winsor

To some extent it depends on what I'm jumping and why I'm low. I practice finding handles on every jump, often in freefall, so I have the kinesthetics wired. Many years ago I couldn't find a handle (old style PUD) as quickly as I wanted, and was under reserve by 1,900 ft., with no cutaway pulled - straight to silver. On cllimbout I watch the altimeter unwind, and note the altitude at which I will go for the main instead of the reserve. It's not a matter of reliability as much as not wanting to find myself under a ground-hungry Class 5 canopy 450 feet over 100 foot pine trees, with power lines to one side and a construction site to the other. I've twice left an airplane that had an engine go massively inop on climbout, and it was only the luck of the draw the we had plenty of altitude (and an interesting spot) each time. If I am low because I'm brainlocking, I assume I will be on a roll and simply go for the main as usual. I would have to be in heads-up mode to go for the open-NOW canopy. A complex decision tree is ill advised for safety-related issues, and switching gears reactively from main to reserve mode can eat up as much altitude as can a pretty good snivel (I don't jump anything that takes 1,000 feet to open - or opens in less than 100 ft., for that matter). I've only had ground rush in freefall a couple of times (outside of BASE), and even then used the main. I really don't have a game plan that involves intentionally pulling low, so finding myself in the basement is likely to be an unplanned event, and the only policy I would apply to the situation is the old standby - don't go in with any handles unpulled (or keep pulling handles 'til your goggles fill with blood, as the case may be). Blue skies, Winsor

Whenever I'm organizing, I stress gear checks. When I read this post, it occurred to me that this practice was, in fact, drilled into me in Jump School. I've caught the usual misrouted chest strap, twisted main lift web, folded under handle, stuffed hackey, and dangling RSLs, as well as spotting a leg strap that had been ground almost through on the previous landing, sliding on asphalt. I also suggest one final check before exit, since I've seen and had an incipient horseshoe that had developed on the ride to altitude but got caught before climbout. There are people who died or were maimed from things that would have been caught by a cursory last minute check before exit, and I figure due diligence is in order. You can only make it so safe, agreed, but building in a system of routine checks can minimize the occurence of easily avoidable risks. I already have enough NSTIWTIWGTD stories, thank you very much. Blue skies, Winsor

In 1971 I was 17 years old, so the Army was the best deal in town. Not only was I allowed to jump, I was paid to do so. It was a rush then, and it's a rush now. I didn't go through Benning, however. I went through the course in Wiesbaden, Germany, and didn't make a jump in the US of A until 1978. All the way, Winsor

I have a real problem with the idea of "tolerance," not to mention judgemental attitudes. You don't tolerate something you find acceptable - you accept it. It is only when something is fundamentally unacceptable that one condescends to "tolerate" it. I find the sanctimonious nature of "tolerance" abhorrent, and I would rather leave my options to acceptable or unacceptable. You can have tolerable. I have had self-proclaimed religious people presume to pass judgement on me enough that I'm unimpressed with the whole thing. Much of what is passed off as holy strikes me as pretentious, if not downright preposterous. I don't drink, am asleep before the wet tee shirt contests (golly, breasts!) but have been know to utter the odd epithet if the occasion warrants. The Amish people who come out to DZs and have picnics are to my liking. They are pleasant and friendly, and don't foist their way of life on those outside their community. What people do behind closed doors is their business. If someone comes selling paradise insurance for when I bounce, they can keep their honeyed figs and I've had my share of virgins thank you very much. Blue skies, Winsor

It's been done. If you somehow expect to come across someone at a boogie that has is as yet unaware of religion, you're going to be sorely disappointed. If you want to keep it low key, cool. If you choose to be offensive and proselytize, you are cordially invited to rethink that decision. I won't stand up in a service and expound on the virtues of skydiving, so please don't stand up at a DZ and expound on the virtues of your particular True Way. If someone wants to go to church, I'm sure they could find one without looking too hard. Some of the people who don't go to church value being spared the experience. Blue skies, Winsor

I guess I do have a rig or two where the main is the bigger of the two. One has a Raven IV main and Raven III reserve. Another rig has matched 215 sq. ft. 7 cells - an Astrobe main and an Orion reserve. Generally I have the biggest reserve I can get my hands on. My EXTreme FX 99 is paired with a Raven 2 (218 sq. ft.). If I get kicked in the collarbone or otherwise have a hard time using both hands to flare, I want to be able to get as much nylon overhead as possible. Then again, that's just me. I've been hurt and didn't like it. Blue skies, Winsor

