DrewEckhardt

I checked my Stiletto 120 trim after 600 jumps (brake toggle lines replaced every 200 jumps, and lower steering lines after 500 or so). The outboard lines had shrunk up to 5-6", center cell A lines about 1.5".

Does it cover rental gear for the six months it can take to have a new rig built to your specifications? And vacation cancellation insurance? The equipment cost is only part of the problem.

I spent $700 for the last used rig (Javelin) + reserve (Raven) I bought (February 2005) and $40 for the last used altimeter (Altimaster-2, a couple years ago). The last main I sold went for $300 (Batwing, a couple years ago. The price is only a little on the low end for ZP squares pre-dating the move to tapered shapes). I doubt prices have gone up much. Protecs are cheap but not fashionable. I have a duffle bag which would fit my biggest rig (Javelin J7 built for student sized canopies). The smaller rigs (Reflex R335s, built for 150 main + reserves) fit into all of my carryons sized to the maximum allowed by the airline. Bags with rollers are NICE. Net cost $0. Don't skip the bag - you do NOT want your rig exposed to battery acid in the trunk, sunlight, spilled beer.... Getting jumping for less than $1000 might be difficult, $2000 is not unreasonable with a Cypres and custom jump suit, and you could hit $20K at the high end (three rigs is a useful number). Spending money on jumps and training will do more for your skydiving than paying more for gear.

Depends. There was an ugly power struggle in my last startup that I didn't want any part of, so I left after the cancelled my project and everyone else on my team who wasn't laid off quit. The state of Colorado decided that I left due to "unacceptable work conditions" and paid out. Depends. Here in Colorado there are time and money limits. They stop paying after you've hit some time interval (I want to say it was a year when I left) or reached the maximum benefit (which would have been 7 months in my case). Depends. Here in Colorado there's a $1 per earned $1 reduction in benefits. Consulting 6 hours a week was enough to make me inelligible for benefits.

If you go to the polls but don't vote Democrat or Republican, you're not voting for the president. If you go to the polls but don't live in a purple state, you're not voting for the president.

Compulsory service is slavery, whether for a private owner or the government.

Cars have gotten more efficient. Gas mileage has decreased because manufacturers are subject to both the laws of physics and free markets, where the consumers don't want vehicles where the physics are compatable with good gas mileage. Among other things fuel economy is a function of speed, frontal area, and mass. Limiting ourselves to 50 MPH instead of 75 would our losses from drag by over 65% but people don't want to drive that slow. A skinny car one adult wide (a second passenger could ride in back) would get great gas mileage, but people want cars that will seat 3 across. A 1500 lb car takes less energy to get up hills but people want 6000 pound SUVs because they're safer.

Because I don't like creeping arround at night, staying up past my bed time, or getting up before sunrise I'd prefer BASE jumping yahoos not do anything to encourage the closure of existing legal cliffs and bridges. While I like hiking sometimes it's good to be lazy. It's nice to get invited to use the inclined railway under the tallest suspension bridge in the US. It's nice to have permits to build landing areas in foreign national parks so I can hitch rides by helicopter instead of horseback. People being stupid make the organized events less likely. Idiots who jump in high winds and need to be medivaced by the Army make governments less likely to issue permits. Being invited to swoop the town fishing pond is fun. Not being allowed to jump into a huge field for my wedding because a jumper landed on a spectator doing a stadium demo on live television is not. Fortunately most skydiving is done at small general aviation airports away from the public so stupid skydivers have fewer opportunities to screw things up for the rest of us. Many skydiving operations have full time staff they can use to apply pressure when things are not going their way. There's enough tax revenue to keep city council out of things. BASE jumping usually doesn't have those protections.

Fried shrimp heads from ama ebi. Shrimp heads, shrimp heads Roly poly shrimp heads Shrimp heads, shrimp heads Eat them up, YUM!

