DrewEckhardt

Here in the Pacific Northwest, there are days when they ONLY do hop-and-pop loads. There are a few 400' buildings just down the road from my apartment and sometimes the cloud ceiling doesn't even reach roof height.

The DZ where I jumped for over a decade would do one low pass per load at any altitude requested with pricing options for 4,500, 8,000 feet, and full-altitude regardless of aircraft - 206, King Air, or Otter. The DZ where I jump now only does low passes out of the 182s, $10 to board + $1/1000 feet, and it seems to take just 2 or 3 people to send the plane.

A 150 of any sort is too small as a first canopy for all but the tiniest people (like girls under 120 pounds) and even then a lot of them do better spending some time under a 170 because a lot of the control sensitivity comes from the canopy dimensions (chord, line length) and not the wing loading. Other people have commented on the Stiletto and pricing.

It's there from Englist tradition as codified in the English Bill of Rights of 1689 which recognizes that people have the right to self defense "That the subjects which are Protestants may have arms for their defence suitable to their conditions and as allowed by law;" with the Militia clause coming from the anti-federalists who believed that an armed populace is the only defense against a government becoming tyranical. John Dewitt wrote that the only protection against tytanny was "a well regulated militia, composed of the yeomanry of the country" where "regulated" in this context means trained in military affairs and properly functioning. Now that we have secret laws, people held without charges, political speech that's illegal outside designated protest zones, and local governments that use arms against people fleeing natural disasters we may have as much need for the second ammendment as in the late 1700s. Unfortunately, although technology has advanced enough people are no different now than they were then. Evil people still prey on the weak who can only protect themselves with arms. The laws do need to be updated though. In the 1700s, private citizens who could afford them had the same arms as the government including canon and warships. Without anti-tank weapons and explosives we're no longer at parity. The founding fathers were a radical lot. No twisting of their words is needed.

The armed victims should be in contact with the police dispatcher via cellular phone and should be able to drop their weapons before the police enter the room. Where that's failed, any one who drops their weapon once ordered to is a good guy. Any one who doesn't isn't. Some police officers (hopefully wearing body armor) might get shot figuring this out, but the police are being paid to protect the public at some risk to their own personal safety. According to the National Crime and Victimization surveys, victims chances of injury are lowest when they protect themselves with a firearm compared to unarmed resistance, resisting with another weapon, or complying with the attacker's wishes. The best way to protect yourself from criminals is to avoid situations where crime is likely. When you can't do that a firearm is the best way to protect yourself.

The type of arming of civilians you're contemplating would have to be a mass arming of civilians. One person who has time to get off shots before the bad guy shoots them would be enough. Given a couple of people as backups in case that happens and a class size of 25 students you're looking at arming just 12% of the adult population. 80,000,000 of us already own guns which is more than 25% of the entire US population. We don't need a massive increase in armed people; we just need those who already have guns to have them handy for more of their day.

I made my first (tandem) jump out of a 182 and then managed to avoid them for 1500 jumps. Did make a few week day hop-and-pops out of a turbo-charged U206 (weekend loads were all out of a King Air or Otter regardless of altitude), and tried to make a freefall jump from a non-turbo charged 206 but gave up on getting to full altitude after 8 or 9000 feet AGL (it didn't work well starting at 5000 feet MSL).

Whatever makes you comfortable. Without the legal requirement to pack a main parachute within 120 days of use, I'd repack mine if the D-bag had been taken out of the container. This includes loan of the rig and reserve repacks. Test jumps have been made on parachutes which were left in their containers for years.

It depends. To do hop-and-pops under lightly loaded canopy (with recurency training) a single jump will do it. To make successful freefly jumps and safely land a small high performance elliptical, 100 are too few.

It's not the gun laws, it's the culture. Yep, America has a sub-segment of their society that is violent. No doubt about it. To reinforce that "culture" idea, note that Japanese-Americans, with full access to all the firearms they want here in the U.S., murder each other at the same low rate as do the Japanese back home in Japan, where they have no access to guns at all. If easy access to guns was responsible for murder, then Japanese-Americans should commit murder at a higher rate than their fellow citizens back home in Japan. But they don't! This is further proof that a propensity to use guns for murder is caused by culture, rather than the mere availability of guns. But it's a lot easier to just blame guns, because no one wants to admit that there is something wrong with our culture, and actually do something about that. That would be too much work, and it might offend someone... Some doctors compared homicide rates between Seattle and Vancouver in the eighties to demonstrate that America's gun laws caused problems. Their actual statistics showed that white people in Seattle are no more likely to be murdered (6.2 per 100,000) than the same people in Vancouver (6.4). 10% of our population is black with a 36.6 per 100,000 murder rate versus .5% of theirs at 9.5 per 100,000.

As long as you didn't use tools to close the container the pilot chute is going to have enough drag to extract it at terminal. With a 135 in a container built for a 205 it falls out when you lean against the plane, the pack job compresses, and the closing loop loses the little tension it had.

A lot of people are under the impression that they have to own one motor vehicle for all their transportation needs even though they'd spend less money, have more fun driving, and less trouble parking if they drove a smaller vehicle and just rented when they needed the added capacity and/or range. For example when I need to haul drywall I can get a Home Depot pickup for a flat $19 per round trip without mileage charges. For more moving I can get a U-haul for $29 a day + $.40 a mile or whatever. I come out ahead financially as long as I'm doing a couple hundred miles of other driving for each of those trips. Unfortunately you're not betting on the technology's promise. You're betting on the executive teams' competance (being good at coming up with ideas and getting venture funding does not imply you'll be good at running a company) and how well their marketting will be received by the American public.

