Inspired by his mother, Gustavo Cabana took his first pictures at the age of 6 and began to study photography at age 16 but didn’t find inspiration until he saw Norman Kent’s poster of the first 100 way world record. After his 70th jump, the first with a camera on his helmet, he knew what he wanted to do for the rest of his life. With his passion and perseverance, he has become one of skydiving's most accomplished photographers with over 27,000 camera jumps in 28 countries, having photographed 29 FAI World Records in Formation Skydiving, Canopy Formation and Head Down and Head Up Freefly. Gustavo is the creator of Videolounge which has been used at world championships for dubbing, sorting and judging videos. He has also collaborated with many highly regarded large formation and canopy formation teams worldwide. Gustavo designed, built and managed an oxygen system that facilitated multiple skydiving records in Europe. He has been conducting camera courses and seminars since 1998 and created the online Flying Camera School with the goal of educating and helping to make camera flying safer for both newer and experienced jumpers. In 2020, he launched the website www.gustavocabana.com to share his 30 years’ worth of images with the world.
Welcome to the Class of 2023!
Bill Coe is the founder, owner, and President of Performance Designs as well as a partner at Complete Parachute Solutions. In the summer of 1976, he entered the world of skydiving at a small Drop Zone in Hinckley, Illinois. There, he jumped through the winter and realized that he needed to move to a warmer place to jump year-round. On January 1st, 1977, he packed up his car and moved to Daytona Beach. Bill started college at Embry Riddle Aeronautical University and started skydiving in Deland, Florida. He also worked for Relative Workshop during this time. In October of 1979, Bill got a job with Eastern Airlines and moved to Miami. He continued jumping in Homestead, Florida, and would also rent airplanes to fly back to Deland to jump and continue taking college courses. In 1980, he designed and jumped his first parachute. Several more parachutes were designed, built, and tested over the next few years. Bill graduated in 1982 with a Bachelor of Science Degree in Aviation Technology, Cum Laude. In 1983, Performance Designs was incorporated. Bill is responsible for many innovations in the sport such as the SLink, Microline, ZP fabric and crossbracing, just to name a few. With Bill's guidance and tenacity, Performance Designs has been at the helm of countless innovations for the sport and is committed to relentlessly pursuing research and development.
Jon Devore is part educator, part performer, and one-hundred percent visionary. He first found skydiving back in 1993 when he did his first tandem skydive in his hometown of Juneau, Alaska. He knew right then that he found his true passion and by 1994, he had moved to Skydive Arizona to pursue his dream of human flight. During the early days of his career, he spent his time flying with a small group of passionate skydivers helping develop and push forward what is now known as freeflying. Jon was one of the first full time freefly coaches and together with his team Alchemy, organized almost every freefly world record attempt. He has been a professional skydiver and cameraman for 30 years’ totaling more than 22,000 skydives and BASE/wingsuit jumps. Jon is a two-time World Champion, a three-time National Champion and he has been the Aerial Coordinator of the Red Bull Air Force Stunt Team for over 20 years. His passion is human flight, and he likes to teach the general public about the sport he loves. Because demonstrating his sport is the best way to advocate it, Jon has dedicated a large part of his career coordinating skydiving demos and live shows all over the world. Jon has also applied his expertise to a number of major Hollywood feature films, as a stunt coordinator, skydiving stunt performer and aerial cinematographer, including “Batman”, “Ad Astra,“ “Godzilla,” “Fast and Furious 7,” “Point Break, “The Hangover Part III,” “Iron Man” and “Iron Man 3,” “Transformers: Dark of the Moon”, “San Andreas” and most recently as aerial stunt coordinator and camera flyer for “Mission Impossible 7”. He has also overseen stunts for a range of television programs and commercials.
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.
Shannon Pilcher is a multiple-time world champion skydiver, educator, and entrepreneur who has spent 27 years traveling the globe and living a life of purpose. As a two-time formation skydiving world champion, he has coached hundreds of jumpers in the science and art of 4-way. As a co-founding member of the PD Factory Team, he has amassed three world records and numerous world medals. Also, with the PDFT, he co-pioneered descents of some of the world’s most iconic mountain peaks, including the Italian Dolomites, French Alps, Norwegian fjords, the Grand Canyon, and the Nepali Himalayas. As a co-founding member of Flight-1, he has taught thousands of civilian and military canopy pilots, helping to usher in a paradigm-shifting culture of canopy safety around the world. Shannon has dedicated the last five years of his journey to coaching multi-national leadership teams and their leaders to reach their highest potential. He holds a Master’s in Organization Development form American University and a Bachelor’s in Building Construction from the Georgia Institute of Technology. He lives in DeLand, Florida with his wife and 5-year-old daughter, and spends his summers in Israel with his wife’s family.