Utah team takes top national honors in skydiving

OGDEN — Kyle Buchholz wanted to jump out of airplanes because his father did.

"I grew up looking at my dad's pictures," said the 25-year-old Ogden resident. "He always took me on adventures. And his motto was really cool. It was, 'So others may live.' They'd jump in to places to save other people."

Dave Buchholz was a para-rescueman in the Air Force, and Kyle was enamored with the idea of skydiving. That is until his father suggested they actually go do it one day.

"Out of the blue one day when I was 16, he actually asked me if I wanted to go do it," Buchholz said. Dave Buchholz, who served in the Vietnam war, actually told him he was calling the airport to set it up.

"I kind of froze," Buchholz said, laughing. "I thought, 'Is he serious?' It pretty much terrified me."

Luckily for young Kyle, he'd have to wait until he was 18 before anyone would let him skydive.

"But I did do my first jump with my dad," he said. "I'll be honest, it's terrifying driving to the airport. But it was a really cool experience. It was a really unique feeling."

That feeling hooked Buchholz so completely that he made it his profession. And last month, he and four other local skydivers, who make up Rockwell Airtime, did what no other team of Utah Skydivers has done. They won the Vertical Formation Skydiving division championship at the United States Parachute Association Nationals.

And the Utah team didn't just win, it dominated.

Rockwell Airtime scored a total of 131 points in eight rounds of competition. That's eight different jumps and formations. The next closest competitor, SDC SubStandard, scored a total of 66 points.

"We just blew the competition out of the water," said team member Dusty Hanks, 34.

The skydivers who make up the squad will tell you it's because they train at Ogden's indoor vertical wind tunnel, iFly Utah. Three of the team members work at iFly and the company sponsors the team.

"The reason we were able to get such high scores is because of all the time we'd spent training at iFly," said Hanks, who is originally from Bonner's Ferry, Idaho, and now lives in North Salt Lake. "We can train as a team in the tunnel, and we can spend hours on end training."

When skydivers practice formations without a wind tunnel, their only option is to actually go up in a plane and jump.