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Heya all, Dropzone .com has been sold. This site has been part of my life for 27 years, so it was obviously not an easy decision. A huge thank you to every one of you (especially those relentless mods!) who supported Dropzone.com and myself during the years. Things change. The friendships I made here will outlast the tech forever, and for that i'm grateful. It's been real. Safe swoops Sangiro

Not telegram, but I’m setting up a private sub reddit to hopefully keep the banter going. Over the past 20+ years I’ve been active in this site I’ve learned skydiving lessons, made great friends and changed my views on life. The mods have done a great job over the years in keeping it relatively civil and so we have a spectrum of views and it’s not a pure echo chamber.

You didn't answer. Cause when presented with something you thought was easy, but turned out not to be so easy you took the simple way out. You had the chance to learn, but you are actively choosing ignorance.

Trump deserves the NO BAIL PRIZE!

Hey everyone, Dropzone.com has been acquired by a non-skydiving party. The site will remain active and available in its current format until the end of the year. Please back up your DMs and data before December 31, 2024. Some of you have been asking about the data: As part of the deal, I will retain all the data and content. We'll explore options to see whether it's viable to make it available in some format again. That being said, there may very well be a period where nothing is available. Ultimately we may not find a solution to put it online again without just returning to the same cost and support issues that brought us to this point int the first place. That's quite likely. If we bring any of the data online again, you should expect it to be different... Go follow Dropzone.com on Facebook, instagram or X. (links in the site footer) If there are any developments or updates, we will use those platforms to announce it. Safe swoops Sangiro

But Trump got a piece of this and a piece of that so he gets the Piece Prize.

The west and free markets won the cold war. Putin is nothing more or less than a criminal kleptocrat. He as a temporary alliance with a communist dictator. With a family dictatorship and a Islamic theocracy. Not one of which enjoys domestic popular support. Each of which is propped up by the power of a gun. After trump's second term, American justice will come roaring back and trump will spend the remainder of his life buried in litigation. IMO

I can't tell you how many people I know that smoke weed and snort coke, yet that lie on their weapons forms never bit them. Most IRS tax issues are done once the disputed numbers are settled, paid, interest, and fines. Yet this one guy was pursued, simply because he was the son of POTUS. The republicans shit their pants over the fact that he had a deal, which is odd because most people do that in similar cases. Why is this one so special and dear to The Great Rapist Leader and his minions? Meanwhile, the criminals pardoned by Trump were fine.

Agree. trump's pardons are in a completely other world. "Among those receiving pardons was Kushner’s father, Charles Kushner. The elder Kushner had been convicted for crimes that included extorting his own brother-in-law by hiring a prostitute to lure him into a sexual encounter, video recording the encounter and then sending the film to his wife, Charles Kushner’s own sister." All of this pardon B.S. makes banana republics look princely compared to the US.

Except it's like playing the "let's hit each other, you go first" game. The one where one person socks the other's arm lightly, in a friendly manner, and the second one wallops the first. Watch for details on who he pardons, and watch for all the "you did it first." Personally, I'm sick of that shit. Bad is bad, good is good, and context is context. Wendy P.

Not sure if you're familiar with the phrase "No Shit There I Was, Thought I Was Gonna Die" that Dudeman alluded to with 'NSTIWTIWGD', but it's the classic start to a skydiver's story about such things. Take the discussion above this about the appropriateness of such stickers to heart but: if your buddy is game for a reminder, either 'NSTIWTIWGD' or 'No Shit There I Was....' are good options.

It appears most of the current republicans consider women property or simply vessels.

There apparently are people who were on the ground who say they saw Cooper exit. They may believe that they did. But they didn’t. Not when the 727 was at 10,000 ft at night. The only exception would be if Cooper carried some sort of light. And there is no reason to believe that he did.

Certainly more bigots are aware that it's a good pejorative. It's the new "communist." I, for one, am happy that those horrible racists/DEI hires/idiots like Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Rosa Parks, Harvey Milk, Billie Jean King, Thurgood Marshall and John Lewis have been spreading their poison across the US.

So looks like the site will be gone for good at the end of December - so we have one last hurrah. Personally I want to thank Andrea and Wendy for helping to moderate this forum. It's always been an odd little appendix on a really useful website, and I've made friends here, had a few thought provoking arguments, and had a lot of fun watching other arguments progress (or, in many cases, devolve.) Thanks everyone.

I don't know how you find the time to keep track of all that. I just skim them because it's just getting too granular.

Good job he wasn't a candidate this year then. He would have deserved to lose. Like Trump deserved to lose except he had locked up the moron vote.

This is why I watch live sports. It's real ! You can only wait so long for the Promised Land with the latest DB Cooper guru looking for his keys! I expect the Cooper search to now shift to Antarctica and Mars. After a good beginning, maybe even a great beginning, the FBI in its various machinations botched the case. It became a joke. No question about this. Today the FBI seems unable or unwilling to salvage the case and actually work with private investigators and labs; its only option left is to make the next press release. That is absurd and humiliating. This is not just my view! What can be done in an environment like that? Nothing.

Couple of comments: Important to remember that FBI agents in North Carolina don't know anything about the case. They would have collected the parachute and sent all other statements and evidence to the Seattle Office who have jurisdiction over NORJAK. The case agent there is who would deal with all of this. I'm quite certain the current case agent knows this is bogus and knew it well over a year ago. Just saying.... :-) But sadly the FBI never/rarely make comments about things like this. They're not going to put out a press release saying that the chute is bogus and Gryder knows that. Them asking for McCoy's DNA was, as I expected, just them wanting to dot their i's and cross their t's because they weren't ever able to get McCoy DNA back in the early 2000's (they tried). They just wanted to run it against the CODIS profile that all the other suspects had their profiles tested against. CODIS profile contains three partial profiles lifted from the tie. They are partial which means that millions of people have DNA that would partially match. Larry Carr was told by the crime lab that the CODIS DNA is useless because the tie has been so contaminated that there is a high likelihood that the three profiles have nothing to do with the hijacker

As someone hit from behind and knocked into line twists with collapsed end cells at 100' agl by a guy spiraling through the pattern at Z Hills (to get on the next load), and then managing to land without breaking anything, I was charmed when TK presented me with a Z-Hills carabiner watch as a thank you for not contributing to the DZ's accident data. The photo taken from the ground even made it into USPA's Safety Day ad the following year.

I may have posted this story before but I am reminded of it again. Many years ago when I was jumping at Taft, somebody had a cutaway and their canopy came down next to a road. Some local guy driving by saw it, stopped, looked around and tentatively lifted the canopy up to see if there was a body underneath it. When he saw that there wasn't, he gathered it up and brought it back to the airport. His curiosity got the better of him, and he went up on a tandem that day. He liked it, and came back a few days later for AFF. Long story short, he became a regular jumper, and even a TI!