It’s a Bird . . . It’s a Plane . . . It’s MIT Skydivers!

If you happened to be in the Chicago area last August 2, you may have seen something surprising in the sky: nine MIT alumni jumping from an airplane, linked together in the shape of a T. It’s not something you see every day. In fact, it was a first: the previous record for the largest all-MIT skydiving formation was four.

The effort was the mastermind of Steven Lefkowitz ’00 and JaNette (Kelly) Lefkowitz ’00. The couple, who met at MIT, have been skydiving for more than a decade, and not just for sport—they have made careers of it. Both are on a competitive skydiving team, competing nationally and internationally. JaNette won the 2016 world championships, and they both placed in the 2018 national championships, winning two gold medals and a silver medal, as well as a medal for top overall competitors.

Their plan to break the MIT skydiving record stemmed from a Facebook conversation in March 2018. With the approach of Skydive Chicago’s Summerfest, the largest skydiving event in the country, JaNette asked a group of MIT alumni in the close-knit skydiving community if they might be interested in a group jump.

The feat took some planning. “In order to skydive outside of a tandem with other people, you need to go through a six-hour course and complete specific skills over a minimum of 25 jumps.  In order to pull off the technical challenge of this jump, everyone had to have much more additional skydiving training, and everyone involved had over 100 jumps,” says Steven, who clocked in the most with nearly 12,000 jumps. In addition, he says, every part of the dive must be carefully choreographed.

“We plan who will go in each position and practice on the ground. We also go to a mock-up of the plane's door to arrange and talk through our exit process, focusing on how to leave the plane together most efficiently. We talk through strategies for success, including details as minute as where every person should be looking as they join the formation.” Steven also notes that it's particularly challenging to continuously adjust fall rate to ensure each skydiver is falling at the exact same speed through the sky once they join the formation.

JaNette and Steven were joined by Mark Hilstad SM ’02, Banks Hunter ’15, Rob Radez ’06, Maggie Reagan ’16, Dan Schultz ’07, Eric Van Albert ’14, and Swati Varshney PhD ’16. While falling at more than 120 mph, the nine participants successfully joined up in the sky to form a capital letter “T”—for Tech, of course.

A subset of the group followed that achievement with a five-person all-MIT record vertical formation, referring to the orientation of the skydivers’ bodies as they fall through the air, which the Lefkowitzes cite as even more challenging than falling belly-to-earth, as in the first record. The five vertical participants were Hunter, Steve Lefkowitz, Reagan, Van Albert, and Varshney.

"Believe it or not, I'm not a huge thrill seeker, but there are so many other reasons to love skydiving,” says Steven. “It is an extremely fun sport that challenges the limits of your agility, coordination, speed, and total focus in an awesome weightless environment. Not to mention the view is always beautiful and the skydiving community is full of great people. The fact that I get to do this as my career is a gift for which I'm grateful every day."