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All 74 Million are angry and patriots? Not a pretender in the bunch? It was an election, Ron. 81 Million is more than 74 Million. We win. You are no Patriot. You hate America. You despise what it is. You reject her institutions. You long for a Theocracy and you get downright giddy at the prospect of pulling down those demonic, Luciferian liberals. The idea that you think you have the ability to counsel others is truly frightening. Get used to it: you lost.

Your logic, your misuse of historical perspective is so fatally flawed as to defy reasonable response.

You do what you practice, mentally and physically. Being a rigger, I have abundant opportunities to practice my EPs (gotta disconnect the main and open the reserve to do the work, so....). My mental practice and physical rehearsal is, and has been since I moved away from student gear, one hand per handle, grab both; peel and punch cutaway, peel and punch reserve, with a 4-beat rhythmic cadence. The reality when opening rigs to pack them, is peel and punch cutaway, peel and punch reserve, *usually* bringing my right hand over for an assist with the ripcord. So... I get a hand on each handle before I begin pulling either of them. For me, the most important thing is being mentally present EVERY TIME I either rehearse EPs or pull handles on the ground, so I'm both building muscle memory and paying attention to what the handles feel like, and the various ways the process can vary. For instance, some jumpers' gear has ultra-mated velcro on the handles, so peeling a handle is not always the same. Most of all, because I've been jumping a soft reserve handle, and rehearsing to use it, for almost 20 years (!!. Omg, I'm an old-timer, lol), I am surprised by the feel of a metal handle when I pull one. My hand used to sometimes slip off metal handles, because I'm not in the habit of hooking a thumb, but lately I've begun to react quickly when I feel a metal ripcord, and get a thumb around it. I got off on a little tangent there.... Apologies to those who rolled their eyes, lol. But.... visualize and practice your EPs. Rehearse for all the scenarios you can think of, putting your mind into it -- total mal; spinner; horseshoe; lost handle. Do it a LOT. And when you drop off your gear off for a repack, pull your handles like your life depends on it! Because at some point, it will.

Within our lifetimes the petroleum industry is going to stop refining 100LL aviation gasoline. Then we need an alternative to keep flying. Consider the Romanian Air Force's dilemma back in the early 1990s. After the fall of communism, Romanian refineries stopped making 100LL and it was prohibitively expensive to import 100LL gasoline from Greece, so the RAF grounded their fleet of I.A.R. 823 trainers. Those trainers were powered by the same Lycoming IO-540 engines as Cessna 182 and 206. Those airplanes sat idle for a decade or so, then were bought up an American dealer and sold on to the warbird crowd, who were wearing out their similar-sized Beechcraft Mentors. Debate all you want, but DZOs are going to need new a fuel source within the next 20 years.

May I suggest that a wise DZO will invest in a half-dozen sets of batteries and re-charge them mid-week? By re-charging batteries during off-peak hours, the DZO can save money on electric grid rates. With solar cells on the hangar roof, the DZO might be able to save even more money .. or sell surplus electricity to neighbours. Finally, with those half-dozen sets of batteries fully-charged by Saturday morning, they can swap battereis and fly until noon before worrying about re-charging. Also the time spent swapping batteries might be needed to allow packers to catch up. I used to work at a DZ that had too much lift capacity with a King Air. After three or four loads, we would run out of tandem rigs. So we stopped jumping for a half-hour while packers caught up, TIs trained and dressed the next batch of students and the pilot refuelled the airplane. The other reason we flew three or four loads back-to-back is that it costs hundreds of dollars to shut down a turbine engine .... wait for it to cool ... then re-start. Every hot-cold cycle costs hundreds of dollars worth of life to a turbine engine. The number of hot-cold cycles becomes increasingly expensive as you approach the end of the over-haul cycle since turbines were originally designed to take-off-cruise-land only two or three times per day ... nothing like 3 to 5 cycles up-down per hour.

i would say that most of the time, you won't be changing you r eps as much as reacting differently to emergencies. you do that with experience i'm told, as i only have 120 odd jumps. for example, if you pull and nothing comes out, you may look over your shoulder or smack your container before deciding to go silver. maybe a better example would be going straight silver for a horseshoe. the experience will give you a second to realize what it is and you may want to keep your main connected. now, it should go without saying but i will anyway for safety, you should decide this on the ground and not in the air.

I have a J7 with a Diablo 170, cypress and I think a PD190 reserve. I can not jump because I'm old and falling apart like my rig. It was stored under my house and has mold on the surface. Let me know if you want it. I'll send it if you pay shipping. I just can't get myself to toss it in a dumpster....... It has let me down over 1,200 times....

Advice - get your rigger involved in this discussion from the beginning. JW

It’s weird to me. Growing up in the UK I heard stories from my grandparents about what it was like for civilians in WWII. Rationing. Blackouts. Travel restrictions. Air raids. All that stuff. They SACRIFICED as a country. They had to, and they got through it. Whereas our country isn’t willing to just suck up wearing a mask and maybe not traveling for the holidays for a single year... Its really not a lot to ask in the big scheme of things.

You kidding me? Ever listen to right wing talk radio? Outrage is their main product, day in and day out. That's all they do is whip up guys like you. Have you examined yourself for example? I mean here. No one, and I mean NO ONE here expresses outrage like you do. In the words of Ellis McDaniels, AKA Bo Diddley, "Before you accuse me, take a look at yourself".

Their misbehavior is not an excuse for ours. This is for protection, not to display how liberally woke we all are By and large I don’t see a double standard, yeah, the party was ridiculous and inexcusable. Of course, so was Falwell’s recent boat party, but I don’t see evangelicals saying that makes it ok for them to sin Wendy P.

"Good ideas don't require force." Exactly. That's why we didn't need laws against drunk driving to significantly reduce the deaths due to drunk driving in the US. Everyone realized it was a good idea and it just happened without laws, arrests, jail times and loss of vehicles.

This might be the scariest aspect of the whole thing: Nobody knows what the long-term effects will be or how severe. The potential heart and brain damage we've already seen is alarming.