Dave has been involved in Skydiving for nearly 50 years, an active competitor and participant in big-way formations in the UK and Europe, and in the Formation Skydiving (FS) World Cup, never losing his enthusiasm for the sport.
He has made over 14,300 jumps with a freefall time of more than 189 hours. He has jumped from many different aircraft and even from a balloon, and from heights between 20,000 ft and 800ft. He has served on BPA Council and Safety and Training Committee and was a driving force behind the move to allow students to jump square canopies, which took five years. He ran a three-year test programme on static line squares for the BPA before they adopted the Ram-Air Progression System (RAPS).
He was much involved in introducing FS into the UK. He was also one of the first to qualify in Accelerated Free Fall (AFF) instruction in the UK, following which he went on to train around 100 AFF instructors over some 32 years. He wrote one of the first books on FS called `Body Flying’. He is held in such esteem that after the Mannheim air disaster in 1982 in which 9 Skydivers from Swansea lost their lives, he was asked to move to Swansea to help rebuild the club. He has remained closely involved with South Wales ever since. He was also one of the first members of the Drop Zone Operators’ Association who helped to provide a voice for drop zones.