PhreeZone

I fully believe the time to get stable time. There are a lot of people that only want to pull their reserve when they are flat and stable and not spinning again and that all takes time to enter into freefall, build up enough speed to gain control and then orient yourself to your belly and stop a spin. Look at how long it takes people jumping from a balloon to get perfectly stable after an unstable exit and that usually involves a ton of arm windmilling when they knew what was about to happen. Yesterday is history And tomorrow is a mystery Parachutemanuals.com

I think its a good starting point to increase professionalism and perceptions among outside parties. I spent this summer traveling to some DZ's and the experiences varied widely from what I could see. I went to DZ's that had a greeters at the door to meet the tandems and walk them through the process to ensure that customers knew where to go. I was at another DZ that had a small sign at the road that said Skydive with an arrowat the corner and left the customer to wonder up and down the road looking for the exact location to go let alone where to go once on property. A different DZ had no signs where manifest was, what customers needed to do and no one bothered to help me even as an experienced jumper know where to go to put my gear or where to fill out waivers. In most cases customers just wonder around until they saw someone else go somewhere and they followed the herd in essence. Initial impressions varied a lot from the experiences I saw. Some customers loved the whole process and others just looked lost. Some DZ's were happy sending customers to old, nasty bathrooms or porta-potties halfway across the airport and others seemed to at least clean the bathrooms but had issues like waste cans overflowing and leaky rusty fixtures. These all leave impressions on people that are spending $150-400 dollars with the business. If I was to go to an amusement park or Ski area and spend $100 for the day I would never want to return if I saw poor facilities that looked like no one had cleaned them in days. One DZ was so bad that my wife left the DZ to go into town to use the bathrooms at a store since it looked like no one had cleaned it in days. A lot of people that are instructors seem to forget that complete strangers are walking in, laying down several hundred dollars which is for a lot of people the majority of their excess money for a few weeks or month and trusting them for a skydive. They see the person as another $30 in their pocket and strive to push as many people through as possible to get money to live off of for the week and do not care about the customers experience. I was on a DZ where I have heard staff talking about "They got the groupon so I don't care what they think, they get what they pay for". Some thing that I think almost all DZ's are missing on right now is gathering feedback from their customers. I see a lot of DZ's sending out emails to their tandem customers as a marketing ploy to get them to do another jump and some are even asking simple questions about their experiences but I'm not seeing many do that same thing for their repeat experienced jumper base. Most will send out a newsletter or something but none that I have received from the dozen or so DZ's that I get mail from ever ask for things like "What events do you want to see happen, What changes to the facilities would you like to see, What type of organizers should we offer" and really trying to develop their experienced jumpers and have the jumpers feel like they have a stake in the DZ. Yesterday is history And tomorrow is a mystery Parachutemanuals.com

I put 1800 jumps on my container and had to replace all the hardware since despite never jumping in or near water, never having a beach landing and taking really great care of the rig the plating managed to flake off and it allowed the RW8 ring to develop rust where it was rubbing against the webbing. The rust eventually started to show signs that it was being absorbed into the tape so we ended up doing a reharness and put stainless on instead. Yesterday is history And tomorrow is a mystery Parachutemanuals.com

John, is that a FlameWheel? Yesterday is history And tomorrow is a mystery Parachutemanuals.com

Sure its a good replacement and can never be stolen... http://www.businessinsider.com/220-million-sheep-marketplace-bitcoin-theft-chase-2013-12 $220 Million worth of BitCoins have been stolen by one person http://www.theverge.com/2013/12/19/5183356/how-to-steal-bitcoin-in-three-easy-steps hundreds of wallets have been cleaned out in dozens of little thefts. Yesterday is history And tomorrow is a mystery Parachutemanuals.com

Weather is super cold but a few DZ's might be willing to get their Cessna out for a few people but thats about it. Nothing really that close to the city and the nearest tunnel is the one north of Boston. Yesterday is history And tomorrow is a mystery Parachutemanuals.com

Officially the rules on this site state you can only have one user name and any additional ones will be disabled unless approval from management is given for the newer name to be used. Did ya bother to read anything before just randomly deciding to change a username that you only had for less than a year to begin with? Yesterday is history And tomorrow is a mystery Parachutemanuals.com

