DrewEckhardt

With a moderate tail wind you'll go farthest when you pull the brakes down as far as they'll go without your glide path getting steeper. Many modern skydiving canopies don't loose glide ratio until they're on the verge of stalling. So more brakes may have gotten you back. With a faster tail wind the canopy's glide ratio is less relevant. Maintaining the minimum sink rate and staying in the wind longer will take you farther.

It means that you don't think it's worth spending the money it takes to avoid the added risk. I keep a Cypres in my main rig - when it needed maintenance I repacked my birdman and main rigs and put my second Cypres into my main rig. I own one for the birdman rig I flock with, haven't been doing that lately, and will wait to put it back in until I repack that. I also have a big rig for jumping BASE canopies out of airplanes. It doesn't get used for relative jumps where altitude awareness loss is most likely, a Cypres wouldn't fire where that happened on a birdman jump, and the rest of my jumps on it are all hop-and-pops. I wouldn't buy one for me but have been more careful than I otherwise would for my fiancee's sake and might put one in for that reason.

The skydiving main malfunction rate is about 1 in 600 including twitchy elliptical canopies combined with trim problems and people who neglect to fly through the openings. You're less likely to have a malfunction. If you manage to get a hundred or three square feet of nylon into the 120 MPH breeze it's going to open. Although I've seen people mis-route bridles arround flaps such that they'd have a total malfunction if they jumped that's pretty hard to do with a little instruction. You could also pack a bag-lock but as long as your sloppy stows aren't too long that's not going to happen. Sub-optimal skydiving main pack jobs are more likely to cause line burns on the canopy (an expensive piece of equipment) or uncomfortable openings If I wasn't comfortable I'd repack it. The repack will probably have no effect on the parachute's reliability. It will make you more comfortable which means you'll perform better on your next jump.

No. Do we have a DZ name at which we should keep our eyes open? Do we have any suspicious individuals or activities to look for? Do we have rig descriptions and serial numbers to watch for? Has some one suggested the owners file police reports and make insurance claims (requires a case number)? Has some one suggested the owners look at nearby pawn shops and on ebay? Tandem passengers and their friends who don't read dropzone.com often out number the skydivers at drop zones.

So you know what it feels like and can therefore avoid it. So that it doesn't scare you. So that you know the slow flight limits. So that you know how to recover smoothly. In some situations with some canopies you want to be able to do it and fly backwards. It's worth noting here that stall speeds are different for dynamic (you pull on the toggles or rear risers quickly) and static (you gradually apply control input without swinging out in front of the canopy and causing a pitch change) situations. That's usually not the best way to land a modern parachute. Flown correctly at the end you'll have some lift but not enough to support your weight. You can stop flying at a slower speed if you take some of the load on your feet. You'll set down with less vertical speed when the wing is producing some lift versus having no lift when it stalls. The converse of this is trying to run before that happens - I did that last weekend, judo rolled, and ended up with all my white covered in dirt. This is much less critical on larger, slower parachutes. It's not a big deal if you recover smoothly. It's definately better than stalling accidentally when trying to land or stalling and then surging forwards.

Note that the manufacturer can install a new harness on a used rig for hundreds of dollars. You may be better off financially buying a used container with a new harness instead of a new container with your sized harness.

I get a lot of joy jumping from cliffs in the 300-400' range and when the approach/landing area is tight. I started that way at the legal span in Idaho although now it's in the same league as a nice swoop or tree run on a snowboard.

There's no truth to that. I haven't jumped a ZP canopy that wouldn't land with zero vertical speed. Larger F111 canopies of any cell count don't seem to reach zero vertical speed on straight-in landings but land fine if they're not jumped out. Smaller PD reserves land fine too.

Less fabric makes it a little easier to get the sides arround the pack job without moving anything - so I like to make my first S-fold, close the sides (velcro) or top and top sides (pin), make the last fold, insert the remaining fabric from the bottom, and then close the bottom. On my velcro rig I have to be careful to avoid peeling the shrivel flap. On my pin rig everything stays parked. Apart from that minor difference closing difficulty is the same. Sub-optimal shape of the pack-job and/or top fold placement on my velcro rig means that by rolling my shoulders in I can get velcro peeling noises and a slight spread of the velcro at the top. My pin rig doesn't suffer from that and it takes greater variation in pack jobs to change the top pin tension. This was more of an issue when I started packing. I wouldn't buy a new velcro rig but don't regret buying a used one as an inexpensive first rig and won't go through the trouble of replacing it with another pin rig.

