JackC

Here's something to try up high in clear airspace. Go to full drive for about 5 seconds so your canopy is flying well, then start a flare but just give it enough input to start to level the canopy out and then hold it. The canopy will level out for a second then gently start to sink again. At this point give it a bit more input and the canopy will level for a second then sink again. You can repeat this process until you are at full brakes. It should feel a bit like your canopy is going down a flight of stairs, if you don't feel it you can try again with more input. Practice smoothing out all the stairs so you can go from full drive to full flare smoothly and evenly using just enough input so you can maintain level flight for as long as you possible. Each time you add more input, the canopy converts airspeed to lift so the idea is to convert all of you airspeed to lift progressively as and when you need it, not all in one big lump. While you're at it and you're up high, find your stall point in deep brakes. If you don't know what this means or how to recover from a stall, for gods sake ask someone. You don't want to stall your canopy close to the ground so do this with plenty of altitude. Many big canopies wont stall anyway but if your's does, you'll want to know about it because that's the limit of your flare range. Find the point where your brakes start to take effect too, that's the start of your flare range. Remember, you're looking for the stall point, not the colapsed-canopy-plummeting-from-the-sky-screaming point. When you come into land, make your last turn high enough so that you have a good 5 seconds of full drive before you start your flare. When you reach flare height apply just enough input to level the canopy out and as soon as it starts sinking again, apply a bit more flare and a bit more, always trying to keep the canopy flying for as long as you can until you run out of flare and then step onto the ground. You can gauge how much flare and how much sink you need to juggle in order to meet the floor at full flare. On a nil wind day, you may still need to take a step or five. A smooth and even flare is the key, if one arm goes down faster than the other, you'll suffer from the dreaded "side gust" that students often complain about. You want to land with a flat and level canopy, into a clear area with no obsticles, flare evenly and into wind if possible. Now I'm no canopy coach so don't take my word for it, find someone to coach you, preferably someone who will video your landings.

Now who sounds like a racist?

Differing political views doesn't make anyone an idiot. Disrupting press conferences (even BNP one) by violent means and defending that on the grounds that it's the BNP on the receiving end and they deserve it was what I was refering to. As dispicable as the BNP may be, they are democratically elected and any defender of freedom of speech must allow them (and their detractors) their say even if you don't agree with them. Aparently thinking that that makes me elitist, arrogant, ignorant, haughty and racist. Thanks for that.

Misrepresentation, non-sequiturs and PAs in one post. Bravo.

I blame the mainstream parties for allowing the situation to arise where the BNP can get elected. But I'm not that worried really, it's a european election and therefore the normal rules don't apply, plus everyone is pissed off with politicians in general and large swathes of voters from Middle Britain abstained alowing minority parties to get a larger proportion of the vote. I'm fairly sure a general election would be quite different. But the United Against Fascism lot seem to be doing everything they can to help the BNP along. A representitivefrom the UAF was interviewed on TV last night and he came across as just as big a wanker as the BNP lot. I swear, the world is populated by class one fuckin' idiots.

If you're talking to wuffos, the term square will mean any ram-air parachute and eliptical will mean nothing or worse still, round. Skydivers will probably know the difference.

Never been in deep shit in the sky but riding bikes I've been confronted with the business end of a truck a time or two that should have been game over. Impending oblivion is a weird place to be, quite calm really, zen-like almost. It's only after that you realise you should probably empty the adrenalin filling your underpants before you go anywhere.

Exactly, but the mindset that allows people to accept that shit happens tends to allow them to continue to accept shit happening. It's the people who refuse to accept it that drive advances in equipment and technique. In the long run, which mindset do you think makes the safer skydiver? The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man. ~ George Bernard Shaw

Interesting. I know my canopy bucks like crazy on fronts if I have toggle input as well but I didn't know that it turns the opposite way. But generally front riser input makes you go faster and I'd have thought that faster is the last thing you want when flying towards someone.

But that shit simply stopped happening because someone thought about how and why that shit was happening and did something about it.

But design revisions have largely eliminated both of those mals. What would skydiving be like if riggers had simply said "oh well, shit happens"?

Well, let's tell it like it is...the pilot stalled the canopy. I would venture to guess that he didn't know where his rear-riser stall point was for that canopy, or, that he got excited and exceeded it by mistake. To be fair, it was the spinning mal, followed by the chop, followed by the stuck brake line on the reserve they had zero jumps on, leading to the unpracticed half-braked rear-riser flare because there was no altitude left, that lead to them stalling their canopy.

