arizona Airspeed competed with a new helmet design for the whole team. The story on 26 March 2012 provided the details.

The same story mentioned that Airspeed is not the first top team that used different colors to make identification of the individuals easier. Sky Panthers Barkli have been using the same concept for many years and are still applying it. However, even the Sky Panthers were not the first ones, and the story goes much farther back in time.

XL member Pete Allum brought to the attention of the NSL News that the earliest lineups of the British team in the late 90s had uniformed jump suits and gear but different colors for the helmets.

Pete Allum trained and competed with John McIver, Toby Stafford and Lee Love in the XL lineup by then. He said that his team, and many others at that time, engineered their jumps with mirror imaged sequences when certain blocks were drawn. Slot switchers were also common, and sometimes mirror imaged sequences were even slot switchers, too.

It was mentally and physically very challenging when those sequences were drawn. This slot switcher/mirror image option has been eliminated ever since teams eventually decided to rather memorize two pages with different slots than switching turning and moving direction every other page.

However, the different helmet colors even help to identify the piece partner and the other piece without mirror images. Just the slot switchers alone can be challenging enough, and any help for the brain frees up space for other important chores in the 35 seconds of working time. Pete Allum still uses his green color of the early days - whether it is the same helmet or not. It will be visible again this week at the World Challenge 2012.