JohanW

Indicated airspeed should be the same regardless of altitude? Johan. I am. I think.

Reasonably perfect, oh, about 500 maybe. Good enough for me (no biffing in, reasonably where I wanted to be): slightly over 100. (Except #256, on the biffing in part. Then I really outdid myself on that part. ) Good and safe enough for my instructors (do not forget PLF, mostly hit the right field): 2. Johan. I am. I think.

I would be very surprised if anyone did. I think you misread 64 GB. Johan. I am. I think.

If the risk caught up with everyone, everyone would need to make an infinite number of jumps. With chances like 99999 in 100000, there's not much point in doing the hard calculations, but it seems you have a 36% chance of surviving a 100000 jumps. About 10000 jumps to have 90% chance of survival. Do you feel like making ten thousand jumps? Do you think you wouldn't influence the odds by learning and making choices during that time? Why are you overthinking it like that? Oh - and don't ever climb on a motorbike. Odds of dying (leaving out broken bones and other minor stuff) are about the same for * 1 parachute jump * 1000 km driving a car * 50 km riding a bike (still looking for a reference for that BTW) Gut feeling - jump more, post less. Johan. I am. I think.

It won't feel like a huge change. That said, please review this and consider the wisdom of jumping a 1.3 wingload at 66 jumps. (Edit: great minds think alike I guess.) Johan. I am. I think.

It's almost as if you hit a button with me, eh Butters? That, or I just have too much time on my hands.

The most important skills I'd be looking for are "soft" skills, not entirely quantifiable and maybe not something you can specifically train for. Flying some other way from where you are looking. We all learn to look where we want to go. Later, much later, you learn to go where you want to go while looking in any other direction. Keeping a heading, not because you are working at it but automatically, without even thinking about it. Keeping level (whatever level is appropriate) with the formation, automatically, without even thinking about it. Not reaching for grips, but flying your slot. Level, proximity, grips. Automatically, no thinking. (Still learning this one myself.

That's exactly the value of freeflying before wingsuiting in my eyes. It gets you used to instability, recovering from it and generally to being other-than-belly-to-earth. Now the information is coming out. So you would recommend doing some freefly to practice instability (not to become proficient at freeflying). If this is new to you, you could have searched the forums. This definitely has been posted before. And we have the concept of a burble, the concept of level, recovery from instability, there is looking through a formation to keep heading and level, there's a lot of things that I'm going to stop enumerating because if you are a well-rounded skydiver with a couple hundred jumps, you will have learned by then. You will have jumped in all seasons, you will have exited from minimum legal altitude, you will have pulled your handles on the ground (because your rigger made you do that the first time you took your rig for a repack - right ?!?), there's all sorts of things that you will have done after two years of jumping. There's all sorts of things that come in bloody useful when you go to your back at pulltime and start spinning on the first wingsuit jump you make. And if you're such a prodigy and don't do it on your first wingsuit jump, it'll be back to bite you on your 100th because you just had to crank out that 12th jump of the day, are tired, had a lazy throw, got just the tiniest bit complacent and now you haven't been in this situation before, and here you are, deploying at 2200 because you've done this a 100 times, on your back, spinning, tired from that two and a half minute flight, sore from all those jumps today and daylight fading and messing with your altitude perception. What do you do? What do you do? (I don't know what movie I'm quoting here, but it conveyed exactly the same stress levels I'm trying to.) Johan. I am. I think.

That's OK, I'll do it for you. Your profiles says you fly a Spectre 150. That's a high performance canopy. There is a reason the manufacturer recommends a kill-line pilot chute on it, at any wingloading. If you don't consider yourself a high performance canopy pilot, you have no business under that wing. If you don't agree with me, yank down one toggle deep and hard, and see what happens. (My view: there are no low performance squares, medium performance does not even extend down to 170, and beyond high performance there's always extreme and ballistic. The simple fact there exists a Spectre 97 does not make your 150 any slower.) Actually, if you do not consider your canopy very fast, please reconsider. And learn appropriately, even if this postpones the g*dd*mn wingsuiting a few jumps. (Neatly returning to the topic at hand here. I'm so smooth.

That's exactly the value of freeflying before wingsuiting in my eyes. It gets you used to instability, recovering from it and generally to being other-than-belly-to-earth. Johan. I am. I think.

(Again, butting in.) Let me try to put it this way: I would not recommend emphasising anything *less*. I would only recommend spending *additional* effort on tracking. Yes, you may take that to mean do the bloody 200 jumps as if you're *not* preparing for wingsuiting and then do some extra tracking. OK, do a lot of it. Do 20 solos, 10 smallways, 10 bigways (a freefly bigway starts at about 4 people!) and don't forget to do other things in the meantime as well. By that time, you might just barely start to know what you don't know. Johan. I am. I think.

I realise you were not directing that question at me. But I'm going to answer it anyway. You could probably have found these answers by searching, because I'm pretty sure I posted something like this before. But that would have *you* do the work, and that doesn't seem fair, does it? Not in any particular order: * Do some solo tracking jumps. Make sure you can steer and be aware of your ground track. * Do some group tracking jumps. Make sure you can fly relative and still be aware of your ground track. * Do some solo freefly. Get used to not being on your belly and in fact not being stable at all times. * Do some belly fourway. Better yet, do a season of fourway team jumping. This teaches basic relative work skills, not to mention being good for your tracking skills. * Learn from your out landings, what to do and what not to do. No need to make outlandings intentionally just as training for wingsuiting of course, but if you are doing a twoway with an attractive MOTAS anyway, propose an out landing. (Take a cellphone and inform manifest when you've landed safely.)

