Heroes, Dragons, Treasure, and Jumping Out of Planes

They say two out of three ain't bad...

The same day we debuted the first official Onion Air Force team jersey, before there was even a real drop-zone community around it, we had our first team hospital visit.

Not long after, two of the three people who started The Onion Air Force had been injured during the early stages of learning to skydive. Not because there was no training. Skydiving has formal instruction, licensing requirements, progression guidelines, coaches, and experienced people who are willing to help. The gap we experienced came after that initial structure, in the limbo after being cleared to do something on your own, and before truly understanding how much you still do not know.

Once you earn your A-License, you're technically allowed to jump independently. You have rules, responsibilities, recommendations, and access to further coaching, but much more of your development becomes self-directed. That transition matters, because being qualified to jump independently is not the same as being able to recognize every risk, every blind spot, or every lesson that experience has not taught you yet.

Further progression depends on what you seek out. You find coaches, ask questions and look for experienced jumpers willing to invest their time in you. You try to understand which lessons matter before the sport teaches them to you the hard way. Meanwhile, much of what a new jumper encounters online celebrates the most visible parts of skydiving: big formations, fast progression, new disciplines, impressive flying, even more impressive footage, and the kind of content that makes the sport appealing to those who embrace risk.

Unfortunately, some of the more important lessons do not travel as easily. When to slow down. Why a small decision mattered more than it seemed to in the moment. What an experienced jumper wishes someone had told them two hundred jumps earlier. In short, everything that doesn't show up on camera or in Instagram Feeds. These essential lessons exist inside the sport, but they are not always organized in a way that reaches the person who needs them at the right time.

So that was the gap we experienced as rookies. The knowledge was there, but there was not always an obvious mechanism for that knowledge to move naturally from one generation of jumpers to the next. Sometimes people kept learning the same lessons over and over because the lesson had gone nowhere after the first person paid for it.

That was the actual starting point of The OAF. Not a business idea. Not a merchandise concept. Not a community strategy. It came from a question that repeated itself after each injury:

How do we stop this from happening to the next person who jumps out that door?

The lens through which we frame our experience

Now, years later, working on ROVER's strategic frameworks, I keep coming back to HTDQ: Hero, Treasure, Dragon, Quest. It's a narrative problem-framing tool built to simplify a strategic challenge into four connected parts: who the work is for, what they're actually trying to reach, what's standing in the way, and the single question that, if answered, moves everything forward... how does our [Hero] obtain the [Treasure] despite the [Dragon]?

The OAF wasn't designed using this framework. The OAF grew on it's own, much like an onion, and years later, when I sat down to write it out formally, I realized the project had somehow already answered every part of it. That's usually the sign a framework is worth keeping: it doesn't invent the thinking, it just gives you a name and structure for a type of thinking you were already doing.

Here's how it breaks down.

HTDQ Framework | (Albrecht Enders & Arnaud Chevallier) HERO: Everyone who wears the jersey. The Hero of this story is anyone who wears the OAF jersey and takes on what it actually asks of you: learn from your mistakes in the open, share them instead of hiding them, help the next person even when it costs you time or ego, and put the community and the safety of the people in it ahead of your own progression or glory. That's a harder ask than it sounds in a sport where every jump costs and your progression in the air can easily become the main currency.

TREASURE: A progression culture where knowledge compounds instead of disappearing.  The goal was not just to build a community or give newer jumpers more people to jump with. It was to create continuity: an environment where one person’s mistake becomes another person’s lesson, experience travels forward, and newer jumpers do not have to begin every lesson from zero. The Treasure is not eliminating risk. It is helping each generation begin a little further ahead than the one before it. DRAGON: The gap between formal training and community-supported progression. New divers fall into a fast-moving, self-taught world with no obvious immediate peers and no real support beyond paid instruction and eye-candy social media content built to look impressive rather than to teach. The crucial stages that actually keep people safe get skimmed past in the name of quick progression and visible results.

QUEST: How might we turn individual experience into collective progression?  That is the question every meaningful decision inside The OAF has run through since. Not “how do we grow,” not “how do we get sponsors,” and not “how do we remove risk.” The real Quest is how to make sure what one person learns through experience, mistakes, or injury does not end with them, but travels forward in a way that helps the next jumper make a better decision. How do we make sure nobody has to learn alone what someone before them already learned the hard way?

Stepping-Stones in our Quest

Two of the OAF's key moments were featured in Parachutist Magazine: our first-ever Cloud Games competition entry, and a jump attempting to revive the Star Crest Award tradition at our drop-zone, a 75-year lineage that more than 27,000 divers have taken part in since 1967. That second one matters more than it might look on the surface. We weren't just building something new. We were reconnecting new divers to something that already had history, so the community they were joining felt like it went back further than the two years OAF has technically existed.

Parachutist Magazine Feature | September 2025 (Bottom: 1st OAF Attempt to build an 8-person 'Star')

The OAF community is still active, and still building toward whatever the next stage of it looks like. The Quest hasn't resolved into an ending. Real ones rarely do; they compound.

Why this matters beyond skydiving

We didn't run The OAF as a branding exercise. We ran it because two friends got hurt and the alternative was going on business-as-usual. Looking back at the experience through the HTDQ lens is exactly the kind of diagnostic work I now do for founders and businesses: find the real Hero (often not who they assumed), name the actual Dragon (usually less dramatic and more structural than they expect), get specific about the Treasure, and compress all of it into one Quest question clear enough to make the next decision obvious.

Most founders don't have a clarity problem because they lack ideas. They have one because nobody's helped them ask the real question underneath their ideas. Frameworks like HTDQ are effective because they reflect how we picture ourselves and our experiences in the world. This form of storytelling –ancient as dragons and treasure quests–, helps us understand who we truly are, what we most desire and how far we're willing to go to accomplish our goals. Learn more about the OAF | IG @onionairforce | onionairforce.com | The OAF Story