lurch

How heavy are you VB? I noticed the thing about the Machs was they worked far better for medium/heavy guys than light ones. I tried an SM1 and for me it was USELESS... worse than useless it was a handicap. Slowed me down, and like Chuck described, felt very "heavy". Was a relief to get back into my light, quick and nimble old Birdman suit. My S-bird on the other hand... I suppose its still a bit heavy in feel relative to my older suits but a lot of that I think is because its still just plain enormous, and the thing is, it still feels quick and easy to fly and a LOT more versatile than my old BM gear. I was never impressed with the R- or T-birds, armwings felt too small in proportion, but the S strikes a perfect balance, big enough to be massive, still small enough to be easily manageable. Glad I didn't get a X though. After flying this thing with a bunch of FFC students I often have to fly with elbows locked to sides and arms behind my back, feet and knees together, suit 100% shut down, flying with just my toes and shoulders cause some students have a heavy arch and fly with their arms way back in a 45 degree V. With an X, I'm almost certain it'd be just too damn much wing for most purposes with my weight and not worth the trouble for the extra 2mph it'd get me. Law of diminishing returns. Any more fabric and I'm not at all sure I could stay with all students. Just too much drag to compensate for. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Fuck yeah, Chuck's blickin' it with Da Bird badness now! Chuck I dunno if you read my review of these things but after putting a few hours airtime on mine I'm still being impressed. Compared to its Mach equivalent its like night and day. No matter how maxed out I am, if I ask for even more power, the suit delivers for as long as my muscles can demand it. Its like having a canopy with bottomless flare. In flight it delivers a feeling of absolute invincibility in terms of sheer powerband and range. If its in the sky and I can see it, I can catch it. Matt... if you haven't flown one of these puppies yet you don't know what you're missing. When you do, and you hit the gas on these things, it will startle you. Normally I'm not the guy to jump on the trendy gear bandwagon but these things are becoming popular for a reason... one HELL of a gain in performance and the only thing on the market that beats my homemade stuff hands-down. Couldn't be happier with the thing... at last, my lust for ultimate low-fallrate has been simply satisfied. To me its like a wearable Porsche... so perfect I can think of no possible improvement. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

"Sorry, but am I to understand you've inserted your father's skull inside of that ball for bowling?" "No, the guy at the pro shop did it." Mystery Men. My turn. "What the hell is this shit?" "The remains of a most unsatisfying victim. Still... you're here to change all that." Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Oh, and yes Spot, I am in fact still here and heating my immediate environment to 98.6 degrees F, rumors of my demise are greatly exaggerated. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Here, http://www.dropzone.com/cgi-bin/forum/gforum.cgi?post=3035484;sb=post_latest_reply;so=ASC;forum_view=forum_view_collapsed;;page=unread#unread This used to have a link to some pics of a time I flew half of the megasuit assembly in public. I only flew it once at the event at the far outside edge of a bigway because I did not wish to expose others to the risk of flying near that thing. I checked the link and the photos are gone but at least you can get the idea from the discussion and the buzz it generated at the time when I showed up and flew the thing at a major event. I'll see what else I can dig up... I'm pretty sure Justin has some photos of the REALLY big one, and I'll have a look at what Scotty's got online, see if I can find the Godzilla mod pics. At the time I did not make a big deal out of that development series so there aren't all that many pics out there and I published no articles beyond discussions about the designs on this forum. I'm not much of a publicity hound, the recognition I get from my peers in the sport is enough, and I was never gonna get famous for a bunch of insane flying hackjobs anyway. Some of the stuff was only photographed once or twice, and the biggest version with the lexan tail design I allowed to disappear quietly with no publicity at all because of just how dangerous that thing was, but it is mentioned indirectly in the thread I referenced above. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Ok Here, Giselle. I'm lousy at expressing myself, my friends do a better job of it for me than I can. If you don't think I'm having fun flying wingsuit, watch this. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h_qNofzikc0 Half the video was shot by brother Jsho, half shot by me. The video itself was made and mixed by brother Spot. Jsho is the red bird, Spots the blue and yellow bird, I'm the blue and white bird making all the noise after I land.

