Canopy piloting and ground launch center review

[superstu 0]

This past weekend I went to Jim Slaton’s new canopy piloting school that is located at Lake Isabella in hopes to improve my swooping and overall canopy piloting, and specifically to get ready for the 2005 season. Since what I did might be a little different than what most others have done I thought I would give a little review of my experience there.

Basically the course that I went through didn’t focus just on swooping or just on ground launching, but canopy piloting. If you had to compare it to something it’s like Perris’s para-perfomance training camps where they utilized both the wind tunnel and actual jumps from the planes to help out your RW or FF skills. The difference here was that our tunnel was the hills that we ground launched from, but we also incorporated what we learned ground launching such as certain aspects of harness and rear riser flying to the actual swooping part of the course.

The versatility of this setup is great because if the weather isn’t cooperating, like it wasn’t for me, for swooping you can still practice, fine tune, or realize often overlooked techniques on the hills with ground launching.

The amount of material covered over the 4 days was honestly too much to handle and I think I was only able to take in about 50% of what we talked about, so bring a note pad or tape recorder and ALWAYS have it handy. I can’t tell you how many times we were driving to the DZ or a launch point and the things we discussed were so informative and so in depth that if I had a notepad of some kind I would have retained so much more information.

Overall I think it was one of the best things I could have done to get past the plateau I was at in my canopy piloting experience. I think just from these 4 days I will improve dramatically, however, I now realize how long it’s going to take (which can be pretty daunting). I honestly believe that anybody going to something like this will benefit one way or another and that no matter how many jumps you have or how much you THINK you know you don’t know it all. So do your self a favor go get some sort of coaching either swoop coaching, ground launch coaching, or canopy piloting coaching and stop guessing about what you’re doing.

Any questions you can PM me…stu

P.S. and just to tell you a little about my self I have almost 1300 jumps in about 2.5 years and i am flying a vx 84 for the past 500 or so jumps.

Slip Stream Air Sports
Do not go softly, do not go quietly, never back down

[CanuckInUSA 0]

Quote

I honestly believe that anybody going to something like this will benefit one way or another and that no matter how many jumps you have or how much you THINK you know you don’t know it all. So do your self a favor go get some sort of coaching either swoop coaching, ground launch coaching, or canopy piloting coaching and stop guessing about what you’re doing.

Good stuff huh Stu? Jim is an awesome canopy control teacher (and very passionate about the whole thing ... especially Ground Launching). I have a long way to go, but getting coaching (twice now) from Jim as well as a Ground Launching camp last November has set me on the right path for success. There are some out there who feel that they are above coaching, but we know better.

Try not to worry about the things you have no control over