DrewEckhardt

Plus overhead of all sorts (administrative and excessive tests to defend against malpractice) and profit.

Nope. This is why we need to legalize drugs. Without the huge underground economy the cartels would have no financial reason to be threatening US law enforcement.

I've made a few from 5300m MSL. In summer when it's over 32C at 1500m MSL.

Do they sink in no-wind conditions like a classic accuracy canopy?

C'mon Brian - lets have your input here ... His owner's manual says: http://www.bigairsportz.com/pdf/bas-sizingchart.pdf goes on to suggest canopy size limits starting around 1.0 + .1/100 jumps maximum wing loading, plus "Add one size for Fully Elliptical Canopies", plus special treatment for smaller sizes.

Yeah.definitely sporty..ESPECIALLY on no wind days.... the canopy I have now lands slower than my Samurai did... and its 20 SqFt smaller You finish your landing approach flying along so your feet would be below ground level if you tried to run until somewhat short of where you're not going to have a choice about running and finish quicker on the toggles to bring yourself back up to ground level. You'll stop real well. Or at least head for pea gravel for soft landing confidence and keep adding enough toggle to keep your feet off the ground until it stops flying and you drop - it'll both go slower and take more toggle than you expect. That's also technique. You can turn the canopy into the ground and get it lying on the topskin with the nose facing you, run the slider up, and yank on the tail to spill out excess air. That's even in the owner's manual. How deep the toggles go, trim, control response, and recovery arc are all matters of taste but there's nothing wrong with the canopy. You can make a good case for the Samurai being the best all-around non-cross-braced canopy for experienced current skydivers not jumping wingsuits designed before the Katana (I never got around to jumping newer designs).

You need experience and decent canopy piloting skills. With larger sizes flaring all the way (there's power deeper into the toggle stroke than other canopies) would have done the trick and at smaller a good job of energy management is all you need. I've parked 200 pounds of me, beer gut, and rig in the middle of the pea gravel with a 8000+ foot density altitude under a Samurai 105 with just a couple steps to stop. I liked 120 square feet more at that size and altitude since it wasn't as demanding to fly and put hundreds of jumps on the 105 I bought after shrinking my belly 25 pounds. I moved to sea levle, grew my belly back, and found 200 pounds at 105 square feet worked great at sea level although currency and paying attention are required. Regardless, to agree with Brian it's not appropriate for people with under 300 jumps.

Skipping the fence and moving towards open immigration sounds good to me. With real wages falling we need cheap labor for food production, landscaping, etc. With a daily minimum wage of 54.47 pesos ($4.32) in there home country lots of Mexicans are happy to hop the border for the US $7.25 an hour ($58 a day) and better 'low' paid jobs. When the last of my family came over everyone in good health was welcome legally except the Chinese. I can't come up with a good moral reason it should be different today apart from ceasing to discriminate against Asians. It will create downward wage pressure, but not to the same degree as the alternative with the work outsourced to people's home countries where the salaries can be much smaller because they don't need to cover American costs of living. The low wage workers may not 'pay their own way' but that's already the case with over 40% of Americans having negative income tax rates and the bottom 50% covering just 3% of the tab. Drug violence is the real problem of our porous borders and is better addressed through legalization.

Control sensitivity is mostly a function of the canopy shape, size, and line length not wing loading. The Stiletto is more sensitive to toggle input than any other popular canopy. John LeBlanc detuned all the following PD designs including the Velocity and Katana because too many jumpers had problems with roll axis stability landing Stilettos. Relatively small amounts of toggle input (whether intended or not) will quickly roll the canopy into a diving turn so you may end up headed at the ground fast in an unrecoverable attitude if you get surprised in the landing pattern (likely) or don't instinctively limit your control inputs when you get back low from a long spot. That leads to issues like this where a guy with 480 jumps killed himself with a Stiletto 150 loaded to 1.2 pounds per square foot: http://www.dropzone.com/cgi-bin/forum/gforum.cgi?post=3709212 Landing a parachute into a wide open field is not a big deal, even elliptical ones. At dusk with a low turn to avoid unseen power lines to a down-wind landing on asphalt (think about what happens on the sunset load when the cute chicks flash the pilot for extra altitude and some one in your group gets hypoxic and gets their foot caught on the seatbelt so you take forever to climb out and have a long spot) it's a huge deal. Things seem to happen much faster and you may not stay flat enough in the turn to avoid a painful impact. Avoiding that situation by flying larger less sensitive parachutes until you've built muscle memory is a wise idea.

