Floating Ballerina Vibes The hypnotic allure of indoor skydiving

NEW YORK – As a child, Maja Kuczynska wanted to be a bird – or a dragon.

“I was really into fantasy, and I thought it was unfair that they got to fly and I couldn’t,” she said. “I dreamt about being free like that.”

Unlike most dreams about flying, Kuczynska’s came true.

When she was still quite young, the Polish athlete discovered indoor sky diving, an electrifying sport whose competitors defy gravity with the help of wind tunnels.

Inside these glass-sided tubes, air is propelled skyward at 80 to 185 mph, allowing Kuczynska to become a hybrid – part astronaut, part B-girl, part Storm from the X-Men.

In her first-place freestyle routine at the World Indoor Skydiving Championships this spring, she carved and flip-twisted through the air with impossible grace – a balletic dragon, at home in the wind.

“The tunnel for me has become a fantasy realm,” Kuczynska, 25, said from Warsaw. “I can go in there and just dance.”

Vertical wind tunnels recreate the sensation of free-fall experienced after jumping from a plane, with powerful fans shooting air upward at approximately the speed a human body would fall.

They are often used as a training tool for outdoor sky divers. But over the past 20 years, as commercial tunnels have become more common, indoor sky diving has developed into its own extraordinary specialty. And because the tunnels can be viewed from the ground, indoor sky diving is a spectator sport in a way that outdoor sky diving can never be.

Today, clips of elite athletes like Kuczynska; her fellow world champion Kyra Poh, 22, from Singapore; and the champion Sydney Kennett, 18, routinely go viral on TikTok and Instagram, helping a niche discipline earn mainstream popularity.

Many flyers have leaned into the sport’s theatrical side, capitalizing on