Giselle: You keep talking about things you've made up, that I never said. So I'll keep my answers to your objections simple and direct. 1: Look again at the thread. Nowhere in this thread did I say anything about thousands of years. Re-read every word I've said. Highlight and quote it when you find where I said "not fly up in a thousand of years". Copy it and paste it in your next reply if you can. You will not be able to do that, because I did not say it. 2: I did not raise the point about a dozen years. You did. You told me that "Anyway if in a dozen of years a wingsuit look like the one in the picture that i put here, i hope u open this topic again to remember u said it will NEVER work!" Which is another thing that I have not said. And you tell ME I speak "too much nonsense"? You have repeatedly tried to scold me for things I have not said. If we are going to have a conversation and exchange of ideas, I'll need to ask you to stick to responding to the things I have actually said here. Lets review. I've actually built and flown concrete ideas in wingsuit design, some worked some didn't. But you, who have not done so, tell me that I "seems have no concrete ideas". I've got, and have made, and flown, plenty of them. They're hanging on my wall, in fact. So far though, you do -not- have any concrete ideas. If and when you do build some flyable prototypes, THEN you will be able to say you have some concrete ideas. And if you reread what I have written, I have been treating you with dignity and respect, more than you have earned by your attitude here where you keep telling experienced wingsuit pilots that they are speaking "too much nonsense." I am not being arrogant. I am telling you the facts that we as wingsuit pilots have learned by experience. We are wingsuit pilots. What we can do is dictated by science and experience. But you keep talking as if your wishes and dreams determine what is possible and thus you are making productive discussion far more difficult than it needs to be. I don't want to discourage you. Far from it. But if you wish to help us advance the passion, art and science of flight, you must pay attention to what we have done and what we can do, and build from there. So far, you have repeatedly told us we speak nonsense, and this is why you are not being taken as seriously as you wish to be. I have already taken my dreams, studied the facts, and made real flight hardware from it. And I have repeatedly bet my life on my own judgment when I jumped out of the plane and flew it, and won. If you wish to make your own dreams happen in the air, you must do the same. If you do not listen when people who have already done some of what you want to do tell you "that will not work", you will not survive your first attempt. This is not a knock on you. This is not an attempt to make fun of you or treat you with disrespect. This is a fact. Again, I am one of the only ones in human history who has actually built such hardware, flown it, and reached the ground alive with the knowledge I gained from it. I am the closest thing to an "expert" that exists in the art of building and flying large skeleton extensions as part of a wingsuit because I am one of the only survivors. One of a VERY small handful of people who has EVER done it, and lived to tell about it. You could count us all without running out of fingers. Which is another fact that should tell you just how difficult such a task actually is. I quit building and flying such hardware because I love flying so much I wanted to stay alive long enough to enjoy it for many years to come, and if I'd kept that up, I wouldn't be here now. But the fact is, I imagined it, I built it, and I flew it. And unlike most who have done so, I am still here. If that is not enough to have credibility in your eyes, then all I can do is wish you good luck, and hope that if and when you fly a suit yourself, you have developed better judgment by that time. I hope you do learn to fly with us. There are few who dare to dream as you do, and in time I'm sure you could have much to contribute to the flight that is our passion and purpose in life. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Yo. Second what Dexter just said. I know its gotta be disappointing having a bunch of negativity come back at you. Giselle, for what its worth, I wasn't trying to come down on you, just trying to get the idea across that it is the people actually doing it who know what can be done... ...and, by the way, look again at the words I used. Pay attention. Not once did I use the word NEVER. I've been flying for a long time now and I can tell you that given the pace of development, we will not be flying your ideas in a dozen years. Technology develops fast, but nowhere near THAT fast. With a lot of development in nanomaterials and several revolutionary leaps forward in energy storage and manipulation technology such a thing may someday BECOME possible, but right now, it isn't. The materials we have to work with now are amazing enough as it is...spectra and kevlar line good to hundreds of pounds per strand, and much more... but to fly up with anything like a human scale wingspan would require energy storage and discharge capabilities in the hundreds of kilowatts per kilogram, and material strengths equivalent to a fishing rod rigid enough to take thousands of pounds of strain without bending. Such technology may someday be developed, but it certainly will not be developed and deployed in a highly evolved practical application such as flight in a mere 12 years. Keep in mind... I understand your dreams. Most of us here do. But talking down to us in a condescending manner when you have not yet even begun to learn to skydive, let alone fly a wingsuit, let alone have the expertise necessary to try to contribute to their development... well, lets just say you come across as more than a little ahead of yourself. Come fly. When you fly a suit yourself, you will have a much better idea what you're up against. