General
The Diamond Quest organization was founded in January. Diamond Quest introduced ”The Large Formation Technical Manual”. It included information on which techniques work and which don’t.
Records and events
Frenchmen kept another training camp and jumped a 37-way formation. The jump was done on May 8th in Gap, France. It was unofficial because there were no judges.
After the Finnish CRW nationals female jumpers from K-HLU (Häme Parachuting Club) set the female Nordic record: a 5-plane. The jump was done in July in Jämi.
Later in the summer the frenchmen set an official record. The new world record, a 37-way, was jumped in Brienne Le Chateu. They held the record formation for 12 seconds. The date was August 16. They also jumped a 42-way jewel but it was broken off too early. Again all jumpers used Contact mains and Patrice Castella was organizing. Exit altitude was 4 500 meters and they used a huge Mil Mi-26 helicopter.
Just before that, Diamond Quest had made the first 25-way diamond in the USA in July.
A 15-plane was built in Helsinki, Finland. That was a new Nordic record and it was made on August the 30th. They needed four jumps to do it.
Diamond Quest organized a record week in October. They soon tied with the 37-way record. On October the 10th they made a 38-way diamond. They held it for 10.3 seconds. The formation was broken off quite low (about 600 meters) and a part of it funneled. After the record they made a few 40-way attempts. The place was Richland, WA and they used eight different main canopies.
Jumpers from Austria set a national record during the Pink-boogie. They built a 9-plane from a Skyvan, from an exit altitude of 4200m.
Competitions
The 4th World Championships in CRW were held in Anyang, China, September 15-25. There were more than 200 000 spectators in the opening ceremonies and every day more than 10 000 spectators were watching the competition jumps. YAN-5, a Chinese copy of the Russian AN-2 was the jump plane. France won rotation and sequential, the USA won 8-speed event. Finnish rotation team members, Anita Nurminen, Maija Makela and Maija Haanpaa (alt) made history in China. They and sequential jumper Pat Sobrero from the USA were the first female competitors in world championships ever. Sobrero was also the first female medalist winning silver with her team.
USA and France scored 19 points in rotation. That new record was first set by the French, and the repeated by the Americans. In 8-speed there were some fast formations. First, the US team built a box in 37.26, and after that they finished a plane formation in 36.70. Then it was the frenchmen’s turn: they made a kite in 33.81. But that is not all, the US team then built a plane formation in 29.35 seconds on the seventh round. They used AR7 mains.
After the competition someone set off fireworks on a train. When the train came to Beijing there were a lot of police all around. All competitors were arrested. There were about 30 people from six different countries. All team leaders wrote apologies for the Chinese railroads.