Skydiving

“A drop zone has a lot of moving parts. Now they all talk to each other.”

Chris is the operations manager at a busy civilian drop zone in Lincolnshire, handling up to 60 jumpers on a busy weekend across multiple aircraft and multiple disciplines — students on tandem and AFF jumps, sport jumpers doing formations, and a coaching team spread across the ground, aircraft, and landing area.

The coordination challenge on a high-volume day is significant. Aircraft are at different stages of their run — one climbing to altitude, one on jump run, one in the circuit to land. Students are being briefed, coached, kitted up, and debriefed at different points simultaneously. The landing area needs to be monitored and cleared. Manifest needs to know which loads are ready. Safety decisions sometimes need to be made and communicated across all of that in seconds.

Previously, the team relied on a combination of fixed radios in the manifest office, handheld units for the landing area team, and a lot of walking back and forth. It worked after a fashion, but it was slow, it depended on people being near a radio, and it created information silos — the aircraft coordinator might know something the student handling team didn’t, and vice versa.

Chris began trialling DigamE across his senior team — manifest, the student coordinator, the landing area safety officer, the lead coach, and the aircraft liaison — all on a single MESH channel. The immediate benefit was situational awareness. Everyone on the team knew what was happening across the whole operation without needing to be told individually. A hold on the aircraft due to airspace was heard by everyone simultaneously. A student who needed additional prep time before boarding was flagged to manifest before they’d even left the briefing room.

The coaching team found an additional benefit during student jumps. Coaches on the ground watching a student’s canopy flight could communicate observations directly to the debrief team waiting at landing, so the feedback was ready the moment the student touched down rather than assembled from memory twenty minutes later.

“Running a drop zone is like conducting an orchestra — everyone has a part to play and the timing matters. DigamE gave us a way for every section of the team to stay in sync without anyone having to leave their post to pass a message. On a busy day, that’s worth more than I can easily put a number on.”

Chris has since expanded the DigamE setup to include additional units for visiting coaches and has begun building it into the operational procedures for the drop zone’s instructor training programme.