This is being discussed in the Incidents forum. But yes, it was a double fatality. Yesterday is history And tomorrow is a mystery Parachutemanuals.com

You can fix the Yellow light of death for about $50 with lots of places or for about $100 you can pick up an old one off Craigslist. I picked up one that had a YLOD for $25, paid $50 to have it fixed and use it as a spare one. Yesterday is history And tomorrow is a mystery Parachutemanuals.com

This video is starting to make its rounds but its an important one to show that right from the start the skydive is staged to go poorly by telling the student to leave in a poor body position and then letting the skydive get to the point that you are in a drogue out side spin. http://youtu.be/p5QZEeQAl24?t=1m27s Yesterday is history And tomorrow is a mystery Parachutemanuals.com

The Sailrite's will not feed 5 cord if you are wanting to do actual harness work but they can push the needle through a few layers of parapack or a few layers of binding tape. Their biggest advantage is they can be ran with or without electricity which is why the sailing industry sells them, put them on a boat and you can fix your own sails if they rip. Yesterday is history And tomorrow is a mystery Parachutemanuals.com

Coming from a family that ran a gas station for 40 years there is some info that might help on understanding this more. Markups on fuel are minimal, it was averaging less than .10 cents a gallon most time. Where the money is made is the food, drink, servicing and other items that they get you for at a gas station. This is one of the reasons that so many gas stations are associated with stores is that they leverage the buying power to get higher margins elsewhere and just use cheap/free gas to pull you in and make the money outside the pump. Daily swings happen due to a few reasons, one was mentioned and its correct that it was a chance to make a few more cents if you were on the right side of the road to catch the morning/afternoon commuters so it is common to increase the price a few cents at the right time of day for that. If you were on the other side of the road you could leave prices low since to get people to fight traffic to get into/get out of your station was often times more trouble so they would skip it even if you were lower in price. Other factors that were impacting the daily swing is that the wholesaler in the area would call and notify that their prices are going up or down and the rest of the stations that purchased from that same supplier would get the same notice so they could either absorb the impact in their margin or they could adjust prices to keep their margin. Usually the fuel in the tank is sold on partial credit so only have its all sold is the money transferred to the reseller. This partial credit also means that you are also trying to figure out the margin needed to pay for the next shipment and what its prices are going to be at. In a given region there might only be 2-3 whole sellers but due to contractual requirements if you are a Phillips 66 you can only buy from X or if you are a Shell station you can only buy your fuel from Y supplier so that whole seller might have been able to get a commitment from a refinery when prices were on a downswing but if they gambled wrong they might have timed the market and bought their shipment at a peak for the day so the prices are higher. Quantity impacts price here also, smaller wholesalers are subject to more volatility in the market so that impacts their downstream customers but this is good since if they time it and buy at a low they have lower prices for a bit, time it wrong and prices spike. Same on demand, if demand is low the whole seller still needs to move the fuel so prices might drop and lose all margin just so they can get ready for the next shipment. Refineries also adjust prices as they change the formulation for the fuel blend that they are using. Summer and Winter blends are different and have different cost basis due to the amount of energy and effort put into making and transporting each type of fuel to the whole sellers. Yesterday is history And tomorrow is a mystery Parachutemanuals.com

They were looking basically for the same effort of ownership they would be getting out of an apartment but wanted to be in a detached home config. Yesterday is history And tomorrow is a mystery Parachutemanuals.com

We tried renting our house out and on paper it rented fast but the issue was that the renters wanted someone at the drop of a dime to be there to fix anything and to get a repair service to do that was an outrageous expense, I would do the work myself but they were trying to talk me into defined contractual times for repair, returned calls, number of times a month the lawn would be mowed, timeliness for snow removal etc and it was going to be things like 1 hour for work to start on most issues or they wanted to have rent reductions that would occur. Basically it was going to tie me to being within an hour of the house at all times and being at their beck and call. After looking around at comps we were not going to be able to get enough out of the rent and the fees to cover the mortgage so we just sold it at a loss rather than slowly bleed on it. An option to consider is Section 8 housing. It sucks for a lot of reasons but its guaranteed money in the back and they pay for damages to a point. You have to get into lower working class areas to be the right fit but if you can do it the potential is there to avoid a lot of issues since people with vouchers usually will try to do anything they can to avoid losing them and things like damages and missing their portion of the rent all is terms for eviction from the program. You can get extra money for things like having fans in every room and having the house properly storm proofed. Yesterday is history And tomorrow is a mystery Parachutemanuals.com

