The command is simple: Stand in the door.
It’s the moment when training ends and commitment begins. You check your equipment. You take a breath. You trust the people around you, the systems you’ve practiced and yourself. Then, you jump out of the airplane.
Air Force Capt. Charlene Sufficool first heard those words as a first-year cadet at the U.S. Air Force Academy, standing in the open doorway of a Twin Otter aircraft above Colorado Springs as she prepared for her first solo parachute jump. More than a decade later, hovering above central Florida with more than a hundred parachutes filling the sky, she repeated them to herself — this time with a world record on the line.
In late November, Sufficool was one of 104 skydivers who successfully built the largest canopy formation ever recorded, breaking a world record that had stood for 18 years. The achievement unfolded over Lake Wales, Florida, where skydivers from 20 countries gathered at Jump Florida Skydiving to attempt a Canopy Formation — or CRW — world record.
If jumping out of an airplane sounds extreme, canopy formation takes things several steps further. CRW skydivers deploy their parachutes immediately after exiting the aircraft, then deliberately fly those canopies toward one another, stacking and locking them together in a precise diamond-shaped formation while still thousands of feet above the ground. Every instinct trained into a skydiver says not to do this.
“Touching another parachute with your parachute is very uncomfortable,” Sufficool says. “You have to fight the instinct to not want to be that close to another human with a parachute.”
There is no margin for error. Each jumper has a specific position and timing window. If even one person fails to reach their assigned slot, the attempt doesn’t count.
For Sufficool, the attempt represented the convergence of two worlds she knows well — flying fast jets and flying fabric wings — and a full-circle return to the lesson she first learned as a cadet: how to step into uncertainty, commit fully and hold steady when everything in your body tells you to pull away.
From Montana to the Air Force Academy
Sufficool, 32, grew up in a small town in Montana, where aviation was part of the family fabric. Her mother and stepfather were both in the Air Force, and her stepfather worked as a crew chief on the Thunderbirds demonstration team. As a teenager, her mother encouraged her to look into Civil Air Patrol, a youth program designed to introduce students to aviation within a military framework.
Sufficool went to two meetings and remembers the experience clearly: all boys, no girls. Although she didn’t join the program, those two meetings planted a seed.
“I wasn’t super interested in the culture, but I was interested in what they were doing and what their goals were,” Sufficool recalls. “And it was the first time I heard about the academy.”
That was motivation enough. Sufficool applied to the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs. She wasn’t initially accepted, but attended the academy’s preparatory school for a year before enrolling as a cadet.
Like many college students, she entered with one plan and left with another.
“I thought I’d go into aeronautical engineering, build missiles and move back to Montana,” she says.
Instead, she jumped out of airplanes — and eventually learned how to fly them.The Air Force Academy is unique among the military academies in that it has its own airfield. Cadets can enroll in a progression of aviation programs, including powered flight, glider soaring and parachuting. The parachuting program allows cadets to complete five solo jumps and earn jump wings — insignia they can wear for the rest of their military careers.
Sufficool signed up to jump after her first year.
As part of the course, younger cadets are taught by juniors and seniors. Sufficool remembers looking up to them immediately. After completing her five jumps, she applied for the Wings of Green parachute team and was accepted as a sophomore.
The training was intense. During her year as a Wings of Green trainee, she learned not only how to skydive, but how to become a jumpmaster — the person responsible for others’ safety in the air. When she completed the program, she was awarded a blue jumpsuit, symbolizing that she was a certified jumpmaster.
As a junior and senior, Sufficool taught parachuting to younger cadets while also serving on the team. Some cadets compete at collegiate and national competitions. Others join the demonstration team, jumping into air shows and stadiums across the country. Sufficool was part of the demo team, jumping into Academy football games at Falcon Stadium.
Meanwhile, academically, she was chipping away at her plan to study aeronautical engineering. During her junior year, a commander asked her why she wasn’t applying for a pilot slot. Sufficool says she hadn’t realized it was an option.
“I immediately switched my major,” she says.
Learning to fly
Pilot slots are awarded based on a combination of military performance, academics and athletics, and they are highly competitive. According to Jeff Troth, an Air Force Academy spokesperson, each year about 300 to 400 of the Academy’s roughly 900 graduates go on to pilot training.
After graduating, Sufficool spent six months assigned to an airfield as a newly commissioned lieutenant, waiting for pilot training to begin. While she waited, she continued to jump.
She began pilot training in 2017. She first spent six months in the T-6 Texan II trainer aircraft, a plane often called the “pilot maker.” Then, she was put on the fighter jet track and trained for six months in a T-38, a twin-engine jet used by the U.S. Air Force and NASA for advanced training.
At the end of the yearlong pipeline, the Air Force assigned Sufficool to fly the A-10C Thunderbolt II fighter jet, an aircraft designed for close air support of ground troops. By then, it was already an aging aircraft, but it was also one of the Air Force’s most mission-critical platforms for air-to-ground operations, particularly in Afghanistan.