FWIW, to really get into the issues you raised would take the better part of a semester. Weight is the force on a object due to gravitational attraction. The short form is: W = mg though both weight and g are vector quantities and m, mass, is a scalar multiplier. The magnitude of g is a function of altitude, but we treat it as constant for the sake of simplicity. L/D is your lift to drag ratio. It is treated as a constant for a particular parachute, though it isn't really. Surface area is one factor in drag, and it isn't all that simple. We lump relevant factors together in ballistics and come up with a coefficient which relates speed to drag in a given flow regime (here we're talking way subsonic). The two objects dropped hit the ground at the same time only if they have the same ballistic coefficient and/or are dropped in a vacuum. All that says is that the magnitude of g (see above) is the same for both. In any event, I wouldn't ponder too greatly on these issues from a theoretical standpoint, unless you feel like undergoing a rigorous treatment of the subject. If you do, prepare to unlearn an awful lot. Blue skies, Winsor

Jumping into Italy, a guy named Washington failed to properly secure the lowering line on his rucksack. It draped over the end of a bench seat next to the door on the C-130, and he was being thumped against the fuselage as the next couple of guys went. The jumpmaster stuck his head out and saw Washington being dragged, so, thinking fast, he began to pull the unfortunate trooper back in. Unfortunately, he tried to do so by means of the static line. Miraculously, nobody was injured when the bench seat was ripped loose and dragged out the door. For what it's worth, the bulk of guys with whom I served would be rejected for enlistment these days. The average IQ was like room temperature, and these kind of bonehead incidents were the norm. Blue skies, Winsor

Of course it is! If your car has bald tires, bad brakes and you are taking it down the mountain on a road without guard rails to get more whiskey since you used all you had left to wash down a Quaalude, driving is much more dangerous. OTOH, skydiving is an activity which involves committing suicide repeatedly, and changing your mind at the last moment each time. You'd have to be a pretty lousy driver to have the same risk of horrific injury or death that is an unfortunate part of skydiving. I know a lot of people who drive all the time, but have lost way more friends to the sport than on the road. Like it or not, that's the way it is, and denial is a poor survival mechanism. Blue skies, Winsor

Keep in mind I am very new to this sport. The ink is still wet on my A-license. My thinking behind it is if, for whatever reason ( I know it should never happen) my hand slipped from my reserve handle, below 1000 ft I may not not have time to grab the handle again and deploy in time to land safely. I would think even a few hundred feet may make a difference. If I were below 1000 ft. I would do as I have seen recommended on these forums and deploy my reserve to get as much fabric over my head as possible then cutaway. Makes sense to me, anyway. If I am wrong let me know. I know there is a lot of difference in opinion even among experienced skydivers, and I like to hear all sides. I yank both simultaneously at a minimum, but by all means get rid of a spinning main. A personal downplane isn't just a possibility, it's a likelihood. Blue skies, Winsor

I'm a rigger. My gear is always in date. Blue skies, Winsor

I was on The Jet at Quincy in '95 or so when a student was finishing AFF on his second jump. He was a tunnel rat with many, many hours of tunnel time, and the transition to skydiving was almost an afterthought. He seemed to think that the airplane and parachute parts of the deal were novel and fun. His attitude was that if you've seen one column of air, you've seen them all. His instructor expressed awe at this kid's abilities in freefall, even though it had only been one jump so far. They may have been pulling my leg, but it was all said with a straight face and someone else on the load affirmed that it was strange but true. I don't have any particulars beyond the conversation on the way to altitude, which was interrupted by the student and his instructor going over the dive plan, so you can take it with a grain of salt. Blue skies, Winsor

Try this:http://dogyks.home.netcom.com/jumprun/jmprun~1.htm Blue skies, Winsor

When in whuffo mode I mostly shoot guns - skeet, trap, clays, and bullseye. For heavy caliber stuff (.45/70 pistol, .460 Weatherby, .50 BMG)I like to shoot things that justify the insane amounts of energy and achieve spectacular results. I handload for over 36 metallic calibers and 6 shotgun bores. Fishing I do by strapping on tanks, grabbing a speargun and getting the little bastards where they live. Screw drowning bait. Riding around on motorcycles (Wide Glide Shovelhead) and flying airplanes is for transportation rather than recreation. Bicycles, unicycles and rollerblades are mostly for transport, but riding horses is more for recreation. Skiing, water skiing, sailing and the like are fun. It's all a matter of availability. I also go through a couple of books a week. Left to my own devices, I'd rather skydive. Peace, Winsor

Anybody who wants to jump a PC is welcome to jump one of mine. I have a couple of PC-class canopies in Wonderhogs, with BOC throwouts and LoPo reserves. I have them on hand at Load Organizer Tent 3 (or whichever one they assign us) at the Convention. Blue skies, Winsor