4 or 5 jumps. At my home DZ's gear rental rate ($25/jump) I could have thrown my first rig in the trash after 70 jumps and come out ahead financially.

I liked the big mexican rock so much in 2003 that I'm headed back down this weekend. The last time the landing area with trees and hill on all four sides was a bit exciting for my tastes. So for the last few weeks I've been doing accuracy out of airplanes with my Fox and Dagger.

For a couple years I used two-wheeled transportation exclusively and had no minimum temperature. I usually managed to avoid snow and ice problems by riding a bicycle with cyclocross tires. Failure to avoid precipitation led to some interesting situations. When you combine the wrong temperatures with a little precipitation it gets on the ground and freezes. Getting out of the parking lot on the ice sheet becomes impossible. When you give up and leave the bike in a low spot, the ice melts, water ends up there, and reefreezes. I had to get a hammer, chip the ice out, and get a couple strong guys to lift it over the rest of the ice. While coming back from a boogie it started snowing. No big deal. It got heavy so I was continually wiping my visor off. No big deal. I then ended up in white out conditions with snow stuck to the ground. Big deal. I pulled over, hitched a ride, got a taxi, and checked into a hotel room for one night. If I had any youthful enthusiasm left I'd be a GS rider.

Nope. With state taxes and business expenses I'm already itemizing. Every dollar I pay in interest and non-federal taxes cuts my bills by a total of $.33 from the feds and state . So my post-tax income impact is 51753 not 77782. I need just 279275 to break even. Lets assume that I'm lazy and don't do a FSBO. So I need to sell for $295842 to break even. The national average housing appreciation is 5.56%, or 39% over 5 years. That gets me $347,500. I do $51K better than I did by investing. I prefer living in fun places. Fun places mean hot real estate markets. My property has appreciated 60% in five years. $250000 * 1.6 = $400,000. So in this market I net $104K. Other hot markets are also in the double digit range. The lowest appreciation rate is 2.14%, or 11% over 5 years to 277500. If I lacked the sense to live someplace fun I'd have lost just $2K. This also ignores the effect of rent increases. My property was a rental before I moved in for about $1100 a month. In nice shape it could rent for about $1500 today. With similar rent increases your $1352 would increase to $1844/month. I'd have paid $15K more in rent increasing my win to $119K in my market. Using numbers for other markets are left as an exercise for the reader. In a high-traffic area I'd do a FSBO. Pay maybe $350 for a real-estate lawyer and $650 to get an MLS listing and showing service. That would inrease my take $10200 in my market for $129K in gains. In an average market I'd get another $8730. In the worst market I'd make $6770 more which would make me positive even if rents were stable. Of course the first $250K of capital gains ($500K for married couples!) on your primary home is untaxed. If your quoted 6% return is purely capital gains I'd be getting just 5.1% in post-tax money. 6% in purely interest would be returning just 4% post-tax. Buying a home is usually a huge win. Paying it off faster may not be if you're good at picking mutual funds.

When we started skydiving I wasn't aware of any hook turn training beyond a satirical piece about driving pickups at 40MPH and jumping out the back. No one really talked about the mechanics of black death hook turns. Many of us just figured out parts of it on our own. Many of us just cranked on a riser at what looked like the right altitude. When we were wrong we just added extra toggle. "The right altitude" was correct for exactly one parachute, one wing loading, and one altitude. Too little toggle too late following a mistake was bad. Too much popped you up and dumped you. It's amazing more of us didn't get hurt worse. The survivors figured out that an interactive carving approach gave a lot of lattitude in the starting altitude/position AND let you carry more speed. Classes teaching this showed up. Local drop zones flew in the experts. People actually attended those classes.

Realtors(TM) acting as buyer's and seller's agents usually each get 2.8 - 3% of the purchase price. You should be able to knock this off the price by doing away with one or both of them. A real estate lawyer can handle the paper work on either side for a few hundred dollars. Various companies can provide MLS access and a showing service which gives licensed realtors a seller's lock box code.

Had Compared to a dog or cat they're less affectionate and are much worse chewing ellectrical cords, wall paper, and carpet. Mine was less cudly than my cat too. Some. Litter box training is not hard. Yes.

Pick work without worying about money (maybe speed startups; I'd go insane without the mental stimulation), move two miles from my town home into a detached house with quieter neighbors and a chef's apartment, hire a gourmet chef, stop travelling comercially, heli-board more, and take care of the one irrational material desire (993 turbo) I'd otherwise forgo to save more money.

