Dillingham Airfield

Tandem jumps here typically exit somewhere in the region of twelve to fourteen thousand feet — operators differ, and some sell a higher option — which gives roughly a minute of freefall and several minutes under canopy. The freefall is loud, disorienting and over before you have organised a thought about it. The canopy ride is where the view arrives.

You are directly over the reef shelf at Mokulēʻia, and the geography reads like a relief map. Kaʻena Point is the blunt tip to the west with no road reaching it. The Waiʻanae range falls away inland, dry and deeply eroded on this side. East along the coast, the surf breaks are legible as white lines on a blue field — Haleʻiwa, then further round the corner Laniākea, Waimea, Pipeline and Sunset. The old plantation land behind Waialua is a quilt of greens.

On a clear morning you may see Molokaʻi to the southeast and Kauaʻi to the northwest across seventy-odd miles of channel. Winter adds humpback whales, which are in Hawaiian waters from roughly December to April and which are considerably easier to spot from altitude than from a boat.

Glider flights give you a longer, quieter version of the same. A sailplane works the ridge lift along the Waiʻanae face with the engine-less silence that is the entire point, and the flights run long enough to actually look at things. If freefall is not your interest, this is the better purchase.

For most of the last decade, anyone reading about skydiving on Oʻahu would have run into a story about Dillingham shutting down. It is worth understanding, because it is the reason older articles hedge about whether you can jump here at all.

The land belongs to the US Army. The State of Hawaiʻi runs the airfield on a lease, and for years that lease was short-term, repeatedly extended at the last minute, and complicated by environmental liability and a failing water system. In 2019 the state announced it would terminate; the closure was deferred, then deferred again, and the tenants — around two dozen businesses employing well over a hundred people — spent years unable to invest in anything.

In July 2024 the state and US Army Garrison Hawaiʻi signed a fifty-year lease, effective from the sixth of that month. It resolves the water-system question, makes the field eligible for federal airport-improvement funding, and gives the operators a horizon long enough to plan against.

For a visitor the practical upshot is simple: the field is open, the skydiving and glider operations are secure, and any article you find warning that Dillingham may close is out of date. The only thing likely to cancel your jump now is the weather.