posted Feb 17th, 2023 - The delegates of the world's participating countries in skydiving had their annual meeting in Malmo, Sweden, last month. The 73rd plenary meeting of FAI's International Skydiving Commission (ISC) included once again meetings of the organization's Formation Skydiving Committee.

The members of the FS Committee, elected by all delegates, are currently Claire King (South Africa), Vana Parker (Great Britain), Trude Sviggum (Norway), Jim Rees (United States), Randy Connell (United States), Matthew Fry (United States), with Deputy Chair David Grauwels (Belgium) and Chair Mark Szulmayer (Australia).

The committee members review and evaluate the rules and regulations of the sport in their meetings. Any changes will be presented to all delegates in the plenary meeting, where the vote on the suggestions will approve them or not.

Any potential changes of competition rules and dive pools follow the same procedure at the annual meetings, where the delegates discuss any suggestions and proposals that they are supposed to collect from their constituency at the skydiving centers and the national and international competitions.

One of the main topics in the past years has been the synchronization of dive pools for indoor and outdoor competition, and the same topic was back on the agenda for last month's meeting in Sweden. There has been controversial discussion of dive pool changes in the past, and it was not much different this time before the meeting.

Most of the times, the suggestions of dive pool changes created discussions of the actual blocks and random formations, which were removed, changed or added. There has been even more food for discussion in the recent years, as the synchronization of indoor and outdoor competition added different angles to the already controversial dive pool and rules topics.

However, the synchronization in 4-way indoor and outdoor competition was already completed when the previous maneuvers of Block 1 (Snowflake - Snowflake) and Block 13: (Offset - Spinner) were replaced by Molar - Molar (Block 1) and Mixed Accordion - Mixed Accordion (Block 13) at the beginning of the 2019 season.

The two current block maneuvers fit much better into a 14-foot flying chamber, which was the main reason for the adjustment. The 4-way dive pool remained once again completely untouched in Sweden. Teams and competitors on all levels will not have to train any new block techniques or random formations.

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Five new blocks for the 8-way indoor dive pool

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The situation is very different in 8-way, where the committee decided to bring big changes to the dive pool. In fact, the changes are so dramatic that the ISC Formation Skydiving Committee also decided to apply all changes only for indoor competition, even though there has not been any official FAI Indoor World Championship or World Cup in 8-way so far: "The changes allow the indoor dive pool to have a full complement of 22 blocks and add some interesting variations that have not been seen in the 8-way pool before. There are no ISC 8-way competitions currently scheduled so there is no problem making a large number of changes to the pool."

Only three of the five new 8-way blocks and the change of Random Formation K (Crossbow to Double Meekers) find their way into outdoor events, where 8-way competition is a part of national championships, world championships and world cups: "It was felt that implementing all the 8-way suggestions was too large a change for the outdoor pool in one year, so it is recommended that only the three blocks above be changed as well as random K for the outdoor pool."

The three outdoor blocks are identical with the three according new indoor blocks, which will be performed this weekend at the Paraclete XP Indoor Championship. Several 8-way teams have been training the new dive pool during 8-way Hell Week, and the execution of the new blocks will soon be seen in the aftermath of the 8-way competition. 8-way world champion Kirk Verner pointed out for the NSL News that the original graphics of the new Block 14 (Zippered Opals - Zippered Opals) are incorrect. The 360' rotation of the four pieces is not optional. The required turning directions are indicated by the arrows.