This happened to a very experienced jumper at my DZ recently under a reserve. Short of altitude and out of options, they tried a rear riser landing but the canopy stalled and collapsed at about 10ft dumping them very hard onto the ground. Luckily, they got away with it. If it was me on my main with enough altitude to spare, I'd find the stall point on rear risers and see if I thought a rear riser landing was an option. On my canopy, I know how it handles and stalls on rear risers cos I've tried it plenty but never with the brakes stowed (one to try I think). If I wasn't happy it was 100% doable, I'd chop. If I wasn't at a safe altitude to chop, I'd be riding it in, either flaring on risers or if I thought it was going to stall I'd take the pounding of a half-brakes landing and PLF my ass off.

I'm assuming cats are interchangable with skydivers since load organising is frequently known as cat herding.

Hmmm... Schrodingers famous canopy experiment where you pack a canopy in a container and you don't know whether it's a good canopy or a malfunction until you pull. Your packed rig is therefore set in a state of undefined quantum flux between malfunction and no malfunction and the skydiver is neither alive nor dead until the measurement is made at pull time. That anomaly of physics?

I've never been to a martial arts club where they taught anything even remotely like a PLF. In martial arts (my perspective is mainly Judo), you fall at pretty much every orientation there is and there are different techniques for each. The idea is to get comfortable with falling and learn how to deal with it without injuring yourself. In competition, you don't get a choice which way your opponent throws you so you need to be good at all of them. The idea in Judo is not to land on your back because that is how you lose the fight. So the skill (assuming you have learned to fall at any orientation without breaking yourself) is in being able to control the fall, turning one fall orientation into a lower scoring orientation in the split second between being thrown and your back hitting the floor. Maybe those same skills could be useful during a botched parachute landing to reduce the risk of injury? For feet first vertical decents like landing a round or a mal, I reckon a PLF is a pretty good starting point and may well be the only option (but if I had to land a round or a mal with any regularity, I'd be looking for some new gear asap). However, the majority of botched parachute landings have a considerable horizontal speed component, in which case you set up for the PLF you haven't done since your FJC and it turns into a faceplant before you even know what happened. A good martial artist should have a more complete set of skills to deal with that. I'm not saying to replace teaching PLFs in a FJC with anything else, that's impractical and would probably make things more dangerous. PLFs are definately still the best bang for the buck. What I am saying is that a PLF is but one of many falling techniques and to dismiss any of them out of hand would be a bit stupid. If that's the way you end up getting thrown, then yes but I wouldn't want to fight someone capable of doing it to me. But would you PLF such a landing or slide it in on your side? I'll take the slide thanks. Disclaimer: I urge everyone to take all this with how ever many grains of salt you need. It's just my opinion and it's worth exactly what you paid for it.

The way I see it, good sex is about good team work. So if you need to fake it, it's 50% your fault.

If you don't want to pay the rate, don't take out the loan. You know, I'm sure I've read that somewhere recently. I wonder where it could have been.

After 20 odd years of Judo, it's pretty difficult for me to turn off that training and do a PLF instead. I can assure you the parachute harness doesn't restrain you anything like enough to stop you doing a martial arts type fall. I think there are better methods to contol a fall than a PLF but that's not something you can be taught in 25 minutes on a FJC. PLFs are still the best bang for the buck.

Good question. It almost implys that the conservative majority think that SC isn't conservative enough even though they (as the majority) presumably have the power to be as conservative as they like. My guess is the perception by some conservatives that SC has a liberal bias has more to do with the presence of liberal moderators than forum content.

It is interesting to note that we often define ourselves according to our intentions, whereas others define us according to our actions. http://weblamp.princeton.edu/~psych/psychology/research/pronin/pubs/2008%20Self%20and%20Other.pdf

I did it once and it was worth it even though it was bloody hard going at times. Once was enough though.

When you're old and knackered like me, sports bikes are a major pain if you have to do more than a few miles. Plus they only really become fun at non-legal speeds. That said, a mate of mine has a Fireblade and a supermoto'd XR400 and the XR is faster for most applications (and arguably more fun) So I'd go for a Speed Triple.

DZ.com should come with a health warning, especially when the advice given here is actually sarcasm.

QFT