It's a matter of contention. Some of us believe that you should pull one handle or all three and not waste time trying to decide whether a high speed malfunction is a pilot chute in tow, bag lock, or something else. Other people believe that cutting away takes too much time. Of course, the timing is only critical once you've made the series of mistakes which ends with you being low with nothing out. Putting some thought into avoiding those situations and reassessing once you've found yourself low would be prudent.

32 people are dead and 29 wounded because none of the adult students or instructors had guns. The gunman even managed to shoot 21 out of 25 people in one class room.

Being able to deduct all moving expenses including temporary housing wouldn't make me rich, but it would send me on a really nice vacation. Being able to deduct losses on personal property sales would be nice too. As long as the IRS insists on getting paid when I sell something for more than I paid, they should let me make a deduction when it goes the other way.

One of skydive city's/The Ranch's otters (N128PM) also has the snub nose. The only explination I ever got from it was luggage storage. Do not know about floats or anything like that?[/repl] 100 series (through serial 115 out of 844) Otters and float planes had the original short nose; newer Otters on wheels get the long nose for extra bagage room (floats can have bagage compartments which would make that less necessary).

Yep. No cable, satellite, or over-the-air reception for the last five or six years. I cancelled my satellite subscription after realizing that while I really liked movies, I hadn't used it (including 10 channels of HBO) for nearly six months. We get Netflix instead - small doses of the best material from the last seventy years beat a round the clock stream of crap with commercials added. Repo Man, Hitchcock's Suspicion, and Forbidden Planet are all near the head of the queue.

A Super-Whatever is usually an after market upgrade of a stock-Whatever which gives it more powerful engines. Super Otters usually have the stock 550HP PT6A-20 or 680HP PT6A-27 engines replaced with 750HP PT6A-34 motors.

SkydiveAZ (eloy, AZ)- 3 Jumptown (orange, MA) - 1 Raeford (raeford, NC) - 1 Cross Keys (cross keys, NJ) - 1 CSS (louisburg, NC) - 2 (?) Skydive Dallas (Whitewright, TX) - 2 Skydive Spaceland (Rosharon, TX) - 1 Skydive Chicago (IL) - 2 Skydive Tecumseh (Michigan) - 1 Freefall Express (Ny, Fla) - 4 Perris (Ca) - 3 'snore (Ca) - 2 Taft (Ca) - 1 Lodi (Ca) - 1 Mile Hi (CO) - 1 Kapowsin Air Sports (WA) - 1 27 now

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DHC_6 Playing with the wikipedia numbers, we have 6 prototypes 109 series 100 115 series 200 614 series 300 844 total built http://aviation-safety.net/database/type/type-stat.php?type=182 Of which hull loss causes are 221 accidents 14 other occurences 6 unfiled occurences 2 criminal occurences excluding hikackings 12 hijackings leaving 589 twin otters Edit: there are only 243 hull losses, leaving 601 flying.

No. It's a conventional piggyback configuration like a modern skydiving rig. Extracting the reserve pull-out pilot chute disconnects the RSL thus allowing it to be deployed following a main total malfunction. Yes.

A total malfunction on a properly packed and maintained BASE rig is a lot more improbable than a line over or tension knots. If I had a Sorcerer I'd leave the reserve packed slider down even though I've been a high-pulling weenie on all 29 of my slider-up jumps. People with planned deployment altitudes too low to identify and deal with a high-speed malfunction (which a 170' cutaway after being under canopy suggests) would have even more reason to leave their Sorcerer reserve packed slider down. The question is purely hypothetical for me because I trust single canopy rigs enough, have more fun with my two tarps in separate rigs than one, and don't want to spend that much on a toy for the rare ocassional intentional cutaway. OTOH, compared to the costs of international travel and Jet Ranger hours even a brand new Sorcerer would be a bargain..... I gotta finish my work and GO HOME.

Gary Robb specializes in aircraft acicdent lawsuits. The airframe and power plant manufacturers could theoretically be responsible for failures in 30-40+ year old airplanes. Chances of discovering new design defects at this point are microscopically greater than zero. Those companies having much deeper pockets than the pilot and company that maintains the plane has nothing to do with it. The PT6 engines used on Otters also power King Airs, Porters, Caravans, Casas, Pacs, twin engined Bell helicopters (including the twin-Huey), and oodles of other aircraft. Sky Vans and a few turbine porters are the only common turbine skydiving planes that don't have a PT6. The engines are rated for a maximum sustained output, time between overhauls, and engine starts on various components. It doesn't matter how you get to those limits. I don't worry about any specific engine or aircraft type.

I have this huge mess of fobs, and cards for home, office, workshop, and storage facility. Sometimes I worry that having the whole mess hanging from my ignition switch is going to do bad things. Especially since German cars are NOTORIOUS for "minor" electrical problems. Push button start would avoid the whole issue. I also want my mirrors, seat adjustments, climate controls, and radio station to adjust when they recognize my fob.

Call up the accounting department and find out what it was for before deciding that it was a mistake, because decisions to make payments and letters explaining them come out of different parts of the company than the part that writes and mails checks. Example: I relocated for a company, left before the end of my first year, and remibursed them for my relocation expenses. A few months later I got a big check for the taxes they'd witheld which they would not be reporting on my year end W2. I'd just figured incorrectly that I'd be getting a really big refund from the IRS after the first of the year. I'd give them a call and discard it if I wasn't entitled to it.