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Wow...just...wow. Giselle: You are being arrogant and condescending. Until you fly a wingsuit yourself, your "accumulated knowledge about flying machines and aeorinamics much more than u can imagine" means precisely...dick. Your accumulated flight time in gliders does not qualify you to design wingsuits any more than my time driving a jeep qualifies me to tell professional motorcycle racers how they should be building their bikes. Learn to fly a suit, then come back and read this thread. You will laugh at yourself. And if you have any sense, you will be ashamed of yourself for taking the attitude you have taken here. There is no need to apologize... when it comes to wingsuit flight you are a child and you don't know any better. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Giselle: You have made a series of mistakes here. 1: Real wingsuit pilots are answering your questions and you tell them they speak nonsense. This is not polite. 2: You are not a wingsuit pilot. We are. Yet you tell us we don't know what we're talking about and YOU will tell us how wingsuits will be built. Do you have any idea how ridiculous this sounds to us? Not to mention offensive? If you will not listen to them, perhaps you will listen to me. I HAVE tried flying things like what you describe. I am one of the only ones who has ever tried who did NOT die trying. I AM a wingsuit designer. I have built and flown the single largest wingsuit design ever attempted. The only reason I did not die trying was because I made my pieces -relatively- small, and based the design on a known, workable wingsuit I already knew how to fly. What you describe cannot work. If you build an assembly with rigid pieces that takes the load off the body it is not a wingsuit. It is a hang glider. And it will fly totally differently than a wingsuit will. If it is attached to the limbs it restricts your freedom of movement. If it sticks out beyond your limbs more than about half an arms length it will restrict your freedom of movement enough to kill you. I KNOW. What I built was a combination exoskeleton tailwing combined with armwings that went all the way to the ankles, connected to the feet by cable struts that allowed me to take some of the load off my arms with my feet. The cable system worked well, but took all the strength I had to fly it, and it could be made no bigger. The exoskeleton tail did not work and the only reason it did not kill me was because I made sure I could fight it with my armwings, overpower it if it did things I did not want it to do, and could collapse the whole assembly behind me so that I could go into normal freefall and still get a parachute open. After 6 flights with that monster, I stopped trying. There was no point. Now I am a retired wingsuit designer. My friends are glad because it means I'm still alive. There are limits to what is possible in wingsuit design, and I know what those limits are because unlike you, I've actually DONE IT. The reason a wingsuit is flyable at all is because the wings are small enough to be controllable with the muscle strength we have. THAT is what makes the wingsuit experience what it is. When we fly our suits, we are light, quick and free. We move easily. The moment you make hard pieces any bigger than our bodies, movement and control become very difficult, clumsy and slow. I know. I did it. I barely survived it and only because I made sure that it wasn't THAT much bigger than a normal wingsuit. It wasn't better...it was WORSE. I was barely able to get a parachute open around it. And in flight I was barely able to control it. It was not very steerable. It ruined the wingsuit flight experience. I could fly better without it. The reason I built and flew it was to see if the kind of thing you want to make could be done. You are not the first to come up with these ideas. The answer is NO. There was no need to keep trying after what I learned from the first few prototypes. What I learned from those flights was that as soon as you add a skeleton, even a simple one, you ruin the wingsuit flight experience. Accept it. We are wingsuit pilots. You are not. We know what we are talking about. You do not. We actually fly wingsuits. We know what it feels like and why what you propose is not a workable idea. You came here to ask us about it and instead you ended up telling us we don't know what we're talking about because you did not like the answers you got. Deal with it. Go learn to skydive. Build up the hundreds of skydives experience you need to be qualified to try flying a suit. Then learn to fly a wingsuit. Fly a wingsuit about a thousand times until you are good enough to try making your own. Then build one or two suits of your own and see how they work, and why, in person by your own experience. Don't just talk about it from a nice safe keyboard, go DO it. THEN you will be qualified to try to build your "flying up" wingsuit. But by then, you will understand why it will not work. The picture you have drawn is nothing but a picture. Things like that work well, in cartoons. In real life, connecting artificial rigid struts to your arms with wings 4 times bigger than your muscles can handle is suicide. Many people have already died to learn the knowledge you are trying to ignore. This is why hang gliders exist in the first place. The only way to support enough wing to go up, is with a frame structure. The only way to control that frame is to hang from it. If you want to try to fly something like what you have in your picture, why don't you start with a small hang glider? Go ahead. Just cut it down a little, then strap your arms to the wings and try to fly it. Let us know how it works for you if you're still alive and able to speak after the crash. OR, you could just learn to fly a wingsuit with us and enjoy what IS possible. See you in the air!

