mr2mk1g

Only by virtue of the apocalyptic postings of one 'Chuteless' can I not claim that this here is the nuttiest statement of certainty that I have seen on this site.

Yes mate... therein I had hoped, lay the humour of my comment.

Nope - only in America. The rest of the world writes their day/month dates the other way round.

or PM him on here: Stumpy

Of course the easy solution would have just been to tie the flaps shut with your pull up cord in a nice big bow...

You've jumped the gun on this by a significant margin.

does it come in red?

I doubt this was a skydiver. Not because of some brotherly bollocks but simply because this is a known scam mechanism and they simply do not give two shits about the auction goods, what they are, where they go, or what happens to them. They wanted the paypal money and that's it. As far as your canopy was concerned they wouldn't have given a damn where it went. On the flip side this fact does at least increase the chances of you finding the thing... even if it is only a little. Number 1 rule with e-bay/paypal.... it's not: "don't use ebay/paypal;" it's: "depart from their rules at your own risk".

http://www.dropzone.com/cgi-bin/forum/gforum.cgi?post=1183486#1183486 (see last post in thread for live link to video and post slightly higher up last page for link to UK Airprox Board report re incident).

Hehe, yup – I'll try to resist the temptation to play with any dead swans!

hehe... yeah... and guess where I'm flying this afternoon...

yup, see my first post

That could be because you generally take it mixed with a glass of water...

You're right john, that could be something that whichever manufactuer takes up the project might have to address. The LED system has already been done with one light in L&B's Optima. But more lights could be a way round the potential problem.

hehe, should be an e-bay add.

how so what? That waivers don't work here? Google UCTA1977 s2. Basically there's a law which says businesses cannot use any contract or notice to exclude liability for death or personal injury resulting from their negligence. There are often other ways round the issue of course but the situation in the UK is far from being analogous to that which exists in many US States.

1: don't build it into a helmet - put it into a self contained unit which is swappable from one helmet to the next. See Davelepka post for all the reasons why. 2: price it to match the high end audibles on the market such as the protrack style devices. 3: make it simple – it only needs to provide a visual altitude display, any other "useful" bits of info simply result in sensory overload. 4: if it can display an alti reliably enough it can also beep in the same way as an traditional audible with very little extra effort - that gives you somewhere to mount the body of the device too. Basically, if you were talking about a device which does exactly what the protrack does but with the display is on the end of a wire rather than on the face of the unit I don't see why it wouldn't be very popular and indeed, very useful. I see no voodoo in having the alti on your helmet rather than on your hand/wrist/chest – it just means you only have to move your eyes rather than your whole head/arm/hand to look at it. There may be some minor safety issues with it obscuring part of your vision, but those can be sufficiently mitigated through design (think small and transparent) – certainly to the point that it's no more obscuring than a ring-sight which many people jump. Snagability could also probably be reduced to the point of inconsequence with the right design. I think that when combined with a ring-sight it could potentially significantly increase safety for people like camera flyers who commonly find it difficult to use a traditional alti without having it enter shot. And how many freeflyers these days confess to never looking at their alti because they were using their arms in HD/sit? Indefensible yes; but people are doing it... such a device would remove their last possible excuse. In the end all you're really talking about is an L&B Optima, (or indeed original C&G Time Out), with a jazzed up visual display switched from a simple tally light to something with a digital/analogue display.

Kolomna, Russia - you can choose to pay extra and not sign the waiver... otherwise you can just pay their usual nominal membership fee and sign the waiver. ... I suspect this has something to do with a provision of the Russian legal system however rather than their disbelief in waivers. ... or just a way they thought they could make more money. Oh yeah - and all UK DZ's – waivers don't work here.

Ah, so it is. But that wasn't the site I first saw that shot. The site I saw it (which admittedly I now cannot say if it were Russian or Polish), was a DZ's own website and the shot was in their gallery. I belive there was another shot in the sequence with some guy jumping a broomstick too...

That appears to be what she's doing in the pic she posted.

90% sure I saw this on a Russian website a year or so back... so that would make sense.

Definitely require a degree of sag – you have me in complete agreement there. All we seem to see these days are ludicrously perky boobies which seem like afterthoughts plonked on after the body was finished (which sadly in many cases is exactly what has happened). Even where we see un-doctored boobies, those in the industry who choose which we get to see seem to have a penchant for selecting this crappy stuck on, motionless boobs with the nipple dead centre of a perfectly symmetrical lump. The best boobs are not perfectly symmetrical along both the X and Y axis, there should be a distinct top and bottom to a boob!

From the article: If something makes unsafe sex safe... doesn't it just become sex? I suspect however that the very same "critics" would still have a problem with it even if one day it did all become completely safe.

Crazy Mike, Beast Hands (female), Nick-the-Bastard, Kiddy Fiddler (surname = Fiddler), My Dad Says (due to repeated anecdotes beginning with the same), The Twins (one young lady), Michelin Mike / Mitch (because on his first jump he landed in the middle of a vast tyre dump situated at one end of his home DZ... the only student ever to have done so).

I think it represents a useful degree of flexibility in the system, especially given the importance of currency under canopy, (so long as they receive full training in the S/L specific malfunctions/exits of course). I take it the S/L jumps don't count a great deal towards their overall progression however? If during hard times a student can keep current at a cost of a couple of tens of dollars rather than a couple of hundred dollars they may well be able to stay in the sport and later graduate where they would have otherwise been unable to do so. On a side note - when I took my S/L instructors course a question was asked by another member of the cohort about conversion from the later stages of AFF to S/L training systems. The answer given was that the student would be grounded as being mentally unstable.