Trying to Catch Some Waves...In the Sky?

Sky surfing is a type of skydiving in which the skydiver wears a board attached to his or her feet and performs surfing style aerobatics during free fall. This sport requires major practice. Because of the possibility of dropping the board, not every skydiving club permits sky surfing, and only a minority of skydivers have attempted this recent specialization in the sport. The simplest sky surfing stance is to stand upright on the board during free fall, and tilt the nose of the board down for more forward movement. However, even this basic technique is extremely difficult for well-trained sky divers. The extra drag of the board tends to upset the balance, and many sky surfers end up flipping over. The jumper must learn to control the board and their body position in order to open the parachute in a stable configuration. More advanced aerobatics such as loops, rolls and helicopter spins, are even more difficult, and take time to master after the basic techniques are conquered. Since some techniques require constant spinning at a high speed, some sky surfers’ tightly wrapping ace bandages all the way up the arms and legs to keep the blood from pooling at the end of their limbs. Even with the bandage technique, however, many techniques in sky surfing can be extremely painful. Some skilled individuals have even taken it a step further; once they reach the appropriate altitude, they glide to the mountain side, cut away their chute, and snowboard down a mountain.

Competitive skysurfing is a team sport. Each team has two people. One is a sky surfer who stands atop a specially designed board as he or she twists, flips and free falls. The other person is a cameraperson, or camera flyer, who skydives alongside the surfer to record the surfer's moves on a helmet-mounted camera. Judges score the team's video based on technical accuracy, performance and video presentation. Most contests include seven rounds of jumps. Two of these jumps are compulsory jumps, where the team must perform manovres set out by the judges. The remaining five jumps are choreographed by the team. Troy Hartman is credited with the largest variety of grand scale aerial stunts performed by any stuntman. He started his career in the early 90’s as a pioneer of the sport of Sky surfing, earning an X-Games World Champion title

.https://youtu.be/MbjNsAno--w 

Sky surfing unofficially started in 1980 when skydivers in California experimented with boogie boards, lying flat on the boards as they fell from a jump plane. Historically, Sky surf was invented by two french skydivers, Dominique Jacquet and Jean Pascal Oron in 1986. It gained its first recognition in the 1990's due to the efforts of the first few masters of this technique, Patrick De Gayardon, and Jerry Loftis. Competitive team sky surfing was apart of the ESPN X Games from 1995 to 2000.  ESPN later decided not to renew the sport for its seventh season, and as a result, sky surfing has become relatively rare in the skydiving community. Reasons for the decline include the rise in popularity of free flying and wing suit flying, the hazards associated with flying and releasing the board, and the dwindling number of experienced sky surfers to train new pilots. 
Hopefully the future will bring more extreme sport athletes, who surf in the clouds!


Sources:
http://www.dropzone.com/safety/Disciplines/Skysurfing_62.html
http://www.koyn.com/CloudDancer/index.html