Not to naysay Spot or anything but personally I'd suggest you hang on to that Sabre. It may give shitty openings during normal skydives but a Sabre 1 is ideal for wingsuit. Seriously. The rest of the crowd I fly with prefer more modern canopies, but I've put maybe 1200 wingsuit flights on a Sabre 1 135 loaded at about 1.2 to 1.3ish and I couldn't be happier with it. Many of the more modern canopies tend to deliver somewhat erratic opening characteristics at the reduced fallrates a wingsuit produces, but the same Sabre 1 that opens hard/erratically at normal fallrates tends to open extremely consistently at reduced fallrates under wingsuit conditions when packed correctly. I've had such good results with mine that if I could buy a brand new Sabre 1 I would. Just my experience, your mileage may vary. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

YOU'LL PROBABLY BE ALRIGHT WITHOUT IT, THE MAJORITY OF SUITS i SEE FLOWN THESE DAYS DON'T HAVE ONE. JUST CARRY A MEGAPHONE SO THAT IF YOU HAVE TO LAND WITH YOUR LEGS STILL ZIPPED YOU CAN YELL REALLY REALLY LOUD JUST LIKE WE'RE DOING RIGHT NOW AND PEOPLE WILL GET OUT OF YOUR WAY. -b Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Second picture made me laugh my ass off. Spot pulls a Mcconkey into a pool! AWESOME!

Same here. Every time I apply for a job and the app wants to know my race I leave it blank or refuse to participate in the "survey". What the fuck does my race matter? Shit. Whenever I get the chance and find a line marked "race" I just put down "Human." Lets see the fuckers work THAT into an agenda. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

What, the fuck, is wrong with these people. I mean what, the FUCK. I would NOT have been able to remain civil. Where the fuck does this assclown get off thinking he has the right to impose this kind of draconian SHIT on kids? There is no limit to these people. None. If they could make the kids piss in a cup every morning and have cameras watching them every second of every day they would. This goes so far beyond appalling I don't have words to describe it. OMG, kid smoked a cigarette, get the handcuffs! This guy needs a beatin'. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Cool factor 10.0 out of 10. I've seen something similar just once...working third shift, 2 AM, warm humid night, everything quiet, suddenly family of foxes came out to play in a pool of light near the front gate of the factory. I did not disturb or approach them, getting to see a bunch of tumbling playing foxes with their guard down when they thought themselves unobserved was a privilege. The secret lives of animals and all that. Enjoy your new neighbors man. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

My .02$ Personally, I'd bet the reason this thing is going to disappear quietly is: He may have tested it against existing suits and discovered that it "wasn't all that". I checked out the gib2 video and it was nothing special. Just another wingsuit. Nobody was going to pay him major money for "just another wingsuit." Slick materials aren't going to make a revolutionary difference... I made a freakin' leather jacket work acceptably well if not particularly great. He could have made the thing out of oiled latex and although it would go over well at a fetish ball, it wasn't going to be all that much faster than anything else we're already flying. My practical assessment of his work would expect performance on par with "last year's designs" about equal to early Vampire/S-6 class suits. A bigger more effective tail would make far more difference than the materials he made it out of. Enthusiasm can easily blind the maker to reality. When I was building modified suits it would have been easy to start making wild claims about my gear... The best variants I built there was nothing in the sky that could even come close to catching them until the X-bird suits came along. But I knew enough not to think I had something revolutionary that people were going to pay me major money for. I actually DID put my money where my mouth is and put it up against the state of the art gear, top pilots flying Vamps and Machs, and my stuff could hold its own. But still, it wasn't record-smashing stuff, just a little better than the best available at the time. No big deal. I deliberately underplayed the stuff I made and let the performance speak for itself. By now the stuff is obsolete and I'm flying Tony's gear now, but for awhile it was ahead of its time. I didn't have to worry about people not believing my hype because I didn't make any hype. I had no unrealistic expectations of making a big deal out of my work. It was what it was, just another minor step in wingsuit development. Gib produced a lot of hype and no hard results. I understand the need to hype such a project to yourself to keep up the enthusiasm necessary to finish it, but when you start to believe your own hype, and exaggerate that hype, you set yourself up for failure. If you're going to start making claims of performance that beat everything else in existence you better be prepared to back up those claims in the air. If I'd seen even a single video of him outflying a top rank pilot with it, I'd say he had some credibility, but all we ever got was, as Skwrl put it, "heisenberg" performances that only happen unobserved. A pity. I too, was rooting for him. He might have gone a lot further with it if he'd spent a little less time hyping it and a lot more time flying and tweaking it. