AXIS Flight School would like to thank Annette O’Neil for writing the following article about the new AXIS Merits System.

Photo by Samantha Schwann

AXIS provides bespoke education for Smart Skydivers: Now with (Gorgeous) Merits!

Ask anyone who’s been in the sport for more than a couple of seasons: the times, they are a changin’. For the first 15 to 20 years of sport skydiving’s popular heyday, there wasn’t any doubt that the party lay at the heart of the matter. In the not-too-long-ago bad old days, your standard sport skydiver would go about chasing boogies all season long — and chase the sun to find even more skydiving parties when her/his own season ran out. Beer, tent cities and magic-carpet exits ruled the day

In recent years — as you may have noticed — the sport is sobering up. Today’s skydiver has a different goal to chase: skill development. Suddenly, it’s not enough to simply jump out of an airplane with your buddies; now, you’d better be using that jump to get — well — better. This is the age of the skills camp; of the training trip; of one-on-one coaching. People just want more. And can you blame ‘em?

Enter AXIS — one of skydiving education’s indisputably premium brands. Brianne Thompson and Niklas Daniel, AXIS’s owners and instructors, are a pair of highly decorated skydivers who founded AXIS as a boutique instruction operation. The intentionally-small operation has been based at Skydive Arizona since 2010. In that time, Nik and Brianne have managed to actually revolutionize how skydiving is coached.

How’d they do that? In essence, by… Continue reading on SkydiveMag.com