That's Loic and friends. He would be flying an S-Fly. www.flyyourbody.com (How's your French?

Yes. There's no rush then, is there? Happy for you.

This one was done from cloudbase. After exit we did a split-S (I had to go ask a pilot what the half barrel roll - half loop manoeuvre we did was actually called ) but all's well that ends well and afterwards we did more crazy jumps. That alti reads 5. Ask me in about a year and a half what more I can post - there is something else that's worth the wait but hasn't been published yet. Johan. I am. I think.

The picture is in the debrief document, an attachment to the mail I got this morning 0745 CET, which is also in the Google thing for the team. Neither the mail nor the document itself mentions not being allowed to post it publicly, but I'm leaving that to the organisation team because you cannot undo something like that. In the picture, all 71 flyers are at least partially in their own grid square. Not all of them completely in their square, but impressive, very impressive. Jeff, Taya, someone, anyone, please post the document (or the grid picture) or tell us we can't post it. 60-odd people want to post it I think, and any unknown quantity of folks who were not at the event for one reason or another want to read it, but I just don't dare, and I'm guessing I'm not the only one. Johan. I am. I think.

Why would you be doing $19 HnP's when you can be doing $23 HnP's? I sometimes refer to it, half-jokingly, as Recreational High Performance Canopy Relative Freeflying outside of the scope of a course but it could do with a snappier acronym. And, ATC permitting, you might just as well do it from full altitude. It's what BrianG had us do when we took his advanced course. Johan. I am. I think.

It seems the last Wednesday jump (the Rick/Stoney one, not the "record" one) is up on vimeo again. Not a mistake this time Spot? I am missing one slot though - left wing of the base isn't there. Did he never make it in? Johan. I am. I think.

You can lead a horse to water but you can't make him drink. Johan. I am. I think.

Do I need a password or do I have to log in to vimeo with a specific e-mailaddress? (Please, not the latter. I use different spamtraps for different websites.) Johan. I am. I think.

That's one definition. But it's not the only possible one. Tell that to the 400-way, or the 71-way Wingsuit, or the future 500-way. The goal is part of the experience. If all this isn't your thing, just let us w*nk between ourselves .. Johan. I am. I think.

I agree on judgeable criteria being important for reasons mentioned earlier by other people, and I largely agree with Jarno's opinion on which formations are good enough (or even nearing perfection, but that's not the point). I have been kicking an idea 'round in my head which does not lay a predefined grid over the flyers but uses a specific picture (the best one available), drawing a diamond of a predefined size over each flyer, centered on the head (or maybe the left hand, the reserve loop or whatever), and then checking to see if all diamonds overlap with adjacent existing ones. This allows for some skewing and breathing in the formation and does not require everyone flying off a single base, so to say, it does not propagate and add all the errors from front to back and side to side. It may also be too easy and judge formations as correct when the lines are not linear enough to subjective scrutiny. This may correct itself because in larger formations, you are flying off lines which you tend to average anyway. But I also like the 36' noodle idea (or 35, or 37 ..). Attach to feet (or ankles, or maybe hands, laterals or wherever) and hold handgrips on 'em. This allows for skewing just like in RW-formations, esp. with long whackers. It may also lead to spectacular and very dangerous funnels. And to very ugly formations, not to mention very ugly glide ratios. We have some pictures of historical formations that we can try retroactively to fit into grid-like rules, but for the noodle idea we may have to get noodles and flyers and actually go up and see if it works. My suggestion would not be to organise a 71-way for a first attempt .. Just a random thought - how breakable should these noodles be? Also, comparing to large RW-formations, do they still have to fly it for 3 seconds, or do they have to provide 1 picture? I thought those rules were changed more or less recently. The rule of all participants having to survive the jump, the landing and the next 24 hours also has been scratched sometime "recently". We may choose to hold ourselves to a higher standard than RW-formations have to, but it's a choice we might make consciously if we make it explicit. Wingsuit formations are definitely a very different animal from RW-formations; there will be differences in judging (or we wouldn't be having this discussion) but reinventing the wheel need not redefine round to umpteen decimal places. 'Nother random thought - the diamond grid might allow for realtime individual electronic assistance because all you need to know while flying is the distance to the flyers surrounding you. This would seem easier to measure and indicate than all the GPS-based solutions to me, admittedly being a layperson in these matters. It may still require custom electronics on each and every flyer, but orders of magnitude simpler stuff than GPS devices, and therefore cheaper. The diamond grid thing also might allow for rating formations as % slot perfect by measuring total overlap. You need at least 0 to completely blot out the sky behind the formation with diamonds, but by flying closer you can have more overlapping areas which you can sum and compare to the total diamond area. Everyone in the exact same place would have 100% overlap; everyone perfectly in their defined slot would have an overlap depending on the size of the diamonds and the spacing of the formation. 100% would not be the goal to strive for .. One last random thought .. F*CK THE GRID! A big thank you and well done goes to everyone that made possible what we did and achieved in Elsinore, organisers, flyers, pilots, ground crew, everyone. I am happy and a little proud to have been one of that group. We proved the naysayers wrong, and I used to be one of them myself. Johan. I am. I think.

I still consider this a good thing. What better way to increase your wingload with not just the canopy you know, but the size you know as well?

According to your profile, 176, 177, 178, 179, 180, 181, 182, 183, 184 and 185. And make sure you walk away from them.

My recollection of the parameters is between 750 and 130 ft, exceeding 78 mph vertical, for 3 seconds. But I can't point to a reference for that. Johan. I am. I think.