About me
My name is Nathan Roth, and I work at iFLY Denver. I have a lot of titles, but my main one is instructor examiner. It's most to do with the safety, training of the instructor staff. I handle all aspects of training from training a new employee all the way up to training a trainer.
About my job
A new employee, I train them to handle new customers and teach them how to fly in the tunnel their very first time. I also teach the instructors more advanced flying techniques, so they can pass on those techniques to their students.
We have a very specific progression chart that all the flyers follow, and the instructors do as well. To be able to teach someone a certain flight skill, that instructor needs to have mastered it first, and needs to have been briefed on the proper procedures of teaching someone that skill, teaching them the safety aspects of it, the way to verbalize it, coach it and debrief it to their student properly.
I started working here in March of 2007. The business started here in 2006, so that makes it about nine years for me.
When I'm not here, I'm at another tunnel sometimes. The past year I've been traveling a lot. We've just opened a couple new locations.
In my free time...
My hobbies include motorcycle riding and photography. I have two Yamaha V-Stars, cruisers, road bikes. I ride up to Sturgis every year. It's crazy. Lots of people. Lots of motorcycles. Lots of… sights, we'll say that.
Before I got this job, I was a bartender, and I used to travel a lot, so I got into photography. When I got into skydiving, I started doing skydiving photography. I've flown with competitive teams, and I wear the camera and film the groups of people skydiving. I have about 800 outdoor sky dives.
The skills we learn in the tunnel can be applied in the sky. But being able to fly in the tunnel is not going to make you a good skydiver, but it will help. I like to compare tunnel flying to sky diving. It's like a marathon runner training on a treadmill; it's going to get you in shape, but it's not going to give you the real world experience of running outside.