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Ok now thats cool. You can actually have different settings for different suits then as well. A BASE wingsuiter could probably fine tune it for ya better than I could by the way... If you watch wingsuit flight videos and see some acrobatics you'll get a good idea of the scale of the altitude loss based on the speed of his movement. A quick flip, he's not going to drop very much relative to stuff nearby...10, 20 feet max, maybe, depending on how clean the recovery is. A perfectly executed flip next to another wingsuit and might only lose 5 feet. A slow flip, and he'll drop a lot. I've done snap-flips next to a flock of wingsuits where after the flip I was still right next to them... and slow or poorly executed flips or rolls where when I got right side up again I'd dropped 200 feet. It'll be tricky to model well but after seeing what you've got so far I have no doubt whatsoever that you can do it. Having a "fatigue" setting is genius. And VERY realistic. You could tie it to the size of the player suit model. When I flew a medium sized suit, a Birdman S-6 the wings were easy enough that I could fly it at maximum the whole way down. So my fallrate would stay mostly the same and get slightly slower from about 4000 feet on down because of noticeably thicker air. When I started flying the huge suits...either homemade mods or a Tony S-Bird the reverse became true... I could pull insanely low fallrates in the first few thousand feet and things would speed up as my arms gave out. I might be doing 25mph at 12 or 9000 feet but by 4000 the best I could manage was 35, maybe 40. Or I could conserve energy and save the all-out effort for lower down and still do low speeds below 4, at the cost of higher speeds higher up. Managing fatigue could be a major game mechanic...waste too much energy higher up and you don't have the strength left to clear a ridgeline... Could have a little muscle fatigue gauge maybe, a simple bar or something. In real life, for all-out flying fatigue management is everything. If I'm trying for max time aloft I'll often switch muscle groups, load some while resting others... back off the outer wings and lock my elbows against my sides to charge up shoulders and chest for one last effort. You could also tie flight characteristics to both suit model choice AND player model... medium height skinny guys like me (5 foot ten, 135 lbs) are medium fast forward and come down very slowly, only going really fast forward in a slight dive or when REALLY maxed out... tall heavy guys, say, 6 foot 4 240 lbs come down a lot faster but tend to be MUCH faster forward and go fast very easily. Short round guys get the worst performance all around and tend to be not particularly fast forward nor slow descending. I can easily see competitions in your game, matter of pride thing similar to fighting games. In fighting games like Tekken or Street Fighter it is often a matter of pride and proof of skill to be able to dominate the game with a weaker character. So in YOUR game, the best players would pride themselves on being able to beat other players while flying the short fat guy in the little suit against the tall skinny guy in the Mach 1. So far your game kicks ASS. Must have taken a hell of a lot of work to make. I give it 4 and a half wings. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

YEAH! when the flyer made first approach to mountainside I was like WOOT! Then when he went into a flip after he cleared it I was like WHOA, shit! Only suggestion would be jack up his fallrate when he's not flying flat...when he went into flip near terrain I was like WHOA cause I expected him to get a LOT closer to terrain when he did that. I dunno how hard it would be to implement that but in real flight, whenever you flip you drop a little even if you flatten out immediately, and if you go head down for any length of time beyond about 1 second you speed up a LOT. That flip should have cost him about 50-75 feet of altitude relative to the slope he was flying over, just to give an idea of the scale I would expect. AWESOME work...really awesome. You know you're succeeding when your work is enough to thrill a real wingsuit pilot and that demo has me all like Whoooah, YEAH! Woot! I had to wonder... what happens when he hits the ground? -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

.250 lexan sheet, Assorted drillbits, a couple of boxes of 18-8 stainless hex cap screws, various sizes Matching locknuts, A leather jacket, Some self adhesive sponge rubber, a helmet, 2 pairs of rollerblades and a chainsaw. Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

I'm in. Late saturday morning most likely. There is flying to be done.