Bernoulli's equation is one of conservation of energy along a streamline. It states that the amount of energy in a fluid - pressureXvolume potential, kinetic, and massXheight potential - stays constant, end of story. Most of the popular treatments of the subject ("Fizix Made Easy!") are classic cases of the blind leading the blind. The scientist did not prove that a bumblebee can't fly - a bumblebee proved that the scientist's model needed further development. Belief has no place in scientific investigation, and physics is not amenable to solution by quorum. The questions you asked were fundamentally flawed. Oh, and knowledge may not set you free, but ignorance can kill you deader than hell. Blue skies, Winsor

Until you have a horseshoe, in which case the difference can be that of life or death. If you have a closing loop failure or dislodged pin with a throwout, you have a horseshoe - and you have the rest of your life to clear it. With a pullout, you have a higher than usual opening. I jump pullouts preferentially, to include jumping camera with huge wings and with ellipticals that are sensitive to body position on opening. YMMV. Blue skies, Winsor

when you accelerate towards the earthe your acceleration will be substracted from G and when you descelerate it will be added. so you will weight less when you accelerate and more when you slow down. stan. Okay, from an F=ma standpoint I think I know what you mean, but I'm not sure what is the point of the exercise. If you are referring to the acceleration due to drag you experience in different flight regimes, you could rephrase it in normalized terms. For instance, you could say that stable freefall is one G, that your drag dropped to say 1/2 G when transitioning to a standup (and you accelerated downward at 1/2 G), or that the net lift component your drag and flight went to 3.5 Gs in the flare (so you accelerated upward at 2.5 Gs). Again, I'm not sure what is the particular significance of any of this, but it is only useful if the data relate to some coherent basis. Blue skies, Winsor

mmmm How did you manage to do that? The bug was flying at the perfect height at right angles to my direction of travel, coming from the left. I was going just slow enough and it was going just fast enough to clear the forks, tank and what have you and be in the way of my crotch. I saw it coming (BIG bug) in my peripheral vision, and wasn't able to do much about it before it happened. The pain was exquisite. Blue skies, Winsor

If he's the guy with 500 jumps in 24 hours, I certainly haven't outdone him yet. Blue skies, Winsor

I hit what I think was a duck at some 5,000 feet in an airplane. The windscreen on a Dash-8 is just about indestructible, but there was a LARGE splat mark, with a goodly portion of giblets smeared away from the point of impact. We had a Canada goose (might have been a Barent's - I can't tell them apart easily) that penetrated the leading edge of the wing and stuck in the spar, which is a really impressive amount of damage to sustain from airborne poultry. The closest I've come to a bird while skydiving was well over 1,000 feet under canopy. I nearly had a wrap with what looked like an golden eagle (it could have been a big mother hawk); we saw each other at about the same time, and it did some very startled-looking evasive maneuvers. All things being considered, I'm glad that most birds and bugs occupy lower altitudes. Having had a June bug hit a testicle while riding a motorcycle at 50 mph (I damned near crashed), I shudder to think of freefalling through a seagull at 120 mph. Blue skies, Winsor

I assume you mean Fred Leslie, PhD. IIRC he was on two shuttle missions. I love his T-shirt "why yes, in fact I AM a rocket scientist..." Blue skies, Winsor

If I do something stupid, I expect people to note "wow, that was stupid." If my actions are terminal, make that "wow, that was fatally stupid." If you're going to be dumb, you've gotta be tough. As is an autopsy, an incident report is no place to engage in denial for the sake of sensibilities. The truth may or may not set you free, but denial can kill you. The stakes are high every time you step out the door. Given the choice of hurting someone's feelings or having one more person get injured for lack of information, I'll chalk it up to minor shock therapy. I am much more concerned about losing more friends than I am about the odd turn of phrase. Also, I'd much rather be with people who can call them as they see them. Blue skies, Winsor

For a knot tied by someone who doesn't know how to tie knots, I find hemostats are handy. They're cheap, commonly available (WalMart sells them as fishing gear), give a good grip on any part of the knot you choose, and don't tend to damage the cord. A good knot to use that can be untied with bare hands is a stevedore knot. That's basically a figure-eight knot with an extra loop on the loaded side. A figure-eight knot is about the minimum for ease of field adjustment, and there are good reasons why a closing loop might be changed in the field. Ask a sailor or Boy Scout; either one should be able to show you some good basic knots. Blue skies, Winsor

Old age. Beware of permanent solutions to temporary problems. Blue skies, Winsor