DrewEckhardt

The economy tanked.

An Otter flown efficiently burns about 25 gallons a load, or 1.25 gallons a person. Assuming a current Jet-A price of $5 a gallon in bulk, fuel would need to break $15 a gallon to cause $40 jump tickets. You're going to have bigger problems if that happens.

It's not generally accepted. I could have thrown my entire first rig in the dumpster after 73 jumps and broken even financially with renting. Like most people I sold main and container+reserve as I grew into smaller gear and got most of my purchase price back. Used skydiving mains and rigs in resaonable condition depreciate about $1 a jump each. The other costs of gear ownership are reserve repacks (about $12.50/month in the US) and AAD ownership (about $12/month in depreciation and batteries/inspection cycle). This generally beats the $25/jump attached to gear rental in many places. You can get something suitable for your abilities now, put 100 jumps on the main, and eat $100 in depreciation when you downsize the main and another $100 for those jumps when you get to the end of the containers safe size range (often 3 sizes with a reserve container mounted closing loop; much less with a flap mounted closing loop). Having your own gear may also mean making more jumps and learning faster. By buying early, I was making up to five jumps a day on the same gear each time where my five jumps prior to that off student status were one at a time (AFF students paying $150-$250 got priority over graduates paying just $25 in gear rentals) using what was available. Obviously, your local situation will vary. If you suffer from testosterone poisoning you'll want smaller more exciting canopies to fly before that's prudent. After that's happened, you're proficient in all the common maneuvers, and you've made enough jumps you sell and buy something smaller. Male skydivers are often on their second or third rig and sixth or seventh canopy by the time they arrive at a combination they'll be happy with indefinitely. A typical progression spread over > 1000 jumps might be rig 1 lightly tapered 210/190/170; rig 2 lightly tapered 150/elliptical 150, 135, 120.

To chase a cutaway I got in my car, went 4-wheeling, jumped in a lake, swam to the middle, and retrieved the canopy. I told the jumper he should buy his cutaway beer for the DZ but wouldn't have accepted a tip. You gotta look out for each other. And buy your beer.

Neither. Sport touring (BMW RS, Triumph Sprint, Yamaha FJ1300. . Buell S3T and Ducatti ST are too small. The Honda is too portly). You get comfortable seating position with sufficient wind protection that you can ride 100 miles to the DZ doing 80-100 on the highway without getting tired, a big enough fuel tank to do 250 miles round trip, hard luggage so you can leave your rig+tent+sleeping bag outside when you grab a bite to eat (Givi 50L bags will hold a rig), and affordable (~$200/year) full coverage since it's a mature person's bike. Having made the mistake of owning a Hinkley Triumph (The triples sound nice, but I was not happy with the 8000 miles I got out of the first engine) I'd probably buy an FJ for the next one. 125 rear wheel horsepower with Japanese reliability.

Sure. There's no law that says you have to live in a suburban area where less money gets you a lot of house with it's own land. I've always lived a comfortable walking/biking distance from work, food, and entertainment. In a small expensive city prior to the housing bubble that meant owning a townhome instead of the a house; big expensive city renting a studio apartment; small really expensive city renting 1/3 of a triplex with $2000 in renovations to make it livable; etc. You can also use less gas. A $3000 brand new Vespa scooter gets 70 MPG. A used Insight does the same thing for more money but four doors. Bicycles work real well for trips of 2-15 miles. Racks, paniers, and trailers mean you can haul groceries, children, and pets.

Do you mean military size in terms of uniformed and non-uniformed personnal or in terms of major defense acquisition programs (MDAPs)? Or both? All of the above. We don't need the man power to defend this country. We don't need MDAPs for new vehicles that are of minimal utility against the guerillas we're most likely to be fighting. Redirecting spending into intelligence might limit the damage they cause (when we can't keep out 500,000 people a year out who mostly want to work menial jobs or millions of pounds of drugs, we're not going to stop people who want to die for their cause with their thousands of pounds of materiel)

So you're saying that we shouldn't concern ourselves with any waste that is less than $600 billion per year? No, but priorities would be good. Most people and media outlets get excited about little problems ($300M on a bridge to no where) while completely ignoring major problems.

I'm suggesting we trim back the military's size to what we need to defend a country of this size while keeping wages in line with what other first-world countries pay their soldiers. Canada has similar labor costs and square mileage, but seems to do fine on $20 billion a year (spending went way up in the years following 9/11). That's probably a lower limit. Maybe we need to spend twice that because we have populated countries on two borders instead of one. Heck, even spending only half the world's total military budget would save us 100,000 million a year.

You choose commuting by car over a smaller and/or shared home closer to work. I rented rooms or split rent on a town house in an expensive city through school and when I got my first job for less than half what I'd have spent on my own apartment. Lots of young people do that expensive places like San Francisco, Seattle, and New York earning far less than "middle class" wages. That's fine, but it's still a choice. You probably already have less moderately priced apartments that become reasonably priced when split 2-4 ways. Europeans have lower salaries but seem to do fine with the $35 jump tickets that would go with jet fuel doubling in price. Otters flown efficiently burn a bit over a gallon per load per jumper.

I wish! Gas is $4.53 to $4.69 a gallon where I'm at! I'm afraid that by the end of 08, we won't be skydiving much. $5.11 per gallon in Canada. (it was $1.35 per litre last weekend). this is getting ridiculous! Stop wining Gallon in Germany currently at $ 8.83 1. You don't have very far to drive. Your entire country is only as big as Montana (1 out of 50 US states). 2. Your population density allows for workable mass transit. You have 82,000,000 people in your country where Montana has just 922,000. I never had to rent a car when I travellened in Germany. Busses and trains were frequent and inexpensive. I've only been to one city in the US where I didn't need a rental car or hundreds of dollars in taxi fares.

