Spizzzarko

Good luck and be carefull to all competitors! Grant

I think the Stilletto, and the Sabre2 135's are some great canopy's. PD really did a great job on making these. I have only put a few jumps on the Sabre2 135, and several hundred on stilletto's. Of all the stilletto's that I have jumped I really liked the 135 the best. It was an awesome canopy. Unfortunatly I see way to many people selling these canopy's and moving on to more advanced canopy's when they havn't really gotten all they could have out of their Stilletto's and Sabre2's.

I enjoyed seeing him fly that tiny stilletto into the hangar.

In hi stress situations people will revert back to the very first thing tought to them, if they do not calm down and think.

The USP is made by H&K. It's an awesome weapon. I have a USP .40 and a USP.45 neither are tacticle. The tacticle version has a threaded barrel for a suppressor, and raised sights for the suppressor too.

I must admit... You don't see that everyday.

And what aviation experience do you have to base this on, or are you just talking to hear your own voice like usual?

Mark say's there is no ZONE...

Do you use it?

OK Back on track... How about the HMA lines on canopy's? Precision has been using a non-cascaded HMA lineset for the past couple of years. It seems as if some people are using HMA to reduce drag in the swooping enviroment but these linesets are not lasting as long (150 jumps) as the Precision is saying their linesets last (500+). So what is the deal with the HMA

Dude, If you are loading a 150 at 2.0, then you must be like 300lbs with gear on. Is this true?

Screw you guys! I'm now in The Zone too! This is bullshit! boqwei

Why are you relying on a DYTER for altitude awareness? You should be using your altimeter, and your body clock.

In competition swooping, having a solid pattern is everything. Actually that's a huge point that I forgot to mention. Doing this will also make you more predictable to everyone else. I do the same thing every time, on every jump as far as the pattern goes. It becomes routine, but I find that if something doesn't feel right, then something is wrong. It's all about habit patterns. Grant

I would say the most important thing about the CPC is to go in with an open mind, and learn as much as possible. The second thing about CPC is to not Vert, and to NOT strike any coursemarkers. If you fly cleanly then you will be ahead of 50% of the competition. To learn this, Set up a 10' entry gate, and possibly make them a little narrower and shorter than what the rules call for. Fly through the gates on every jump. Do not miss a chance to hit gates. Move the gates daily, as you can get very used to the visual qlues if you just swoop the same thing everytime. There are some great beerline swoopers, but some of them suck at hitting gates. Most importantly you need to learn when NOT to go for the course or the gates. I have seen many many people push a bad setup, and put themselves and other people in jeopardy. If you are not comfortable with a setup, then abort. If you are going to have to fight traffic then abort. A good swooper can make the gates most of the time, a great swooper, knows when to not make the gates.

They give me shit because they all love me! I keep telling myself that.

hahahahaaaa Nice dude. I like the pictures. I'm glad you are doing that there now. Grant

Why do yall think your canopy is more sensitive at high speeds? Do you think it has to do with the wing loading? Here's my thoughts on it. Frist off the wing loading doesn't affect the sensitivety at high speeds. The sensitivity is caused by having a much faster airflow over your wing. With faster airflow over the wing, you need less input to achieve a desired effect. Now as you slow down you will need more input to achieve the same effect. Let's take a swoop for example. After you do your turn to final, you have a lot of speed. Have you noticed that you don't have to flare very much or very fast to get your canopy to plane out? It's because you have all this air speed flowing over your canopy. Now let us continue the swoop. The further we go the more we need to flare, to create enough lift to keep us off the gound. The more we are flaring the more we are slowing down. This makes us have to flare more or faster, than we did in the begining of the swoop. Do you understand that? Let's take an F-15 for example. If the F-15 used the same controll inputs at mach 2.5 as it did when it was taking off, the aircraft would be ripped to shreds. Now let's look back at the wing loading issue. Every canopy has an optimal wing loading. If you go beyond that wingloading, you will start to lose performance. When I say lose performance, I mean that the canopy will have to have more airflow over it to create enough lift to keeps it's load off the ground. Also it becomes more sensitive to controll input. Any wing can be stalled at any airspeed. The more it is loaded the easier it is to stall at a higher airspeed. I have a friend that Fly's a CHAOS 27 78' canopy. He loads it close to 3.0, and he lands with toggles. It's impressive to see him land, as he comes in very very very fast, but he doesn't get a very long swoop. Some one asked him why he doesn't land with rears, and he said it just stalls his canopy. Even though he is approaching mach speeds he can still stall the canopy at those speeds. Does this clear things up any? Grant

OOOOHHHHH You so funny GI!!! Actually that was pretty freakin funny! Swoop 402' on every jump and you are a decent swooper... Crash into a pond once, and you are labled an aquanaut for life.

Nah. The levels just getting higher and will continue to get higher. The reality is, that even in the 'standard' class, there's very little room for error anymore. I have seen the week become hero's here. Everyone seems to really step up to the plate, and bring their A game to these meets. I really think Ian is right, as there is so little room for error, that if you fuck up just once you are done for the day. Go back to the basics, and fly clean. Everything else will fall into place. Let everyone else take themselves out of the comp with silly errors. I bete there are many of us in this forum that have seen or have actually dropped many places in the ranking from round to round. It's not uncommon to go from 1st to 5th in the drop of a hat.

I was having a hard time at Rantoul last year. All of my turns were in the stratosphere, when I first got there. I figured it out after a while.

Ok, I'm beginning to understand the theory behind it now. Thanks for clarifying. Mark thanks for the advice too. As far as the weight goes, In our first CPC it came to the speed round, and I was sizing up the competition. Most of them had considerably smaller canopy's than I had, and I thought I was going to get blown out of the water. So I decided to grab a buddy's weight belt, to try and get some added power. Well it worked out. I brought my loading up to about 2.4 on the 103. I scored 2.45 seconds, and the next closest competitor scored 3.0 seconds on his 90 velo. I don't know what he was loaded at, but I know he was wearing some weight too. Another thing, was that I was able to fly the entire course on rears, and he either flew in toggles or had to tranfer a lot earlier. I think having the bigger wing helped me in that account. Mark, Are you flying the velo full time now? Did you have a few frustrations changing from the VX to the velo? At first I really didn't like the Velo compared to the VX, because I was used to the VX, but now I'm learning the velo more I really am liking it quite a bit. It seemed the Vx was easier to go far with, but it feels to me, if done properly, the velo will go much farther than the VX. Grant

You do your 270 at 700? I would have to whip one around pretty quickly up here from that altitude. 800-900 is more like what I have been using up here, for a slow long turn.

So he is MORTAL, and not a skygod after all!!! We all just thought he hatched with 2,000 jumps. hahaahaaa

You know there is something that I really want to know about. It's the climbing of your canopy to get more distance. We don't always see the latest and greatest here in Co. I would really like to know a little more about this technique. Also I would like to know more about what you gus think about using weight. I fly a 103, I weight 220 with gear, and I strap on 16 lbs for the speed rounds, (I get times of 2.5-2.3 seconds (2.5 being my slowest with out wind), my closest competition get's times of 3.0 seconds, and he's flying a 90 velo) but I havn't experemented with the weight on distance rounds. Have yall tried this or not for distance like the big boys do? Grant