The European Skydiving Symposium (ESS) 2026 took place in Seville, Spain, and canopy maker JYRO attended it for the first time. In its recap, published on 30 March 2026, JYRO says the event drew more than 800 skydivers, manufacturers and industry people. For gear enthusiasts, the most interesting thing JYRO brought was not a new canopy but a measuring experiment.
Inside canopy design
JYRO’s lead engineer, Julien Peelman, gave a talk on how the company designs its canopies: which performance characteristics it looks at and what data goes into development. JYRO did not announce a new model at the symposium.
The pitot tube project
Together with Elia Chief, Julien also presented what JYRO calls the Pitot Tube Project. Its aim is to measure a canopy’s true airspeed in flight.
Why does that matter? Most jumpers measure canopy performance with GPS, for example with a FlySight 2. GPS measures speed over the ground, so the wind is always mixed into the numbers: the same canopy looks fast downwind and slow into the wind. A pitot tube, the instrument aircraft use for airspeed, measures the speed of the air flowing past it, which is the speed the wing is actually flying.
During early test days Elia jumped wearing an experimental pitot tube. According to JYRO, the flight data is being analysed to build canopy polars (how sink rate changes with airspeed), to compare wing loadings and to describe performance across the whole flight envelope.
The project is still in progress. JYRO has not published any results or a timeline.
Why this could matter when you choose a canopy
Speeds and glide ratios are hard to compare between manufacturers today, because they are measured in different ways or not published at all. If true-airspeed data becomes common, comparing canopies could become far more objective. When manufacturers publish such figures, we will add them to the catalog, with the source.
Demo days at Skydive Spain
After the three-day symposium, JYRO ran demo days at Skydive Spain with a large part of its range available to jump. JYRO also notes that Seville is already booked as the ESS venue for 2028.
JYRO canopies in the catalog
We list 14 JYRO models on the JYRO page, including the all-round Safire 4, the cross-braced Crossfire 3 and the Helium, as well as discontinued models such as the Safire 3 and Crossfire 2.
Source: JYRO at ESS 2026 – Seville Skydiving Symposium (JYRO blog, 30 March 2026). Photo: JYRO.