What makes formation skydiving its own discipline? History, how it differs from freefly and wingsuit, and your path from first grip to team.
Why do some skydivers build stars in freefall while others fly head-down or glide through the sky in wingsuits? The honest answer: these are different disciplines of the same sport, and Formation Skydiving (FS) is the oldest and still the most-jumped of them.
FS means flying belly-to-earth and building pre-planned shapes with your team by gripping each other's arms and legs. No coincidence, no freestyle — every formation is planned, rehearsed and judged by clear rules.
The roots go back to March 1964, when four jumpers built the first documented 4-way star over Arvin, California. By 1968 that had grown to 12 people, by 1972 to 24 — and today the world record stands at an astonishing 400 skydivers linked in one formation at once. 400 people in freefall, connected at the same moment — more people than fit into an average cinema.
The reason FS is often the first competitive discipline jumpers try: it doesn't demand the extreme freefall skill of freefly or wingsuit, but rewards precision, teamwork and timing instead. Train Smart. Play Hard. — in FS that means: learn to grip cleanly two-up first, then grow into a team.
FS is also officially called Relative Work (RW) — the older term for controlled group flying. You build shapes from a fixed dive pool, take grips (contact points on your suit) and separate cleanly afterward.
Freefly flies head-down or sitting, usually without fixed formation requirements. Wingsuit uses a winged suit for distance and proximity, not grips. Canopy piloting only starts after deployment, in the precision approach. FS remains the only discipline built entirely around constructed formations in belly-to-earth freefall — more on how it relates to the vertical variant, VFS, in a later guide in this series.
Teams start in four skill classes: Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced and Open. The classes aren't a requirement — you can build formations purely for fun without any competitive ambition. But the structure shows you how far the path can go.
The typical path: your first two-way grips at intermediate level, then an informal three- or four-way team at your home dropzone, often supported by wind tunnel sessions. Nobody expects you to jump straight onto a competition team — most FS jumpers build formations for years purely for fun before competition ever crosses their mind. How exactly you find your first team is covered in a dedicated guide in this series.
FS carries an extra risk solo jumps don't: several people share the same airspace in freefall. A clear separation plan before every jump is mandatory, not optional — more on that in the guide on break-off and collision avoidance further along in this series.
Never join a formation project bigger than your current skill level supports. Every additional team member increases complexity disproportionately, not linearly — a two-way team isn't half as complex as a four-way, it's a fundamentally different undertaking with its own failure points.
Approach experienced FS jumpers at your dropzone and ask for a jump together with a debrief. Most are happy to share what they know — the FS community runs on exactly this kind of mentoring, more than most other disciplines. That openness isn't an accident: because FS simply doesn't work without a functioning team, few other skydiving disciplines have developed such a strong culture of experienced jumpers helping newcomers.
None — RW (Relative Work) is the older name for the same discipline, FS (Formation Skydiving) the more modern, official term. Many experienced jumpers use both words interchangeably.
No. Most FS jumpers build formations purely for the joy of teamwork. The four skill classes exist for those who want to measure themselves — not as an entry barrier.
FS flies belly-to-earth and builds fixed, planned formations. Freefly flies vertically (head-down or sitting) and is usually more individual, less formation-focused.
400 skydivers at once, set in 2006 in Thailand. That's still the world record today — and shows how far the discipline can reach from your first two-way grip.
Formation Skydiving: RW Suit, Grips and Booties