I'm looking seriously about moving out there and began wondering about the weather Is it possible to skydive year-round in the pacific northwest? IOW, do clouds mean reduced altitude (hop-and-pops) or no skydiving?

Depends how much rentals cost. At $25 a jump I could have thrown my first rig in the trash after 68 jumps and come out ahead financially. If I sold at that point and taken the standard depreciation of $1/jump for main and container I'd have over $1500 more my pocket towards my next rig than if I'd been renting. It's hard to argue with those economics. Depends on how available rentals are. I don't think you can make reasonable progress learning to skydive if you're not making more than a couple of jumps a weekend because you're spending those jumps getting over being nervous. At my home DZ, AFF students got priority and I wouldn't have been making more than 1-2 jumps a day with rental equipment. Depends on what's available to rent. If I was renting I could have jumped a 295 Skymaster. Period. Down-sizing to a reasonable 1.0:1 wing loading would have been impossible on rental gear. If any of those describe the rental situation near you, you might want to buy the first reasonably priced used rig you find that's airworthy, has safe sized canopies (wing loading no more than 1.0 pounds/square foot, less if you're small, see Brian Germain's chart), fits you, and has a Cypres (or is at least Cypres ready). I bought my own gear and used it from jump 13 on (the first 5 after AFF had to be made on the DZ's gear). If you can have gear for $100 a month with unlimited jumps on whatever you want, you might as well rent until you figure out what you want and find something more ideal. You might get bored with your first canopy (even though you still have a lot to learn on it) and want to replace it (I bought a different main after ~75 jumps). Containers are often only good for 2 sizes less than what they were built for. That's fine - if you bought used, depreciation is usually $1/jump for the main, and the same for the container. It won't cost you anything to put some mileage on what's safe now. If you can shop arround before buying for a good deal and wait for the right buyer, you can even get back what you paid.

On-line pharmacies will forward prescription requests to MDs and fill them within 24 hours, the downside being they won't take insurance.

Are you sure of this? Positive. They sent mail to all four e-mail addresses appearing on my web pages which contain "skydiving" including one listed in the HTML comments (not used any place else in the world, not even visible if a human visits those web pages). Makes it easy to identify such messages as spam. They may not have looked at that page yet, may have looked at an old version, or your ISP may have filtered the spam.

I paid $850 for my first Cypres brand-new in 1998 and don't feel it's held its value that well. With a $60 trade-in and $140 4-year cost and $1200 purchase price a water resistant Cypres 2 that never needs a separate battery replcaement costs $118 a year. At $800 and $80 for batteries in 2 years an 8 year-old Cypres with fresh batteries and 8 year is going to cost $205 a year. That's not reasonable. If you figure that having a water proof AAD isn't worth anything, at $120 a year 120 * 4 + 60 (you'll get it back) - 80 (you'll replace the batteries once in 2 years) = $460 is not unreasonable for that Cypres with its 8 year and fresh batteries. $460 - $140 - $80 = $240 without.

Unless I wanted a cheap spare canopy and the price was right (under $350 with only a couple hundred jumps on the line set) I would not buy a sabre or Monacrh. Newer designs have more pleasant openings, slower stall speeds, and are more fun to fly. I would not buy a Tempo 150 made before 2001 to use for freefly because the older Tempos lack span-wise reinforcing tapes. One of the guys I know got knocked out on an AFF jump, his cypres fired, and his reserve separated into 2 and 5 cell pieces held together by the manufacturer's single reinforcing tape at the tail. PD reserves land better too, especially at higher wing loadings. $350 for the main (because if you shop arround you can get a better flying main for that), $300 for the reserve (not out-of-line for the age, they were only $550 new), maybe $500 for the old container. I wouldn't buy any AAD but a Cypres. $250 (needs 8 year + batteries) - $500 (8 year done with 2 years left on the batteries) would be reasonable for that. $1400 - $1650.

