SSK Industries, Inc.

30/10/2026

Denied, again. 💀

Happy Halloween from SSK, Home of CYPRES USA.

27/10/2026

SSK athletes Curt Bartholomew, Jeannie Bartholomew, Jesse Weyher, Robin Jandle and Matt Fry represented the U.S. at the 2026 FAI World Championships, delivering some impressive results.

Canopy Piloting
Curt Bartholomew 🥇 Overall, Speed, Zone Accuracy & Freestyle, 🥈 Distance
Jeannie Bartholomew 🥉 Freestyle
Curt, Jeannie & Jesse Weyher 🥇 Canopy Piloting Freestyle National Team

Speed Skydiving
Matthew Fry 4th Individual, 🥇 National Team

Shoutout to Curt for defending his Overall World Championship title, adding another milestone to an outstanding career.

Congratulations to the whole crew on a great week of competition. 👏

📸 Eric Yopp | Marcus King | Dallan Porter | FAI - World Air Sports Federation

21/10/2026

Spotted: another CYPRES keeper. 👀

Have one of your own? Our Friday Feature contest is ongoing, and you could be this month’s winner! Snap a photo or video of yourself wearing your CYPRES keeper and check the pinned post for full details.

16/10/2026

Olav Zipser, the father of freefly, relied on CYPRES while helping reshape the sport and establish a new discipline. 👏

𝐅𝐫𝐨𝐦 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐀𝐫𝐜𝐡𝐢𝐯𝐞𝐬: 𝐏𝐚𝐫𝐚𝐜𝐡𝐮𝐭𝐢𝐬𝐭, 𝐎𝐜𝐭𝐨𝐛𝐞𝐫 𝟏𝟗𝟗𝟔

This ad for the CYPRES AAD ran in the October 1996 issue of Parachutist Magazine, with the caption:

“Free Fly Clown #1, Olav Zipser and his team members rely on CYPRES.”

The man in that caption went on to reshape the sport.

Born in Simmern, Germany, Olav ZipserZipser was on the path to a career in dentistry when he made his first jump in the mid-1980s at Texel in the Netherlands. At a time when skydivers flew almost exclusively belly-to-earth, he began experimenting with flight on every axis, including head down. In 1992 he formed the Free Fly Clowns with Mike Vail as a two-person competitive team, and the group went on to open the First School of Modern SkyFlying, the first school dedicated to teaching freeflying.

By the time this ad ran, the Free Fly Clowns (Zipser, Charles Bryan and Omar Alhegelan) were competing on the SSI Pro Tour, a series of televised events across North America and Europe in 1996 and 1997 that carried freeflying to a worldwide television audience.

In 2000, the International Parachute Commission accepted freefly as an official discipline, and Zipser won gold at the first U.S. Freefly National Championships that same year. A year later, he took freefly gold at the 2001 World Air Games. In 2009 he founded the FreeFly Astronaut Project, a research mission to develop techniques and equipment for safe descent from extreme altitudes.

In 2024, Olav Zipser was inducted into the International Skydiving Hall of Fame. In 1996, the caption called him Free Fly Clown #1. Today, the sport knows him as the Father of Freefly.

14/10/2026

14 years ago today, Felix Baumgartner took a helium balloon to nearly 128,000 feet and jumped. He had a CYPRES in his rig.

Airtec built the Stratos CYPRES for this one mission, and nothing about the skydive was normal. A CYPRES uses air pressure to calculate altitude and speed, but at the jump altitude there was virtually no air pressure to read, which added complexity to building a device that would function properly.

No data existed for air pressure readings at supersonic speed either, and the team knew the unit would face temperatures below -50°C and cosmic particle radiation, including damaging gamma and beta rays that can wreak havoc on electronics.

Felix’s rotation and speed could also challenge the CYPRES sensor and programming. With no test jumps possible, the team could simulate those forces on a computer, but not under real conditions.

So they built the unit around those conditions. They chilled it to -180°C in liquid nitrogen to make sure the cutter would still do its job. The processor got a new housing to ensure it never failed, and the rig carried two cutters, one for the drogue release and one for the reserve.

The team identified six distinct phases, from exit to the activation zone, and the CYPRES worked as intended through all of them. Seconds after Felix broke the sound barrier at 843.6 mph (Mach 1.25), he went into a flat spin. Had he lost consciousness, the CYPRES would have activated at 800 m (2,625 ft) above ground level. It never needed to.

The voice guiding him through it had been there before. Joe Kittinger made the highest skydive in 1960, and at 84 he was Felix’s capsule communicator, talking him up to a skydive higher than his own. Helmut Cloth, who invented the CYPRES and founded Airtec, is pictured with Joe and with Felix.

A CYPRES is there for the moment everyone hopes never comes. On this day it didn’t, and Airtec’s team is proud of the work that went into being ready.

Photos provided by Airtec and Red Bull Content Pool: Jay Nemeth / JOERG MITTER / balazs gardi / Red Bull Stratos

09/10/2026

Peace, love, and tie-dye. Summerfest sure knows how to do a theme day. ☮️

Who’s still reppin’ their SSK tie-dye?

📸 Chris Cook

02/10/2026

Our next Friday Feature winner! 🏆

Congrats, Aidan Cooper! Thanks for sharing these shots with us. We hope you enjoy your CYPRES prize package!

Have a CYPRES keeper of your own? We’d love to see it. Submit your entry anytime for a chance to win next month.

Full contest details are in our pinned post.

📸 Karen Gifford