Parachuting, including also skydiving, is a method of transiting from a high point in the atmosphere to the surface of Earth with the aid of gravity, involving the control of speed during the descent using a parachute or parachutes.

For human skydiving, it may involve a phase of more or less free-falling (the skydiving segment) which is a period when the parachute has not yet been deployed and the body gradually accelerates to terminal velocity.

History

After Louis-Sébastien Lenormand demonstrated a rigid-frame parachute for the first time in 1783, the first high-altitude parachute jump in history was made by André-Jacques Garnerin, the inventor of the frameless parachute, on 22 October 1797. Garnerin tested his contraption by leaping from a hydrogen balloon 3,200 feet (980 m) above Paris. Garnerin's parachute bore little resemblance to today's parachutes, however, as it was not packed into any sort of container and did not feature a ripcord. The first intentional free-fall jump with a ripcord-operated deployment was not made until over a century later by Leslie Irvin in 1919. While Georgia Broadwick made an earlier free-fall in 1914 when her static line became entangled with her jump aircraft's tail assembly, her free-fall descent was not planned. Broadwick cut her static line and deployed her parachute manually, only as a means of freeing herself from the aircraft to which she had become entangled.

Wikipedia, Parachuting, 2021.