The flaming asswipe searched for web pages containing "skydiving" and sent mail to all of the e-mail addresses contained in those pages. Bounce all mail from anyone at argus-aad.com and don't worry about it.

Your friends current 1.6 lb/square foot wing loading is NOT low; it's still enough to get a 50 MPH swoop. Subjectively speaking, the effects of increasing wing loading are not linear. 1.6 to 1.8 is a much bigger jump than 1.4 to 1.6. Moving to a more radical planform at the same time makes things even sketchier. When I changed from my Batwing 134 @ 1.5 to a Stiletto 120 @ 1.7 the thing didn't even fly straight on landing (this was not the canopy's fault). Discovering that after you've skipped a size is NOT a good idea. Hundreds of jumps on a 150 square foot non-square platform adjusting his muscle memory to a non-square's inherent responsiveness before thinking about down-sizing would be a good idea for your friend. Wearing out at least one lineset (500-600 jumps) before each subsequent down-size would be a good idea, since it takes a few hundred jumps to get a canopy dialed in and you might as well enjoy it some after that. Your friend may also find a wing loading that works well enough for him - I think about 1.7 is plenty for me at 5000 feet MSL.

The maximum suspended weight isn't structural, it's a subjective limit on what works well. It may or not be reasonable depending on your perspective. The speed at which a wing stops providing enough lift to support your weight is dependant on the density altitude, shape, and wing loading. I think that at a 9000 foot denisity altitude (5000 foot MSL field elevation on a hot summer day) ZP squares start to get unacceptable (especially if you throw in a small tail wind) at 1.4-1.5 pounds/square foot, conventional ellipticals about 1.7, more modern ellipticals 1.9, and don't stay current enough to care about cross-braced canopies. Those numbers aren't too far off PD's Stilletto (1.7) and Katana (2.0) maximums. Spectres do better than sabres but worse than Stilettos, so I'd buy the 1.6 lb/square foot limit from PD. But at sea level, I'm pretty happy with a size smaller. As wing loading goes up, you need to be closer to perfect to get an acceptable landing. If you're going to need to approach in brakes, land down-wind, land on an uneven surface where you can't slide to a stop, etc. you might want to be more conservative. I would not recommend over .7 (not a typo) pounds/square foot for flying big F111 seven cells into tight landing areas, and definately prefer that to .8. Other people are more or less relaxed about what they'll accept on landing. Glide ratio also falls off when you overload a canopy.

If you choose to reproduce when you cannot procure sufficient food for your children they're going to starve. If you choose to drive a truck you're going to spend more on gasoline and have a harder time parking than if you used a smaller car. Obviously, buying the SUV hurts fewer people and is the lesser evil.

You need a suit because it's much more difficult to sit-fly with more drag on your legs than arms. You need to be able to sit-fly well even if you plan on staying head-down because it gives you a stable, straight-down body position fast enough that some one over you won't run into you and die when you come out of your head-down.

They don't. You see it on the news because it's exceedingly rare, shocking, and therefore good for ratings. Because law abiding postal customers have to leave their guns in the car and criminals know this.

Yes, you are incorrect. Federal law prohibits any modern firearm over .50 caliber, and has for some time. Federal law attaches a $200 transfer tax and mandatory registration to non-sporting firearms over .50 caliber. You can buy yourself a double chambered in .700 Nitro Express with no more paperwork than a Remington 700 although it won't go as easy on your wallet. If you can handle the hassle you can even have a 20mm Lahti anti-tank rifle.

It takes me 15 minutes to get from my house or office to the DZ and I can manifest by phone.

I always wanted to be an engineer and ended up in software. This makes me a fourth generation professional nerd: ny father is a chemical engineer, my grandfather was an electrical engineer, and my great grandfather was a a geophysicist.

One of the jumpers at our DZ did that. He got his chest strap re-routed, flipped over, ended up with two out when he pulled his main and the Cypres fired the reserve, and he got the whole thing on video.