Ilya works with numbers and came to skydiving the way he approaches everything: with a spreadsheet. The spreadsheet did not survive the first week. What replaced it was a notebook with one page per day and one line at the top of each page: the task.
From the first day to the licence
“The course is one road, not two courses glued together. The tunnel time, the AFF stages, the solo jumps, the canopy work — the same person briefed all of it, and the same person told me when I was not ready.”
The day it clicked
“There was a jump where nothing was new and everything was calm. Andrew said afterwards: that is what the licence is for — the ability to have an ordinary jump.” The school’s idea, as Ilya puts it, is that independence is built, not awarded.
He now plans his next goals with the same notebook. The last page of the course is not a certificate; it is the list of what to work on next.