Dave Smith takes us back in time to see how tandem skydiving was introduced to Australia and how tandems contribute to the Australian Parachute Federation and its members.

It was 1984 and the APF conference was being held in Mount Isa, central-west Queensland. The special guest speaker was none other than Bill Booth; inventor of the 3-ring system, hand-deployed parachute and tandem parachuting. His Florida rival, Ted Strong, had also developed a tandem parachute system, but Ted’s equivalent used the now-familiar drogue. Bill’s tandem parachute system didn’t have a drogue when he came to Australia, but later on down the line, Bill decided to incorporate a drogue.

Trevor Burns, Civil Aviation Australia’s (CAA) Sport Aviation Inspector at the time, was also a guest at the Mount Isa conference, and someone in the APF hierarchy put both Trevor and Bill in a shared room. By the time the conference was over, Trevor was ‘persuaded’ by Bill to approve tandems in Australia as a student training method.

Ted Strong with passenger Mary Jobe (left) and Bill Booth with passenger Connie Simpson (right) in 1983.
Image: Norman Kent Productions 

Bill used a simple analogy: When learning to drive you have a driving instructor in the other seat. When learning to fly, you have an instructor beside you. When learning to parachute, you receive ground training and then are despatched from the aircraft on a static line, on your own, descending until someone on the ground gives you landing instructions. As Bill rightly claimed, tandems would allow the instructor to accompany the student and deliver training during the descent.

So tandem was approved in Australia as a student ‘training method’, requiring the person on the front to be considered under training (not a passenger).

The APF and CASA now formally refer to what’s often called the ‘tandem passenger’ as a ‘tandem parachutist’. The person on the back is an instructor. The term ‘passenger’ has certain legal connotations, and you owe a passenger a higher duty-of-care than a participating tandem parachutist. Parachutist sounds better to the person on the front than passenger too.

Other countries don’t require tandem masters to be instructors. Some follow the USA model and only require the tandem master to be endorsed by the tandem parachute manufacturer. So Australia is in a rather unique position requiring the tandem master to be an instructor and the tandem parachutist to become a member of APF.

The reason the APF can offer such a range of membership services – which are the envy of other national parachuting organisations – is because the APF collects a membership fee from every tandem passenger. Every tandem parachutist in Australia is a member of the APF and makes a meaningful contribution to the APF’s income. Their membership fee includes an insurance component to cover our very substantial insurance costs. In our best year there were 180,000 tandem passenger descents.

So the message is, tandems contribute to the cost of running the organisation and services the APF provides members. It allows DZ Owners (Group Members) to provide turbine aircraft and nice facilities for fun jumpers, which might not be possible if tandem jumpers were simply members of the public ticking something off their bucket list.

About The Author

Dave Smith is an Australian Parachute Federation Board Member, with over 50 years of skydiving experience, as well as being a pilot. His series of articles, titled "Looking In The Rear View Mirror", will give examples of how far the Australian Parachute Federation has come since it began, and what it has achieved for its members. 

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[Photo Sources: Norman Kent Productions, Skydive Australia, Baz]