D-license
As I previously wrote about, I just received my D-license yesterday. The D-license is awarded to applicants from the USPA who have achieved 500 skydives and a couple of other requirements. Anyway, my license number is D-29580. That means that I am the 29,580th person to receive my D license. To put that in contrast, the city of Minneapolis has 372,833 people alone. If you take all the people that have received a D-license, there is less than 10% of the population of a major city, and not even the largest major city. Now, it feels like I am in a small community even more. Imagine, walking around in Minneapolis and being able to talk to 1⁄10 people about skydiving, that would be pretty neat. Now spread those 29,000 across the US and imagine trying to converse in a sane manor with anyone about the sport of skydiving..
Of course, there is (maybe) more people in the US that skydive that don’t have 500 jumps yet or they don’t get their D-license period. However, if there is one license to get, it would be the D because that is the highest one that you can…so, I don’t know how many people there are that skydive in the US.
Another tidbit: According to [here][4] at the time of this writing, the US population is ~305,378,753. I am 0.0096863% of the population. Interesting.