Bill Kitchen is the inventor, with technical assistance from aerospace engineer Michael Palmer, of the modern vertical tunnel skydiving simulator. Bill’s first skydive was a tandem jump in 1990 from a Beech 18 at the skydive center in Ft. Collins, Colorado. He soon completed Accelerated Freefall training, continued to advance his skills and went on to earn a PRO rating. To improve his flying skills, he went to a wind tunnel in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, where he observed that the air in that tunnel was not smooth and he bruised himself falling off the “column of air” in the flight area. This inspired Bill to invent an effective vertical wind tunnel freefall simulator. Bill’s vertical wind tunnel design revolutionized the concept by adding a fully enclosed cylinder resulting in the most effective skydiving training tool other than actual freefall. The invention allows a new skydiver to get the equivalent time in simulated freefall in five minutes in the tunnel they would achieve in a day of skydiving. His success has both benefited and advanced skydiving significantly.
