Melanie Curtis is a professional skydiver with more than 11,000 jumps over two decades in the sport. She is the co-founder and co-captain of the all-female Highlight Pro Skydiving Team, a new elite demonstration team that flies into events and crowds with smoke, streamers and large flags (think: parachutists landing on the 50-yard line at football games).
Melanie Curtis
The team’s mission is to inspire women and girls to live “bold brave lives of their own design.” They plan to magnify that goal and “other messages that matter” in coming years by partnering with social impact groups. The team is supported by the Women’s Skydiving Network, a non-profit focused on increasing female participation in skydiving through networking and promoting female leaders in the sport. Only 13% of the United States Parachute Association’s 40,000 members are women.
Curtis is the author of three books and the co-founder of How To Fly, Inc., a company that teaches high-achievers how to fly—literally and figuratively—through skydiving and life coaching. She is also leading Project 19, a women’s vertical skydiving world record attempt that will require 101 women to build and hold a formation in an expert-level flying position during freefall. The jump was supposed to commemorate the 100th anniversary of women’s suffrage but was postponed a year due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
On equality in and outside of skydiving . . .
Women are underrepresented. We see this in skydiving but we also see it in business, in other sports, on boards—we see the underrepresentation of women everywhere.
We wanted to not only make an impact on that in skydiving, but also by modeling women doing things that people classically think they can't [such as skydiving]—we can open people’s minds to what’s possible, and especially women’s minds to what’s possible. That applies to whether they’re doing their first jump in skydiving or being bold and brave however that looks to them.
Critical messaging around the 19th Amendment celebration is also acknowledging that it didn’t secure the right to vote for all women, only white women. Racial injustice is important to us. How can we get more women and more people of color in the sport so people see themselves in the collective that is the skydiving community? We have unlimited energy for that effort.
On why demonstration jumps are an effective tool . . .
Skydiving has such a unique power to capture attention, so we’re using that. Sure there’s this thing we love to do and we’d love to see more women be inspired to try skydiving. But as a medium, it has an amazing way to capture attention and draw media. It allows us to step onto those larger platforms as allies and spark dialogue around issues that we want to change in our country and world.
I do not know of any other demonstration jump team that has been funded philanthropically. With Women’s Skydiving Network supporting the mission, we’re not able to jump for a product or brand. We’re truly jumping for impact.
On live streaming at altitude with GoPros . . .
In a normal year, for demo jumps to have impact, we’d do them into a large in-person crowd where people are blown away by what they’re witnessing. Enter COVID and we’re absolutely committed to full-on adherence to COVID-19 guidelines to keep ourselves and others safe, so we reached a point where either we stopped, paused, or figured out a way to do it.
We hired a small production team to come to our largest demo jump and livestream the whole thing. We built something from basically nothing and reached so many more people than we ever would have with a live in-person event. We had cameras on the ground with an announcer, where they were shooting skydivers from the ground and livestreaming the feed to Facebook Live.
Then we developed, well, Macgyvered, a system to have a livestream connected to two jumpers’ heads. When we had a line of sight on them the helmet stream could be included in the live broadcast. We did a lot of research into those systems and they’re extremely expensive, so to be able to make it functionally work from scratch was pretty badass. We all also had regular GoPro cameras [GoPro Max 360) on our helmets and on wrist mounts for post-production edits.
On not just “doing it for the ’gram” . . .
I think [live streaming at altitude] is an interesting avenue. I love the idea of getting people a more direct perspective of what we do, especially live because you don't know how it’s going to turn out. There’s automatic electricity in the experience.
But I also think it’s important that this type of technology isn’t in the hands of inexperienced skydivers. When you put something like this on your head you want to essentially forget about it. You want to first focus on all things required to safely pull off a jump in front of the public.
Social media platforms have helped us reach more people. We have been putting our content into inspirational edits and making sure the messages we want conveyed are coming through.
On Zooming long before COVID . . .
I’ve been using Zoom for a long time as a life coach and skydiving coach. I’ve had a subscription group for young, well new, skydivers for a long time and we have met weekly for four years. It’s really wonderful to see that people are using it to help bridge the isolation gap in these times of COVID.
I love working with young jumpers. They’re excited, they want to learn more, and they don’t necessarily feel super comfortable asking for help. This service is a way for me to offer my experience, debrief videos, help people meet each other and ask questions to someone who is a trusted coach.
On air-to-air comms during freefall and under canopy . . .
My teammate, Karen Lewis Dalton, and I did a formation landing in Nashville [where two skydivers come in stacked under their own parachutes]. We have in-air communications in our helmets and can basically talk to each other while flying next to each other. So if I’m in a formation while landing and I make a decision to take my base leg a little longer during the landing pattern because of the winds, I’m going to tell her that I’m doing that and cue the exact moment when I plan to turn.
We’re very much able to be safe and in-sync when we have that kind of communication.
On why the message to be daring and brave is important . . .
Having learned about women’s suffrage and the history of that movement—and certainly as it relates to racial inequality as well—I can see that systems are set up to keep us down. Women being bold, brave and really speaking up and out and taking intentional action in their lives to change the things and systems that are set up to keep them down? That’s worth reflecting on, if nothing else.
From the perspective of aliveness, and living a life that feels fulfilling, connected and rich? That, for so many people, comes when we make choices to be brave. When we’re really connected to that, and how things feel when we’re purposefully driven, there’s little in life that means more.
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