mr2mk1g

Honest question: is the cable housing not a standard item supplied to all (/many/most/several??) manufacturers from the same producer?

Be sure to discuss with your instructors how a 120 canopy loaded to 1 does not behave the same as a 190 canopy laoded to 1. Thats an important difference that many people overlook.

Doubt it - that's an established rational. Go take a look at some of the commentaries on the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs. An awful lot of them conclude that more lives would have been lost in a conventional invasion of the Islands.

I see exactly where you're coming from hook... but I have quite a different take on the question. I participated in the thread which obviously spawned this one and was interested to see the answers given by egons who was evidently heavily involved in the testing of the skyhook. My question in that thread, I’m sure you remember, was essentially with regard to the safest course of action at 500ft with and without a skyhook when you find your canopy suddenly becomes unlandable. Ok, so my drill is at that height I fire my reserve into the mess and take my chances, just as you have stated. That’s the risk I accept every time I step out of a plane. The reserve might inflate enough to land me safely. It might get choked off and I might die on impact. It might get choked off but provide enough drag to save my life albeit with a bit of a hospital stay. Those are the risks I take and I acknowledge them or I wouldn’t be in the sport. Now what if I have a skyhook? Does that piece of equipment cause the odds to sway in a different way in that very specific niche situation? Are your odds of survival now better if instead of simply firing your reserve off into the mal and clenching your butt cheeks, you cutaway and the skyhook has an open reserve in 100-200 ft say? Ok, you're still taking a risk – the risk this time is that the skyhook will not work, and you’ll fall to your death with nothing out at all. Or hell perhaps chaos theory prevails and you still end up with some kind of two out mess. Should you take that choice, those would be the risks you accept, just as in the first scenario. This is not a question of taking a new safety device and using it as an excuse to allow oneself to participate in more dangerous activities or do more dangerous things; the question is whether or not this new safety device actually means carrying out the old drill is the more dangerous activity. Now the answer given by egons, (rightly couched in terms of what he would do as opposed to actual advice) was that at 500ft with a skyhook equipped rig he considered the least risky course of action was to cut away and take the risks associated with the failure of the skyhook. The other possible action of course would to not cut away and simply fire the reserve into the mess and take the risks associated with a reserve deploying past a malfunctioning main. Egons it would appear, considered this action to be a more dangerous choice (for him at least). I realize this specific question doesn’t carry so much weight with you as your stated minimum cutaway altitude is 500ft in any event, but it is of great interest to me and I'm sure many others. For me I have a simple scenario: 500ft, no skyhook, don't cutaway and take my chances. But then what if I'm on a skyhook equipped rig? What actions have the greatest chance of getting me to the ground alive and able bodied? Now I'm looking at this from an impartial position. I don't have a skyhook, nor do I have any intention of buying another new rig in the near future. I don't have to cross this decision bridge yet so this is all just a mental exercise for me. But for some this question could be the difference between walking away from a freak mal with a "no shit there I was" story and being carried off by the county coroner. I still wonder what the answer is. What's the safest course of action? Egons, a guy who’s been heavily involved in the development of the skyhook, thinks he would take his chances with it. You evidently consider that choice is simply an excuse to do something more dangerous based on the fact that he has a new toy in his rig; as opposed to a considered decision based on where the relative risks lie for his particular gear set up. You're both highly experienced jumpers; I'm still not sure what the answer is. I entirely agree that doing something more dangerous based on the safety features of one's gear is tantamount to risk homeostasis and is a very bad thing. I just can't quite see how that principal applies in this one specific situation though - surely staying with the old procedure would be risk homeostasis as that would be the mechanism by which one would maintain the old level of risk. The skyhook in this situation would appear, in the estimation of some at least, to offer a lower level of risk in this specific situation and therefore it ought to be seen not as risk homeostasis (bad) but risk mitigation (good).

I think it was an excellent program. Sure it was geared to whuffos and took an hour to actually get to the point (which we could have reached here in about 5 mins) but for once it actually examined all the correct points and came to roughly the correct conclusion. They stuck the girl in a wind tunnel and figured her terminal velocity was about 140 in the position the doc reckoned she impacted in (presumed from her injuries). They then accounted for the drag of her reserve after it was choked off by her cutaway main (that’s the mal she ended up with... no mention of why it happened although it was clear she was a static line student on 5 sec delays). The "science guy" at the wind tunnel (horizontal) used an arbitrary figure of about 1 square meter of fabric for the amount o material above her. From that figure he calculated her impact speed was approx 40mph. (although they also calculated it based on ½ square meter and a impact speed of about 70mph). Now I have no idea how bad the mal was, but 1 square meter seems like not a lot of surface area for two canopies – even badly wound up. Anyway, they actually went through all the relevant data and the show didn’t turn into one of those “oh my god she’s plummeting to her death” show’s. They even went through the physics of a PLF and showed some nice graphs of the forces involved (although I think the PLF was more like some guy landing on his feet then a second later falling over…).

Since the beginning of what? It's only the last 100 years or so that the US has actually had the capacity to do anything like respond with overwhelming force against a great many of the worlds nations.

[mexican] "Hell no Pepe - I'm not trying to get into America again. Last time mi amigo's and me tried that those pinche Gringo's sent planes to bomb me. I barely got home alive. No way cabron, those border patrols are getting too hot for me man." [/mexican]

The shoe bomber - he tried to blow up a plane with a shoe filled with explosives but failed partly because his feet were real sweaty and partly because a French guy held him down. That last bit probably pissed the Yanks off more than the fact that he tried it in the first place.

yes hell you don't even have to get hit to have been assaulted.

