iFLY Bharat - India’s First Premium Indoor Skydiving Experience by Waltair Group

By Mukul Ronak Das

History has a tendency to simplify.

Looking back at the emergence of any significant industry, we tend to identify a founding moment, a pioneering name, a single turning point that explains how everything came to be. Aviation has the Wright Brothers. The automobile has Henry Ford. Personal computing has a handful of names so familiar that listing them feels unnecessary.

The story of indoor skydiving is messier than any of those.

And considerably more interesting for being so.

By 1979, the concept had been demonstrated. A facility outside Paris had shown that ordinary people would pay for the experience of bodyflight, that the market extended well beyond the skydiving community, and that the fundamental engineering was achievable. Those were important things to establish.

They were not sufficient to build an industry.

What followed was not a straightforward march of progress led by a single visionary organisation. What followed was a period of experimentation, competition, failure, refinement, and collective learning scattered across multiple companies in multiple countries, most of them working largely independently, most of them solving different parts of the same problem, most of them unable to fully predict the category they were helping create.

This is, in my experience, how industries actually develop.

Not through a single dramatic breakthrough, but through the accumulated effect of many people attempting many things, some of which work and many of which do not.

During the 1980s and 1990s, a diverse group of engineers and entrepreneurs began exploring how to build commercial bodyflight facilities at scale. They approached the problem from different directions and made different technical bets. Some of those bets proved correct. Others required revision. A few were abandoned entirely.

Some focused on open-flow systems. In these designs, air was drawn in from the surrounding environment, accelerated upward through a flight chamber, and then discharged back out. These systems were relatively straightforward to build and worked reasonably well in outdoor or semi-outdoor environments. They played a genuine role in the early development of the category, introducing thousands of people to bodyflight and demonstrating commercial viability in markets where a permanent indoor facility was not yet practical or economically justified.

Others became increasingly convinced that long-term commercial success would require something more controllable. The concept was the recirculating tunnel. Rather than drawing fresh air in and pushing it out, a recirculating system redirected airflow through a closed loop. The same air moved continuously through the flight chamber and back around again. The engineering was considerably more complex. The results were considerably more consistent.

Consistent airflow, it turned out, was worth a great deal.

Customers who flew in early open-flow systems were often delighted by the experience. But delight at novelty is not the same as the kind of repeatable satisfaction that builds a sustainable commercial business. Athletes who wanted to train seriously needed conditions that did not vary with the weather or the season. Beginners who were paying for instruction needed airflow that behaved predictably so that lessons could be structured and progress could be measured. Operators who were trying to run facilities profitably over many years needed systems that could be managed efficiently.

Open-flow systems served the market’s early curiosity well. Recirculating systems were better suited to its long-term requirements.

This was not obvious at the time. Arguments about tunnel architecture were genuine and substantive. Different manufacturers made different technical choices. Operators ran different systems and accumulated different experiences. The category was learning in real time, without a clear consensus about what the final form of the industry would look like.

Among the organisations contributing to this learning was Aerodium, based in Latvia. Aerodium’s approach was notable not only for the engineering but for how the company used public demonstrations and large-scale spectacles to introduce bodyflight to audiences who had never encountered it. Their exhibitions at major international events showed thousands of people what the human body could do in vertical airflow. The response was consistent.

People were captivated.

This established something important that was easy to overlook at the time. The visual experience of watching skilled bodyflight could be as compelling as the physical experience of participating in it. An audience watching a capable flyer could feel the possibility even from a distance. Awareness, it turned out, was itself a form of market development.

In the United States, SkyVenture was pursuing a different emphasis. Rather than focusing primarily on spectacle, SkyVenture invested heavily in creating facilities capable of delivering high-quality, consistent experiences at commercial scale. The engineering was rigorous. The ambition was not merely to demonstrate that the concept worked, but to build something replicable, operable, and expandable. SkyVenture’s technical work would eventually inform some of the most successful commercial deployments the category produced. The name iFLY, now the most widely recognised brand in the industry globally, is directly connected to that lineage.

