Tunnels

Indoor skydiving happens at wind tunnels — vertical, recirculating air columns that simulate freefall. The IBA doesn’t run the tunnels itself. It accredits the people flying in them and the records of what they fly.

Tunnels on the platform

Each tunnel known to the IBA exists as a record on the platform: name, location, the staff authorised to operate at it, the manufacturer that built it, and the booking system it uses (if any).

Tunnels matter on the platform for three reasons:

1. Member affiliation — a flyer’s home tunnel is where most of their training happens and most of their flight time accrues.
2. Per-tunnel staff authority — an instructor authorised to approve skills at one tunnel isn’t automatically authorised at another. The tunnel-staff roles (Site Administrator, Tunnel Manager, Airflow Controller) are scoped to specific tunnels.
3. Booking integration — when a tunnel uses an integrated booking system, the IBA can validate members at check-in and (depending on the system) feed flight time back into the IBA’s logbook. See Bookings for the integration landscape.

Manufacturer matters

Each tunnel record has a manufacturer field — who built the tunnel. This isn’t just trivia: the platform branches on manufacturer for one specific reason explained below.

The breakdown across ~170 tunnels on the platform:

Why the Skyventure split is load-bearing

Skyventure isn’t just a manufacturer — it’s the parent company of TunnelFlight itself. Tunnels that Skyventure built are part of the same corporate family that runs this platform. Everything else is an independent third party.

That corporate-family relationship is wired into the API in two places:

• Fee waiver. A Tunnel Manager (role_id = 12) working at a Skyventure-manufactured tunnel doesn’t pay IBA membership fees — it’s a corporate-family arrangement, not a platform bug. (fees/service — [12].includes(role_id) && manufacturer === 'Skyventure'.)
• Special platform routes. The auth middleware grants a Tunnel Manager at a Skyventure tunnel access to certain API routes that other tunnel managers don’t see. (middleware/auth/routes.validate — role_id === 12 && manufacturer === 'Skyventure'.)

Any future code that branches on manufacturer === 'Skyventure' is almost certainly doing the same thing: granting parent-company privileges. Read it that way.

Tunnel staff

Three role_id values describe staff scoped to a specific tunnel:

• Site Administrator (role_id = 11) — per-tunnel admin.
• Tunnel Manager (role_id = 12) — manages a tunnel’s IBA operations.
• Airflow Controller (role_id = 13) — operates the airflow controls during sessions.

These are separate from the credential-track roles (Instructor / Trainer / Examiner). See Members → Roles & groups for the full breakdown and the credential-vs-employment distinction.

Non-integrated tunnels

Plenty of tunnels around the world aren’t integrated with any of the booking systems. For these, members log their own flight time manually and instructors approve it the old-fashioned way. The records are just as valid — booking integration is a convenience, not a gate. The same per-tunnel staff-authority and manufacturer rules apply regardless of whether a booking system is plugged in.

All tunnels

The complete list of tunnels currently on the platform. Click any column header to sort; the filter box narrows by name, city, country, or manufacturer. Tunnel name links to the venue’s website where one is on file.

This is a point-in-time snapshot for orientation. The authoritative list lives in the tunnels table in the API database — the Admin app’s Tunnels report is the live view.