Best practice is what's best for the situation given the limitations of the gear you're using. Best practice used to be pull on the Jesus cord if nothing was happening. Best practice used to be hand deploy your reserve in the opposite direction to the spin, without cutting away. Gear changes. I honestly don't know what "best practice" is when you have a trashed main canopy at 500ft and a skyhook. On my non skyhook rig it’s dump my reserve into the mess and hope it works. What if the less dangerous choice on a skyhook equipped rig is to cutaway? Surely if it was that would change "best practice". In fact - does the community actually know yet? Has the skyhook even been around long enough for us to come up with a "best practice" for rigs equipped with it? Following "best practice" for a rig without a skyhook when you do actually have one could be just as lethal as deciding to following best practice for gear with a belly wart and shot and a halfs. Either way you're failing to take into account the gear on your back when you decide what "best practice" is applicable.

I certainly wouldn't disagree with you there. It's just the question posed in this thread is essentially; "does the skyhook have the potential to change 'best practice' for some circumstances?"

y'a know the old adage about just knowing when it's time for a slow clap?

Are you seriously suggesting that such events don't occur or are not to be of concern to people? My very first post on this forum relates to an incident 2 years ago involving friends and a low canopy collision. One person’s dead and the other's never going to walk properly again. Canopy collisions are not something we should ignore, even if they ought to be preventable in an ideal world. Maybe the industry can provide safety equipment that will help mitigate the danger of such events. Maybe the skyhook is one such item. Maybe we should consider if the use of such an item might save lives under such circumstances instead of simply burying our heads in the sand saying – well I’ve not seen it in 5 years therefore it’s not going to kill me. All anyone can do is play the odds game once their canopy is wrecked at less than 1000ft. The question here is how do those odds lie – do you have a better chance of survival if you just dump out your reserve into the spinning mess at 500ft or do you have a better chance of survival if you cut away with a sky hook? How is simply examining those odds a bad thing?

hehe, no I meant that for a short while, the prime meridian was considered to run through Paris. Oddly enough, the concession that the world would accept Greenwich as the prime meridian was made in an attempt to get us Brits to use metric instead of our imperial system.

To be fair, the BPA are consistent in what they recomend... its the DZ's that aren't. If DZ's wish to either ignore or better the BPA's recomendation I guess they're only recomendations. On the other hand the BPA can't make DZ's accept a lower requirement if the DZ wants to be more stringent. How about blue skys - we could do with a few more of them.

http://www.dropzone.com/cgi-bin/forum/gforum.cgi?post=1519425#1519425 edit - damnit - change [_quote_] to [_url_]

I would be surprised if your employer would fire you for not coming in if it is a bona-fide union and a legal strike. If you’re not union though there may be an issue. I dare not comment on the specifics though so please seek advice on this particular situation... but I would say it's unlikely if you’re union.

For a short while though it was Paris

Statistically the President is far safer amongst foreigners - it's generally only US citizens who have tried and succeeded to kill the POTUS.

I think the Red Dwarf Cat-People episode is a great example. The cat people arose from the pregnant Cat Frankenstein Lister hid in his laundry before being put into stasis. They evolved a religion based on the stories Lister used to tell Frankenstein about how he dreamed of opening a burger bar on Fiji, deifying Lister as “Cloister”. After millennia of evolution the cat people were finally destroyed by wars between two factions of this one religion – one side believing that the little paper hats to be used in the burger bar would be blue, the other red. (Lister lamented on this fact as they were in fact to be green). Finally, after many years of war, each faction set out from Red Dwarf in giant arks in search of the Promised Land – Fushal. One ark was almost immediately destroyed when the occupants made use of a sacred text handed down by Cloister himself as directions to the promised land. This text was in fact Lister’s laundry list. Whilst this was of course merely a geniusly funny act of comedy, I feel it provides a nice little commentary on humanity and religion. No matter what way you look at it (from the atheist or theist point of view), mankind will always pervert the true meaning of things and find reasons to kill each other and argue over the trivial detail. How different is an argument over the colour of paper hats in the promised land to an argument over whether our churches are to be gordy and decorated or plane and somber? Both have killed thousands (ie in the Cat world and in humanities centuries of strife between protestant and catholic) At the end of the day, whether religion is a figment of our imagination, or truly a work of the divine, we will always find ways to fuck things up and turn it into a reason to kill one another. (and yes I do now feel sad for being able to recite the entire plot of a single episode of Red Dwarf)

Sounds like you get an A4 plastic magnifying lens and plans to build a box holding it in front of your TV screen. Overall I think it looks like his customers are happy with the effect... those that never expected to see a full blown projector turn up in the post for £4.50 of course. Also appears to be a degree of home construction involved in the "box". The guys feedback profile is quite funny though. Here's some quotes from the pages I flicked through, all about the lens:

My first thought was that it was obvious - he must have been an Arab! But from the second article we see I was close but get no cigar: So it is obvious then... He was a foreigner!

That's not what I've been led to believe. I was under the impression that this was to be effective from the begining of this financial year... although I've yet to go to the DZ so can't confirm this. I certainly hope we don't have to wait another year before this comes in.

so I'm dyslexic

My first few posts were all in relation to 3 different fatalities involving either friends or my home DZ.