Paul “Jyro” Martyn

Paul Martyn made his first skydive at 16 years old in New Zealand and never really came back down. Born in Wellington, New Zealand, he was the kind of person the sport produces rarely, and needs desperately: a self-taught designer, a relentless experimenter, and a builder who operated on instinct, passion, and an almost uncanny feel for what a parachute could do.

In his early years Martyn sewed his first canopy on a borrowed sewing machine at 19 and began selling canopies out of a garage in 1986. The nickname Jyro, an acronym for “Jump Your Ring Out,” had already attached itself to him by then, originating from a jumpsuit company he ran to fund his skydiving. It would become the name the world knew him by.

In 1985, Jyro began making skydiving parachutes under the name “Icarus by JYRO,” starting with Pegasus copies for friends before gradually elevating the performance levels of the designs of the day. By the early 1990s the brand had become Icarus Canopies, and in 1994 NZ Aerosports became an incorporated company. What had started on a borrowed sewing machine was becoming one of the most respected canopy manufacturers in the world.

The milestone that secured his place in the history of parachute design came in 1995. When cross-braced construction and zero porosity fabric were emerging as the technologies that would define high-performance canopy flight, Jyro committed fully to combining them. After years of prototyping, often getting the performance right but not the openings, NZ Aerosports released the Icarus Extreme in 1995, the first zero porosity cross-braced canopy on the market. High-performance canopy flight changed permanently that year, and the designs that followed across the entire industry trace their lineage to that moment.

The designs that came after built on that foundation one by one. The FX in 1997 introduced the closed nose construction that is now standard on high-performance canopies. The VX in 1999, released on the same day as a competitor’s similar offering, became known in the industry as an act of competitive audacity that only Jyro could have pulled off with a straight face. The Safire and Crossfire lines extended the company’s reach across the full spectrum of the sport, from student progression canopies to competition-level wings.

The most ambitious chapter came in 2010, when a young French aerodynamics engineer named Julien Peelman arrived at the factory for a holiday and never left. The collaboration between Jyro’s design expertise and Peelman’s computational engineering produced the Petra, a canopy that established an entirely new category in the sport, the hyper-performance wing, and that still holds major canopy piloting records. The Leia and Queen Sleia followed, extending that performance frontier further still.

Through it all, Jyro ran his company the way he approached everything: with directness, generosity, and a culture that treated the people around him as family. The company he built outlasted him, and the team he assembled continues his work in his name.

Paul “Jyro” Martyn passed away on March 3, 2017, at the age of 53. The company he founded has since been renamed JYRO, ensuring that the name he carried through the sport remains permanently attached to the canopies he gave his life to designing. His induction into the International Skydiving Hall of Fame honors a designer whose work changed what skydivers fly and what those canopies are capable of, and a man whose spirit remains inseparable from the sport he loved.