"free" is marketting speak which means the company generates more revenue directly from the offers you and your "friends" accept than they would selling the item directly to you. It also means their advertising reaches people who wouldn't otherwise see it, often taking the form of spam.

Sure. I felt complete and was often very happy with life before meeting my soul mate. I'm not sure how long that would be though - I did nearly everything I wanted to before my 30th birthday and would have rather been done by 40 (much sooner when things were crappy).

While I'm counting on my 401K and other investments to fund my retirement, I'd be very happy with payroll tax diversion into private accounts especially when we can make dangerous investments like 5-year fixed rate CDs. Provided that in the next 38 years the government increases benefits at the rate of inflation, doesn't increase the retirement age for full benefits, doesn't increase the wage cap faster than inflation, and doesn't decrease benefits for people that spent less and saved more before retirement (like working couples that give up the luxuries you could buy with $19K a year in favor of putting the $28K legal limit into their 401Ks) I'll need to survive nine years beyond my statistically expected life span to get out what I put in. With my Social security savings going into a private account I or my heirs will be insulated from government policy changes and will have all the money if aged steaks marbled with fat kill me early or the government decides that frugal living made me too rich to take the full benefit. With inflation at 3% and my bank paying 4.2% on CDs, I'll come out ahead with 25% more if I can make that dangerous investment with pre-tax dollars. The stock market as a whole does much better averaging 5-7% after inflation including sore points like the great depression and crash in the 80s. At those rates my money would be doubling every 10-14 years and yield 3-5X what I'd get from Social Security. A month long 40% loss like in the great depression close to retirement would reduce my gains to a mere 180% - 300% of what Social Security would pay me. Social Security is a horrible retirement plan. It does provide a useful safety net for the disabled, widowed non-working spouses, working poor who can't save for retirement, and fiscally irresonsible. This is a separate issue which should exist as a budget item in the expenses column without the regressive tax and creative accounting that goes with the current system. Depending on how you define working class and wealthy, the current system comes with a regressive tax where working class salaries are hit with a marginal tax rate up to 12.4% higher than wealthy people's salaries. This tax rate is up to 27% higher than the wealthy are paying on other income. Ludicrous. Under the current system, the budget deficit is reduced on paper by Social Security revenues exceeding its current obligations. We don't have honesty in accounting. Social Security needs an over-haul where the retirement savings plan is separated from the rest. We need to do away with the regressive payroll tax. We need to close the accounting loophole. Doing all that at once is not politically viable. A payroll tax diversion to private accounts is a good first step to reduce the working class burden, increase retirement savings, and protect people from government policy changes. While I trust Bush 43 less than a used car salesman and question the motives behind his implementation, the basic idea is wonderful.

When you want to play with parachutes, opening right out the door gives you much more time tha you'd get if you mixed freefall into the equation. Getting your own low pass with like minded people also means the landing area will be less crowded. Otherwise people open as low as practical. There are technical limits - if you have a main that snivels for a long time you don't want to risk snivelling past AAD firing altitude if you pull a bit lower than planned. IIRC USPA recommends an 1800 foot cutaway decision altitude - you can add how far it takes to open on top of that, a little padding, and have a opening altitude. There are traffic concerns - if you open higher you have more time to let other people land so you have more room. Conversely if your group is out first you may be better off opening lower and beating everyone down. Spotting at some dropzones is bad and opening higher may mean the difference between walking to the hanger or climbing fences and hitching rides. How much housekeeping you need to deal with on opening and the potential for time consuming problems can be an issue - with four zippers, legs that need to be stowed, a greater likelyhood of problems, and more trouble dealing with line twists wingsuit pilots often like to open at 4000-4500 feet. With a lot of traffic, slow opening canopy, and potential for a bad spot 3000' is a nice minimum. With no traffic, a quick opening canopy, and large canopy that will be more affected by winds the 2000' BSR minimum is better. If the parachute opens real fast and you're doing a hop-and-pop, your body will have less wear and tear if you open out the door whetever that is - 2500 or 4500 feet.

That's hunting for sport. Protecting your crops and livelihood is business.

It depends on how interesting the new work would be. If the projects would be enjoyable I'll do them as soon as possible. If not my current projects can take as long as they need to.

No. America is in a recession. We need to cut our unemployment rates. More government bureaucracy means more government jobs and more jobs from government contracts.

Good. It's nice to see the war-on-some-drugs opressors taking some casualties.