Yo, Butters, might wanna ease up on the guy a bit. He's still new. I doubt he's being lazy, more likely overwhelmed with too much info. Actually finding the specifics he's looking for laid out simply, often isn't as easy as "do a search". We want to be welcoming, instructive and helpful. If we come off all negative and shit, by the time he's ready for a wingsuit he might not want to be one of THOSE guys. Marolam: You're still a ways out. I'd suggest throwing yourself into everything skydiving you can for now. Put the desire for wingsuit on the back burner for now and know that it'll be waiting when you get there. If you focus too hard on "How does this activity serve to get me ready for a suit" you can get a kind of tunnel vision about what you learn. You need to get your head fully in the game thats on right now, not the game you will be playing in 140 jumps. At this stage in the game you need to be open and paying attention to everything. I'd say do lots of RW, get in on some small tracking dives, pay particular attention to developing solid canopy navigation skills, and location awareness skills in general. To be fit for wingsuit you need to be very aware of where you are in the sky relative to the dropzone. The bigger the variety of dives you do, the better idea you will develop about where in the sky you are, where you want to be and when, and how to get there from where you are. Watch the other canopies in the sky with you and learn to predict their movements based on where they are right now. For example you know that a bunch of canopies hanging out upwind are unlikely to suddenly fly downwind until they are low enough to get ready to land, and even then they won't go far downwind if at all. Learn to anticipate their speeds and patterns as well. Big slow student canopies tend to fly wide conservative patterns and stay up longer, without moving around too much. Small fast canopies chuck around like dragonflies, fly tighter patterns and come down a lot faster so sort your sight picture accordingly and learn to know what to expect from what you see. Smaller canopies will overtake you, and you will overtake bigger stuff. Remembering to make a habit of keeping your shoulders level during deployments will also serve you well. The most important skydive of your life is THIS one, the one you're doing right now. Immerse yourself totally in the here-and-now, enjoy the incredible adventure of the next 140 jumps and you'll be ready for a wingsuit before you know it. Good luck. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Hey, thanks, you guys. I was a bit worried cause this was even more long winded than most of my input to this forum but it needed to be said in detail. Every time I see somebody raise raise the questions the OP did, I get the creeps because they are openly proposing to short-circuit the process that MIGHT keep them alive. The only difference between me and every other 200-jump wannabe skygod is, I knew damn well I was going to get in over my head. Marolam: A few final thoughts on the matter: There is nothing wrong with wanting to get into wingsuit early. But if you are going to, I suggest you do as I did: Don't model your behavior on the hotshot swoopers and tiny canopy pilots...You're going to be a wingsuit pilot, not a swooper, model your behavior on the behavior of those who have survived long term in the sky. Eventually you will be able to swoop your wingsuit canopy anyway. Do not attempt to short circuit the experience curve by hop n pops to build numbers. It is elaborate suicide. Just skydive. You WILL get in over your head. You WILL find yourself in deep shit many times in your first thousand wingsuit flights. Do not bet your life that you are badass. Bet that you will be stupid and plan ahead accordingly. If you want to get into wingsuiting at 200, stick with bigger canopies. Aggressive downsizing combined with a wingsuit just makes you a crater waiting to happen. If anybody asks why you are so slow to downsize, tell them you are in training for wingsuit flight. Anyone who knows what they are talking about will applaud your decision. I chose my long term training wheels this way: a 210 was still student gear. A 190 was fun but got closed end cells a lot because I was underloading it too much. I stopped downsizing at 170 when I found it opened cleanly at that loading, just barely loaded highly enough to not be a handicap