Wow. Government waste just went up .002%. When you're spending three million million a year, $85M isn't even a rounding error. If you want to get upset you have to look at things like 600,000 million being spent on the military when the next biggest spender gets by on a bit over 1/10th that and some countries our size manage on 1/30th that budget (Canada. They even have oil that we covet)

It's been done, although it's more work to neatly stow the lines without bands of any sort. Tube stoes, calf castrators, silibands, etc. usually don't break. They wear out but you can replace them at your convienience (say last pack job of the day) when they start looking worn.

Batwings with the right different colored panels on the bottom (span-wise) and top (chord-wise) skins looked nice with light behind them.

You could move. I've always lived within a comfortable biking or walking distance of work. That usually means less space than living out in the boonies and can get a little expensive, but uses less gas than commuting by car, leaves more time for my family & hobbies, and is decidedly less stressful. I even sold a home in Kirkland when I went to work across lake Washington in Downtown Seattle. Lost $10K at the time but it was good to be out of the real estate market.

I've paid $40 in parking fees for leaving a 3500 pound car parked for a day extra. The storage fees on an 80-100,000 pound jet have to be attrocious.

Opening a base canopy at terminal, at 1000 feet, free packed show how little he knows about canopies. Sad. Sounds pretty conservative to me.

So how about a tech industry excessive profits tax? The tech industry's pre-tax profit margins exceed the oil industry's by far. Microsoft gouges consumers for TWO TO THREE TIMES what the oil companies do! Should we tax their excessive profits? Pre-tax profit margins among big players in the tech industry were Microsoft: 38.2% Google: 33.3% Intel: 24.2% versus these in the oil industry Exxon-Mobil : 18.6% Chevron: 15.3% Conoco-Phillps: 12.8%

$0 for the original poster who is not itemizing their deductions. Demolition Derby would definitely be a much more interesting way to get at least that sort of return. You could probably even get some value for scrap (engine, unbent axles...) after the fact.

The instrument panel altimeter gets set for altitude above sea level. Your altimeter is set for altitude above ground level where you plan to land. If you're not at a sea level DZ the two are likely to be different enough to matter.

Yeah, but it neglects population density and the resulting availability of fast public transportation. France is smaller than Texas yet has 62M people vs. 24M in Texas. Germany is about the size of Montana but has 82M people vs. 950 thousand in Montana. Some place like Amsterdam which got popular in the late 1400s before they had cars you have town homes 25-30' wide with no front yard and small back yards. Some place like Anaheim which got built around cars you have an average lot size of 1/5 acre. Most of America isn't dense enough to support public transportation so you have to drive long distances to live an average lifestyle. Much of Europe is so you don't have to drive often or go far. The five times I've been in Europe over the last fifteen years I didn't need a rental car. Every American trip I've made in the same time frame (except vacationing in downtown San Francisco) has meant a rental car or $100+ a day in cab fare. Europe was built around pedestrians and horse carts and had expensive gas for a long time. It's not a big deal. America was built around cars with an average gasoline price around $1.50 in current dollars. $4.32 gas (the average in California) is a big deal for people who bought into housing developments 20-35 minutes by car from the jobs.

They have the potential to be cheaper than those available today, but may not be. My company outsourced our benefits to another company, which gives individual employees choices as to what sort of health insurance we want including HSA + high deductible plans. Our high deductible plans increase the family deductible from about $1000 to $10000 while only reducing the payments $10s of dollars a month. Based on my medical costs I went for the moderate deductible plan with a use-it-or-loose it FSA. A universal not for profit government plan may be substantially less expensive. USPS will deliver a letter any where in the country door to door for $.42, while Fed Ex gets $7 for 3-day envelope delivery from California to Colorado.

Inexperienced people don't have experience landing in a variety of wind conditions and often make the wrong call on where to hold. It's a lot better when that wrong call means a longer walk or paying a farmer for crop damage instead of an ambulance ride because they flew into a building. When you don't designate, the jumpers who lack the experience to know what they can and can't do try for the tighter landing area close to packing and screw up leading to nicknames like "34B" (as in the hanger, not bust size) and "Ram Tough" (like the pickup truck). When you do designate, they screw up and have time to contemplate staying farther up wind during their long walk back. Here's a C license or better landing area. The prevailing winds are usually out of the east or west. Note the hangers, helipads, and runway surrounding it. This disregards the increased potential for conflicts with the unpredictable S-turnings used by less experienced jumpers to land where they want. An S-turning low jumper "having the right of way" isn't going to get them out of the morgue/hospital sooner when some one swoops into them.

Nope. Sizes sharing the first digit have the same reserve container size. The next two digits indicate main container size for that reserve (there isn't any absolute size - an R400 holds a bigger main than an R300). A 460 is built for a 170-180 reserve (Raven I, PDR176, etc) and 170 main. An "S" suffix indicates short, for a thicker but shorter main container. Here's the secret decoder ring: http://web.archive.org/web/20050307150002/http://www.tridenthc.com/ReflexSizes.htm I own a couple of R335 containers.

The Americans with Disabilities Act requires employers, businesses, etc. to make reasonable accomodations for people with disabilities, even where the disabilities are temporary. You definitely want to look into that.