OTTAWA – Falling at speeds of up to 220 mph, a group of 138 skydivers shattered the vertical skydiving world record as they flew heads-down in a massive snowflake formation in Illinois.

Three judges representing the Federation Aeronautique Internationale, the international air sports agency, certified that the skydivers created the formation Friday evening over Ottawa, about 80 miles southwest of Chicago. It took 15 attempts over three days for the team to break the previous record of 108 skydivers, which was set in 2009.

“I feel amazing,” Rook Nelson, an organizer and the owner of Skydive Chicago where the record was broken, said shortly after he made the jump. “There was a lot of emotion and a lot of days where we should have got it. But we dug down deep and stuck at it.”