Stratosfear - AAA Class

Members: Mario Bellavance, Richard Epp, Rick Epp, Peter Nash, Rocky Nash, Tana Nash, Wayne Schreiber

General Information: Team Stratosfear is the Canadian National Skydiving Team for Formation Skydiving. Stratosfear will represent the country as Team Canada at the World Championships. Sure jumping out of planes is fun, but formation skydiving is about what you do in freefall from the time you leave the airplane to the time you open your parachute. The sport has been around for years but has come into the limelight only recently. In four-person formation competition, (4-way), competitors build formations by holding on to each other in different ways. There are 60 different formations in the official rules. The formations have names like "Star", "Donut", "Crank" and "Snowflake" based on what they look like when they are built in the sky. These formations are randomly drawn in groups for competitions, so that formations rarely come up in the same order. There are ten rounds to a competition with five or six formations per round. Teams build the formations as fast as they can in 35 seconds of working time, which starts as soon as they leave the aircraft. If they build all the formations, they start over with the first one and go through them again, and again. The rounds are video taped and judged on the ground after the skydive.