This does solve a few issues for contractors and special needs groups that need to do small cargo drops with extended ranges in a fast time frame. The ability to toss out radio beacons, life rafts and other small cargo has typically been limited to either near shore operations or by military aircraft only since they can refuel in air but the GV has a range of over 6600 miles so it provides a really long distance option that can get onsite much faster than a C130 that has a range of 2300 miles with out refueling. Yesterday is history And tomorrow is a mystery Parachutemanuals.com

It would be great to have a sortable filed of "experience level" for people that are submitting reviews of dropzones. I have been looking at some DZ's where the reviews are 99% tandems and its not helping me as an experienced jumper to know that someone ranked it as 5 stars since they "love their video from Joe!" I have seen on other sites where its a simple "New, some what experienced, extremely experienced, I wrote the book on this" type of selection that users select for their know knowledge level or experience level with a product so I can decide to filter out all the experience level that does not apply to me. Reverse logic can also be applied to the rational for this. As a potential tandem student I do not want to wade through reviews of people that are complaining about the manifesting system and policies since their experience level is different and they are reviewing different parts of the DZ that might not apply to my interest level and I only want to see what other students are saying. Yesterday is history And tomorrow is a mystery Parachutemanuals.com

That being said I would not expect many of the staff to be IBA rated for anything past level 1 or maybe level 2 so hopping on board and trying to learn Head down is probably not going to happen since they would not be trained up to that point from the sounds of it. Yesterday is history And tomorrow is a mystery Parachutemanuals.com

I would want to see the area up at the top of the photo that is out of frame to make that call to see how close to the edges it is. Yesterday is history And tomorrow is a mystery Parachutemanuals.com

For that article you also need to consider the Source. RT is owned/operated by the Russian State Media so its used to push a very pro-Russian agenda so its not surprising to see it predicting the doom of a western institution. Yesterday is history And tomorrow is a mystery Parachutemanuals.com

I think the current record is 12. Confirm with the USPA since last weekend at Work Stinks they made several attempts at 18ish ways and I am not sure if they succeeded or not.

List of sponsors looks pretty good! Yesterday is history And tomorrow is a mystery Parachutemanuals.com

The DZ is a High Volume Tandem op that did just about 10,000 tandems last year. This weekend is also going to be the busiest of the year since we have 4 planes flying so you might be on the Casa, Otter or one of the Caravans. Casa is a tailgate exit but the TI will walk you through any changes in the exits. The hanger is going to be extremely busy this weekend and they typically have extra packing set up to deal with the extra jumpers. Wonder around but be expecting 10X as many experienced jumpers as a normal weekend. Parking will probably also be in a different area so read the signs and stick around for the fireworks Saturday night since they do those rain or shine. Staff might be fewer this weekend since some will want to play instead of work so it might be much less time beforehand meeting (might meet them on the walk to the plane) them but that might be changed this year so play it by ear. Enjoy the weekend, I will be getting out there tomorrow I hope. Yesterday is history And tomorrow is a mystery Parachutemanuals.com

Yes, in this case we are going from a 2 Caravan DZ that uses one plane for tandems and one for everything else to a 4 plane (plus 2 helicopter) DZ with a lift capacity of around 270 slots an hour. With over 200 jumpers registered it is a little more than our typical weekend and it is not an atmosphere that most students feel comfortable in since in the middle of their landing field we park a tractor trailer and all the equipment for a 30 minute fireworks show.

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Check and see if student gear is even going to be available. In years past they have restricted the rental rigs to jumpers that have reserved it due to the high demand. Plans are for 4 planes to be running all weekend starting on Thursday so come on out and hang out but do not be surprised if the decision is made not to let non-licensed jumpers jump just due to the potentially high number of jumpers in the air and that the front landing area is going to be closed off for most jumpers so everyone will be landing in the student or the middle field. Yesterday is history And tomorrow is a mystery Parachutemanuals.com