The sport flyer's guide to indoor skydiving - written by the only person in the building who sees everything and flies almost nothing.
Egbert Halderman is the sole cleaner at City Skydive Utrecht, one of the world's only twin-tunnel facilities. Every morning at six o'clock, long before the first tourist arrives, he walks into the building and spends three hours scrubbing the polycarbonate glass, sweeping the steel cable net, and reading the physical evidence left behind by the previous day's flyers. The scuff marks tell him exactly who panicked, who progressed, and who hit the wall at speed.
After years of watching thousands of hours of coaching, competition training, and spectacular failure from three feet away - without the deafening roar of the wind blinding his judgment - he decided to write it all down.
Tunnel Vision is the book that sits between your first tandem flight experience and the dense technical manuals used by professional instructors. It is written for the person who did their two-minute tourist flight, felt the strange support of the wind beneath their chest, and thought: I need to learn how to control this.
What this book covers:
The complete physical progression from belly flying through back flying, sit flying, head-down, and dynamic carving - explained through accessible metaphor and real-world observation, not chalkboard physics.
The definitive hand signal reference - 46 coaching signals catalogued, illustrated, and explained, including the most common beginner misinterpretation for each. No such complete reference exists anywhere else in print.
The mental game that no other resource addresses - learning plateaus, the three stages of skill acquisition, structured self-coaching through video review, breathing techniques, flow state, and how to stop wasting expensive tunnel time on aimless flying.
Evidence-based injury prevention - including published clinical data on shoulder injury risk, a targeted exercise protocol, the Day 3 fatigue phenomenon, and honest guidance on when to stop flying before your body makes the decision for you.
The financial reality - session planning templates, optimal training structures, coaching strategies, the secondhand gear market, and practical tools for extracting maximum value from every expensive minute.
A complete guide to the global tunnel circuit - from the thick, heavy air of Indoor Skydive Roosendaal to the silent luxury of LuxFly Luxembourg, the raw cathedral of Paraclete XP, and the absurd thirty-two-foot chamber of CLYMB Abu Dhabi.
Competition formats explained - all current FAI-recognized disciplines including the brand-new Solo Speed category, with a practical pathway from your first local scramble to the international stage.
The transition from tunnel to sky - an honest assessment of what transfers to real skydiving (about 30%) and what absolutely does not, including the AFF licensing path and recommended dropzones for tunnel-trained flyers.
What this book is not:
This is not a textbook. If you want exhaustive photographic breakdowns of every grip angle and body position, buy Andy Newell's excellent Body-Flight Basics. This book is the translation layer - the experiential companion that tells you what the textbook cannot: why you keep sliding backward into the glass, why your coach looks quietly disappointed, and why you are spending your entire disposable income on a hobby that leaves you bruised, deaf, and grinning like an idiot.
Over 100 illustrations including body position diagrams, transition sequences, formation references, exercise protocols, and a tear-out hand signal quick-reference card designed to live permanently in your gear bag.
Written from the outside of the glass, for everyone on the inside.
