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Bob Sturtivant
is one of the Royal Marines team which gained the bronze medal
in 1984 Third World Cup Competition of Canopy Relative Work, which took place at
Toogoolawah, Australia in October 1984, with teams from 11 countries competing.
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The following information is from Bob:
It shows one of the stacks we did in 1984 at the Army Parachute Association
base at Netheravon in Wiltshire, this was done after having successfully built
an all Royal Marine(RM) 15 stack or plane as it is more correctly known in
1983. We (The Royal Marines) were attempting to beat a world record that was
held by the Americans which was a 23 plane.
Despite a lot of hard work and training we only managed a 17 in that period,
however later that year we went to Australia and competed in the 3rd World Cup
of CRW (Canopy Relative Work) and achieved a Bronze Medal in the speed 8 plane
event, being beaten by the Americans in second place and the French in first.
The following year the RM’s organised a weeks training camp at the Royal Navy &
Royal Marines Sport Parachute Association (RN & RM SPA) at Dunkeswell in Devon
which is where I was working at that time as an instructor, with a great deal
of support from the military and from sponsors we achieved a 23 plane on the
very last jump which equalled the world record at the a time, however the
following year the same base was chosen and with similar support we did another
training camp and achieved the 24 plane which is still a world record today as
no one has built a bigger plane formation, this was recorded as such by the FAI
and by the Guinness Book of world records.
The 1986 record was also the subject of a one hour documentary by skydiving
photographer and adventurer-Leo Dickenson entitled ‘Stacking in the Sky’ which
was aired on TV on channel 4 in the October of that year. Since then however
the world record for a formation, I believe is a 100 canopy Diamond formation
with jumpers coming from all over the world to take part and this is the only
canopy formation record shown by the Guinness book of world records. Although
there were several Brits involved none of them were Royal Marines.
I also took part in a 50 way Military freefall formation record in August 1988
at Middle Wallop it was done on an open day in front of the public but took
about a week of training dives to achieve and was co-ordinated by Major Tim
Mace AAC who was second in running as the first British astronaut (Helen
Sharman being the first), this was a British and European record for about a
week when I believe the French did a bigger formation.
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geoff@sturtivant.org.uk
