Brian Pangburn

Brian Pangburn made his first skydive in November 1991 as a birthday gift to himself, and found canopy formation entirely by accident. Born on November 20, 1964, in Casa Grande, Arizona, he was waiting at a small drop zone two years later while his wife completed an AFF jump when three strangers asked if he could fill in for an absent fourth on their practice load. He made his first canopy formation jump that day and never looked back. What began as a favor became a lifelong calling, and the discipline of canopy formation skydiving would not be what it is today without him.

His competitive record is among the most decorated in the history of the discipline in the United States. From 2003 to 2014, Pangburn represented the country on the US Parachuting Team at multiple World Championships, accumulating 47 U.S. National medals and 14 World Championship medals, including 5 gold, across a career that spanned more than a decade of international competition. He was part of the 2007 effort that produced the 100-way canopy formation world record at Jump Florida Skydiving in Lake Wales, Florida, a record that stood for eighteen years and was considered by many in the community to be unbreakable.

He was the one who helped break it. In November 2025, as one of the lead organizers and the formation pilot, Pangburn was central to the effort that brought 104 skydivers from 20 countries together above Lake Wales to build a diamond formation that surpassed that 18-year-old mark and set a new world record, the largest official canopy formation ever completed. Between those two milestones, he co-organized the 2019 2-, 3-, and 4-point 43-way sequential world records at Skydive Perris, the 2021 46-way sequential, and the 2022 54-way sequential, building the foundation of experience and community that made the 2025 record possible. His contributions to the discipline across those years brought his total world record involvement to at least ten.

What enabled those records was as much about infrastructure as it was about flight. Pangburn has spent more than two decades building the talent pipeline that canopy formation skydiving needed to grow. As a Flight-1 instructor and Course Director, he has trained hundreds of US and NATO military jumpers, coached numerous teams from beginners to US National Champions, and developed athletes who went on to represent the United States at the world stage. His most striking coaching achievement may be the Qatar 4-way sequential team, whom he guided from their very first canopy formation jump to a World Championship title in under three years, a team that went on to hold that world championship for the following decade. He also created the CRW-tube YouTube channel, a library of structured instructional videos that standardized canopy formation training for skydivers worldwide and established safety as its foundation.

His innovations extended beyond coaching and into the operational systems that govern how the sport operates at scale. For the 2025 world record attempts, where the formation required exit altitudes of 19,500 feet, Pangburn worked directly with FAA officials in Miami and Washington to secure a Temporary Flight Restriction that created a protected no-fly zone from exit altitude to the ground, a level of airspace coordination unprecedented for the discipline. He also integrated a transponder system atop the formation itself, enabling Miami and Orlando air traffic control to monitor the attempt in real time. The approach he pioneered has permanently changed how large canopy formations are safeguarded in the sky.

In 2022, the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale recognized his contributions to the discipline with the FAI Leonardo da Vinci Parachuting Diploma, one of the most prestigious honors in international parachuting. It was a fitting acknowledgment of a career defined not by a single achievement but by a sustained, generational commitment to advancing canopy formation in every dimension available to him.

Brian Pangburn’s induction into the International Skydiving Hall of Fame honors a competitor, organizer, innovator, and teacher whose work rebuilt a discipline from the inside and left it larger, safer, and more capable than he found it.