Across Europe, other manufacturers were pursuing parallel paths. Firms in Denmark, Germany, and Spain continued refining airflow management, structural systems, energy efficiency, and operational procedures. Each contributed something. Each also encountered limitations that forced further refinement. The category advanced through competition and through the kind of shared learning that emerges when multiple organisations are working on the same problem in public view.

What none of these companies fully anticipated was one of the most consequential developments of the entire period.

Some customers refused to stop coming back.

Not all of them. Most first-time visitors experienced bodyflight, enjoyed it enormously, and moved on with their lives. But a meaningful fraction behaved differently. They booked again the following week. Then again the week after that. They started asking questions about technique. They wanted to understand why adjusting their arm position affected their stability. They wanted to know how to move laterally, how to control descent rate, how to build the kind of precision that allowed them to respond to airflow rather than simply react to it.

These customers were not consuming an experience.

They were learning a skill.

That distinction would change everything.

An attraction depends primarily on first-time visitors and occasional returnees. A skill creates lifelong participants. When a meaningful portion of customers began treating bodyflight as something to be mastered rather than sampled, the economics of the category shifted in ways nobody had fully modelled in advance.

Coaching became valuable. Not just the basic safety instruction that guided newcomers through their first sessions, but real technical coaching. Structured progression. Personalised feedback. Communities began forming around facilities. Athletes emerged. Some of them started competing informally, then formally. Governing bodies began developing standards. International events started appearing.

The industry that existed by the early 2000s looked remarkably different from what anyone working in it during the 1980s would have predicted.

Not because the technology had changed beyond recognition, although it had improved significantly. Not because the market had grown unexpectedly, although it had clearly expanded. But because the category had revealed a dimension of itself that its earliest pioneers had not fully seen.

Indoor skydiving was not simply an attraction.

It was not simply a training tool or a business model or a tourism product.

It was a sport. And once it became a sport, it became a community. And once it became a community, it developed a kind of momentum that no single company could have generated alone.

The race to build human flight had been won, in the sense that the technical and commercial foundations were established. What emerged from that race was something larger than any of its participants had intended to build.

That, too, is how industries work. The people who start the race rarely determine its final destination. They simply provide the conditions in which the destination eventually reveals itself.

More than twenty million people have now flown inside vertical wind tunnels across twenty countries. Facilities operate in Dubai, Singapore, the United Kingdom, the United States, Australia, Qatar, and dozens of other markets. Professional athletes have dedicated careers to the sport. Military organisations have integrated the technology into freefall training programmes. Schools have begun using it for STEM education. Families have made it part of how they celebrate birthdays and milestones.

None of the engineers and entrepreneurs who entered the category in the 1980s could have drawn that picture in advance. The industry they were building was considerably larger than the problem they thought they were solving.

That is not a criticism. It is, if anything, the most encouraging thing about the story.

The people who build genuinely new categories rarely know how large those categories will become. They know only that something is worth building, and they build it.

India is at that starting point now.

The race that built this industry elsewhere is the same race that tells us what is possible here. Not as a template to copy mechanically, but as evidence that the demand is real, the model is proven, and the desire, which was never the uncertain part, was always already here.

Curious about indoor skydiving?

iFLY Bharat is bringing India’s first premium indoor skydiving experience to Bengaluru. The first tunnel opens at PLaY Arena, a venue already welcoming 45,000 visitors every month.

If you are an enthusiast who wants to be among the first to fly in India, join the waitlist at waltairgroup.com.

If you are an investor interested in the India opportunity, the final round is currently open to a limited group. Write to us at mukul@waltairgroup.com or rajesh@waltairgroup.com, or schedule a conversation at calendar.app.google/fXrt1eQf6PhMSeDL8.

Explore more stories, insights and updates at Waltair Group.