FREEDOM WIND TUNNEL

It started as a simple conversation with my wife, Sally, “Someone should build an indoor skydiving tunnel at Patriot Place. It would be so cool. Hey…why don’t you do it?”

Sally and I were high school sweethearts and had recently moved back to our hometown of North Attleboro. I had been serving in the Army for 12 years. My love for skydiving began as a cadet at West Point on the sport parachute team called the Black Knights. I remember my first jump, sort of like coming to a single point in my entire young life. With all my teammates watching, I was the first to jump. I couldn’t wait to see my parachute open with my chosen color : hot pink. From that point forward, hot-pink became my parachute color of choice!

The next 50 jumps seemed more frightening as my awareness expanded to all the other things that could possibly go wrong. My parachuting experience gained me the opportunity to jump the game ball into home football games as well as train in a vertical wind tunnel. At that time, I recognized how great tunnels were for replicating free fall and as a training aid for skydivers and military soldiers.

Fast forward to when Sally had the idea of building a wind tunnel, I was now on a mission to figure out how to build this cool skydiving concept and incorporate it into my already busy life. Having taken a senior position at a local business college, I was immersed in an entrepreneurial environment and set upon the new goal of bringing an indoor skydiving tunnel to Patriot Place. My hope was that people could experience the same excitement I felt when I was skydiving, whether free falling or floating in a wind tunnel.

With a growing family, at last count we were up to 5 kids 🙂 – the journey would include a tremendous amount of research and consideration. I traveled around the world visiting tunnels in Spain, France, Germany and the Czech Republic to name a few, and experienced that thrill again and again, met owners, discussed technology and spoke with manufacturers.

Three things I realized: 1. it was important to use cutting-edge technology, 2. I needed to work with the right partners to keep the vision alive and 3. I wanted the experience of skydiving to be just as exciting whether it was the 1st time or the 50th time I jumped.

So, the wind tunnel was not going to be “the next big thing”. It is going to become an integral part of the Patriot Place culture for decades and generations to come.

Now, after 5+ years, we are ready to break ground and you might say, we are out of the plane and already in free fall. Yes, free fall into the Freedom Wind Tunnel. We are excited to move into this next phase of development by landing this facility safely at Patriot Place and make that simple conversation, so long ago, into concrete reality.

Being a local, family-owned, veteran small business, we are happy to be able to share this (soon-to-be) flying experience with our amazing community. We invite you to follow us through our journey, over the next 18 months, as we get ready to build our first indoor skydiving tunnel at Patriot Place.

Experience Freedom Wind – Feel the Thrill : Coming Soon!

Freedom Wind is a leisure and entertainment company focused on safely replicating the skydiving experience. By achieving the wow factor, our facility is literally a smile factory using new ways to gamify skydiving and immerse guests in parachute simulations amongst educational skydiving museum exhibits.