I finished AFF last month and this was the path that i went.
2 tandems, pulling on the 2nd one.
10min tunnel time
AFF.
AFF took a total of 8 jumps for me (repeating Cat-A and Cat-C1) and found that the tunnel time really helped overall for being stable in freefall. 5 minutes is all it took to get the arch down and another 5 was spent working on holding a heading/turns.
Also - most of my exits were terrible, often we ended up on our backs, but remembering to relax and that i had seconds to flip/complete the rest of the jump, made recovering really easy.
