Indoor Skydiving
SkyVenture (http://www.skyventure.com) started in Orlando in 1998, when original owner Bill Kitchen decided to create a place where skydivers could train and other people could get the sensation of skydiving without jumping. The company, now owned by a group of investors, has since expanded to Arizona, California, Colorado, New Hampshire, England and Malaysia, with plans for several more in the next few years, including one currently being built in Moscow.
It wasn't a new technology -- wind tunnels have been around since the late 1800s and there were already skydiving tunnels on the market -- but Kitchen wanted something that was safer than previous versions.
What he did was create a 40-foot tower that's shaped like an hourglass, with a large air tank at the bottom, a narrow flying chamber and an expanded area at the top, where large fans suck the air upward. The air underneath gets compressed once it reaches the chamber and the fans help create a vacuum known as the Venturi effect, similar to the way a carburetor gets gas into a car's intake.