In October 2019, just months after completing A-10 training, Sufficool deployed to Afghanistan as a fully mission-qualified combat pilot.
While Sufficool felt prepared by her training, flying at night, in bad weather, or trying to locate a tanker aircraft for midair refueling — all while ensuring communications were correct — pushed her to the edge of her comfort zone.
“It was nerve-wracking,” she says. Setting up the aging radios proved to be particularly challenging — and consequential.
“If you mess up the radios, you can’t talk to anyone,” Sufficool says. “You don’t know where to go.”
The nervousness early in Sufficool’s flying career wasn’t unique — becoming a fighter pilot is among the most prestigious assignments in the Air Force. It is also one of the least populated by women, and Sufficool wasn’t immune to the pressure that came with that reality.
“Being a woman and being in the pilot community, it did feel foreign at times,” Sufficool says. “I feel like I’ve been fighting imposter syndrome since the beginning of my career. When you’re the only woman, you feel like you don’t belong.”
She had grown up with three brothers. The Air Force Academy was mostly men, and so was the skydiving team. But over time, Sufficool learned that what mattered was exposure and repetition — showing up, doing the work and trusting training over instinct.
“When you don’t see a lot of yourself in something, it can feel like it’s out of reach,” she said. “I had to learn that wasn’t true.”
Building a record in the sky
Unlike traditional skydiving, where jumpers focus on a 30-second freefall before deploying their parachutes, canopy formation skydivers pull their chutes immediately after exiting the aircraft. Then, the precise work of stacking and docking begins. Like piloting a fighter jet, nerves are firing and stress is high.
For Sufficool, the parallels to fighter aviation were obvious — and useful: close formation flying. Air-to-air refueling. And mostly, managing fear through repetition and preparation. She also had to fight intuition; instead of steering away from other parachutes, canopy formations require the opposite — making contact.
“We’re putting our feet in each other’s lines and touching each other’s canopies,” Sufficool says. “I can’t see their faces and they can’t see mine. It’s incredibly uncomfortable.”
The last canopy formation world record was set 18 years ago, and Sufficool spent most of 2025 doing her part to help break it. Throughout the year, organizers hosted training camps across the United States and internationally, including sessions in Canada and Poland. The goal was to prepare skydivers to build increasingly large diamond formations — starting with 36 people — and to evaluate who could reliably perform under pressure.
Sufficool attended as many camps as she could during the year, sometimes paying out of pocket. Over a weekend training camp, jumpers might attempt to dock into a 36-way formation three to five times a day. Before the world record attempt, Sufficool had only docked on formations of up to 43 people. The 104-way would be something entirely different.
“They tried to describe what it would be like,” she said. “But really the best way to do it is to do it.”
The moment in the door
The competition began Nov. 18 and the team’s first attempts were unsuccessful. For each attempt, eight aircraft flew in staggered formations at different altitudes. Jumpers with larger canopies exited first from higher altitudes. Sufficool was assigned to one of the lower outer layers of the diamond, which meant that she would exit later and need to intercept the moving formation at exactly the right moment.
She was overwhelmed the first time she approached the massive formation.
“You’re above 10,000 feet, there are so many other canopies in the sky,” she said. “You’re approaching this big scary thing and trying to do it successfully for everyone to achieve their goal.”
Once a jumper reaches their slot, the work doesn’t stop. Holding position requires constant input — flying the canopy, managing grip points, maintaining awareness as others dock and move around you.
“Once you get into the formation, you feel a few seconds of joy,” she said. “Then you’re back to staying in position.”
On Nov. 22, the group finally did it. One hundred and four skydivers completed the diamond exactly as required, meeting the strict requirements for a world record. It was a full-circle moment for Sufficool, one that began with the skills she learned as a cadet jumper at the Air Force Academy.
“All of that experience helped me become a pilot,” she says. “Confidence, awareness of what’s going on in the air. As fighter pilots we fly in close formation with one another. The skills I picked up as a fighter pilot helped me make this world record.”
Women make up roughly 14% of the skydiving community, and canopy formation skydriving is an even smaller niche within the sport. For Sufficool, the visibility of being in the air, at air shows, and now, as a part of history, is simply part of her work.
Today, Sufficool is stationed back at the Air Force Academy, flying the UV-18B Twin Otter — the aircraft cadets jump from in the five-jump program — and instructing skydiving for the 98th Flying Training Squadron. She coaches demonstration teams, mentors competitive CRW cadets, and continues to pursue advanced instruction herself. The work keeps her challenged and stimulated.
“It’s funny, when I was a cadet in the five-jump program, canopy flight was the scariest part. Now I have two world records.”
The Academy airfield is one of the busiest in the Air Force. On any given day, cadets are flying gliders, powered aircraft or parachuting. Sufficool is often there, preparing students for their own moment in the door.
The lesson, she says, hasn’t changed. She still repeats the same words before every jump.