What is TunnelFlight?
TunnelFlight is the operational platform for the International Bodyflight Association (IBA) — the global governing body for indoor skydiving. The platform manages the people, skills, training, bookings, and safety records that make wind-tunnel flight a regulated, repeatable sport.
This Overview section explains what the platform does in plain English. It is for anyone who needs to understand the IBA — staff, partners, new joiners, and anyone evaluating an integration — without first reading code.
For internal engineering documentation, see the per-component zones: API, WWW, and the cross-cutting Infra reference. The interactive API reference endpoint explorer is coming in Phase 4.
What the platform does
At its core, the IBA platform tracks:
- Members — flyers, instructors, trainers, examiners, and coaches. Their identity, qualifications, and ongoing standing in the association.
- Skill levels — several parallel programmes (flyer, instructor, trainer, examiner, coach, military) each with their own progression, prerequisites, and approval workflows. The IBA credential is recognised globally.
- Currency — a member’s “in-good-standing” status, refreshed on a six-month cycle through safety training. Without active currency a member’s flight time is not officially recorded.
- Tunnels & bookings — the physical wind tunnels around the world where flight happens, and the bookings that schedule individual flights.
- Safety training — mandatory recurrent training and assessments required to maintain currency at each role and level.
- Logbook — every flight, every skill attempt, every assessment a member has on record. The IBA’s source of truth for “who has flown what, with whom”.
Most of what the platform does is enforce the rules that keep these records honest: who can train whom, what counts toward currency, when a booking generates an automatic logbook entry, and who is allowed to see or modify each record.
Who uses the platform
| Audience | What they do |
|---|---|
| Members (flyers) | Track their own progress, view their logbook, pay membership fees, plan their next skill. |
| Instructors / trainers / examiners / coaches | Approve skills, run assessments, manage their assigned trainees, log their own training. |
| IBA staff | Administer members, review change requests, manage tunnels, oversee currency cycles. |
| Wind tunnels | Validate IBA members at check-in, send booking data back to the IBA so it lands in the member’s logbook. |
| External booking systems (Convergence, FuzeMetrix, and Tunn3l) | Validate IBA members at check-in and (depending on the integration) sync booking data into the logbook. See Bookings for the integration landscape and Tunnels for the venues. |
Where to go from here
- New to the IBA? Start with Members and Skill levels.
- Trying to understand “currency” — the most-asked-about IBA concept? Currency explains it without jargon.
- Curious about the technical architecture? Platform at a glance sketches the three apps in plain English; the Architecture diagrams go deeper.