The fourth round of the Canopy Pilots Circuit will be held Saturday at Skydive The Farm, located on Grady Road.

The competition will be open and free to the public, said Bill Clough the event organizer.

The public is invited to meet the pilots during registration at Moody Ques on Main Street at 7:30 p.m. Friday.

Events for the public will include a Tandem Skydive from 14,000 feet to be held on the day of competition.

Activities will begin at 10:30 a.m. Saturday and continue

throughout the afternoon.

“We encourage everyone to come out and watch. We want to continue to promote Polk County and northwest Georgia to skydivers world wide,” Clough stated in a press release. “We want to keep Cedartown as the skydiving capital of the south.”

When the professionals begin competing in the fourth round of Canopy Piloting, also known as “Swooping”, the public will see one of the most growing activities in the skydiving world. Many believe this is due to this event being spectator friendly.

This type of competition entails the canopy pilot to deploy the canopy at 5,000 feet, piloting it to an execution point over the swoop course. Then, he turns from 270 to 180 degrees or more and goes into a rotating dive dramatically increasing the canopy speed.

Professional competition courses mark the entry gates with 5-foot tall wind blades, whereas some part of the pilot’s body must break the imaginary line across the top of the entry gate pair, often only 20 feet apart.

For competitor safety, this is usually done over a swoop pond, which is a shallow artificial pond.

The goal of the canopy piloting competition is to negotiate a number of different courses, which challenge different performance characteristics of canopy flight and pilot skill.

Speed, distance and accuracy are three of the basic courses used at most competitions. Quickly evolving out of these courses is the Free style discipline. Free style typically uses a large body of water for competitors to drag through or touch with different body parts and positions while maintaining nearly constant contact with the water.

To become a high performance canopy pilot, an interested and competent skydiver will typically have at least 1,000 jumps to their credit, and start a 1-2 year training process to become skilled and experienced enough to compete at the standard level.

Professional levels take 2-to-4 years of dedicated training, where competitors have 10,000 or more jumps.