Eloy, AZ is one of the largest DZs in the world, with basically everything you could want (including a great wind tunnel), Except for pleasant 70-80 degree summer days as in California and air conditioning for the wind tunnel.

Rarefied air molecules (by tandem instructor Lance "Swoop" Kerwin)

To get a faster turn rate and finish with more energy left for flaring you can start with one toggle and immediately add opposite toggle to counter the roll, stopping with the opposite toggle and raising both at the end. If you do it right you'll finish at trim speed with no surge and speed increase when you raise the toggles. Obviously that's something you want to be very familiar with before trying it down low. You also shouldn't be needing full speed to get an acceptable flare from a ZP canopy or appropriately sized F111 canopy that's not ragged out.

Yeah, you could even smell the exhaust.

You really want bike shorts regardless of the cost. Bike shorts have a chamois which reduces friction and wicks away sweat. They also don't have seams between you and the seat which could get uncomfortable. They'll make your life a lot more comfortable especially if you'll be spending a long time in the saddle and/or working hard. Jerseys are a fine idea too. Although they probably don't wick sweat any better than other exercise clothing, the pockets on back are real useful to stash things you want to grab while riding like Cliff bars or a cell phone.

Except by using the bedazzler, aplique, and print fabrics. Classic bounce-and-blend colors don't flair well. Precision print fabrics did. I really liked my Bat Wing with the purplish abstract art pattern which may have been called "Dali." The Galaxy pattern had great flair too. I also have a pilot chute made out of reflective silver ZP. That stuff has great flair and is real unique.

Are you comfortable knowing that pretty much anyone else can get the necessary tools to pick their way through your door ? Sure, just like I'm comfortable that any one over 21 years old can buy enough beer to become intoxicated and kill me while driving drunk. If they couldn't, a little work with a grinder can turn street sweeper bristles into lock picks. Or windshield wiper inserts. Or bicycle spokes.

He probably has a lot more experience. Although many learning experiences with parachutes involve pain and trips to orthopaedic surgeons, that experience doesn't have to be first hand. So he's got both his jump numbers and the extra time at the drop zone which is more likely to include a few "not a hook turn type" people leaving in ambulances or at least them telling them how they screwed up when he visits them in the hospital. For instance, people are more likely to practice low turns before they need them after seeing an AFF instructor nearly bleed out because she hadn't. You only gain muscle memory through doing something, which comes purely from jump numbers and time under canopy. You generally gain judgement from experience, which comes purely from jump numbers, time under canopy, and time in sport learning from other people's experience. It's a black, white, and blood red thing which has played out the same for decades. Most of the new jumpers who believed they were special snow flakes have a few close calls and come to their senses before going to the hospital. Most of the rest wise up after the first visit which often means titanium implants but doesn't leave them with serious lasting effects. Just a few suffer serious permanent injuries or death. Unfortunately, the distinction is pretty much random chance and you really want to avoid that.

It's not for the environment. It's for the politicians to stay in power by doing popular things. The voters seemed to like it when San Francisco and other California cities banned paper bags, so the ones in Sacramento are doing the right thing and following the cities. As such the facts are irrelevant.

Working models prove that it's not impossible. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86vhmTp7tKU Consider a line parallel to the propeller shaft intersecting its disk area. I'd speculate that workable gearing + propeller pitch combinations result in the propeller's point of intersection along all such lines moving backwards relative to the vehicle such that their a average total velocity with respect to the ground is less than the wind's. That seems more intuitive to me than the simplified explanation of the relative wind always hitting the blades at an angle.

Altimaster II. No batteries and big so it's easily readable by both you and (with a chest or mudflap mount) people across from you in flat formations.

The correct interpretation of the 14th Amendment is its plain English meaning, just like the rest of the US Constitution. All persons born in the United states are citizens of the United states. Any one who doesn't like it can work to have a 2/3 majority of both House and Senate to propose an amendment and 3/4 of the state legislatures to ratify it.

Big business is what pays for big government election campaigns. Suggesting the two are separate seems unreasonable when the two fit together like a hand in a glove.

Correlation does not imply causality. They also have higher population densities and gas taxes which make taking mass transit and walking the final fraction of a mile both more viable and less expensive than the American driving habit. Besides, we have problems with Social Security funding. It's better when people die before they can claim the benefits they're legally entitled to.

Bite your tongue! maybe they should remake Cool hand Luke . . . Never. Paul Newman rocked.

Vanishing Point rocked, perhaps even more than Bullit with Steve McQueen. Both are on Netflix "watch instantly" for your viewing pleasure.