Parachuting

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "Parachuting" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (September 2009) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

Parachuting

Four skydivers with deployed parachutes in Bex, Vaud, Switzerland
Highest governing body	Fédération Aéronautique Internationale
Characteristics
Contact	No
Mixed-sex	Yes
Type	Air sports
Presence
Country or region	Worldwide
Olympic	No
World Games	1997 – 2017

Parachuting and skydiving is a method of transiting from a high point in an atmosphere to the ground or ocean surface 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.

For cargo parachuting, the parachute descent may begin immediately, such as a parachute-airdrop in the lower atmosphere of Earth, or be significantly delayed, such as in a planetary atmosphere where an object is descending "under parachute" following atmospheric entry from space, and may begin only after the hypersonic entry phase and initial deceleration that occurs due to friction with the thin upper atmosphere.