and open well. I did not downsize to my current 135 for years. Once you're loaded enough that you don't get closed end cells, STOP THERE. You will likely feel this canopy is too big, too slow and boring... right up till the day you desperately need the thing, it saves your life and allows you to land in a tiny backyard 50 feet across, unharmed. Repeatedly. THEN you can feel as badass as you like because you were smart enough to plan for the day that was gonna happen. On a canopy of that loading, rear risers will get you home from impossible distances. Learn to use them. Don't just hang from the thing like a potato in a harness. Once you have committed to flying light loadings long term, fly the shit out of it! Stay upwind. If you need penetration, learn to hang off your front risers to hold your ground. When your life depends on it, you'd be amazed how long you can hang by your arms. If the wind is too high for you to get penetration under that canopy, stay on the ground! Ask about "The Accuracy Trick" from a canopy instructor. If you know it, it will tell you if you can make it home or not. It will keep you alive. Use it. Get canopy instruction in the techniques I just described! Live and learn...or die, and teach by example. ---------------------------------- If any of the mods think my first post actually merits being made a sticky, let me know and I'll edit it a bit for that purpose and send it back to you or something. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Here's a piece of perspective for ya: You've probably heard it before, but think about it in detail: You don't know what you don't know. At first glance this looks like a statement that says nothing, only intended to sound stubborn and annoying. I had a cousin who used to do stupid shit: Take my stuff, I say give it back, he says no, I say why, he says "Because." Because why? "Because." (cue stupid smirk from cousin) But think a little deeper. Put a different way, there is knowledge, awareness and experience you gain with time through a million little events. How to counter linetwists. How to know at a glance if you're not making it back to the DZ. How to avoid mistakes you didn't have a clue you were even making at 150 jumps. You do not know, what it is, that you do not know about. There are levels of awareness that someone at 100 jumps does not even know exist. They can't even seek to train or gain that knowledge...because they do not know that knowledge exists. What you know at 100 jumps LOOKS like a complete picture... until you have 1000 and realize it wasn't, and there were a million little details you were not controlling for. No amount of hyperfocussed training can be a shortcut to the experience and awareness you need to survive wingsuit flight. The only way to be as aware as you need to be is by accumulated experience. That 200 jump number was not an arbitrary limit somebody pulled out of their ass to frustrate aspiring wingsuit pilots. It is an approximate success threshold below which the incident rate caused by lack of awareness and experience goes up dramatically. Hyperfocused training specifically for the skills required for wingsuiting can help you be ready when you reach that 200 jump threshold, but it is not in itself enough. Any one poorly developed skill can bite you at that level. Wobbly body position on openings. Frequent canopy control issues. Poor awareness of winds, location, direction. I was one of those 200-jump wonders when I started on wingsuiting. I DID hyperfocus on getting ready for it. And still, the things I didn't know nearly bit me a hundred times. What kept me out of trouble was, I KNEW there was all kinds of shit I was unaware of, and I set myself up with enormous margins for error everywhere I could. I bought a brand new Sabre2 170. I weigh only 135 lb. It was one of the best decisions I have ever made. It was loaded at .93 with gear and descended very slowly. I got line twists all the time because of subtle stuff I didn't know about packjobs, but that huge canopy let me get away with it until I learned better because it flew straight and slow even with 6 twists in it so if it took me a couple minutes to get untied, untangled and untwisted that was ok, I just hung there, going nowhere, slowly. The oversized security blanket canopy choice saved my ass more times than I can count. I said fuck canopy progression, learned to fly that thing in any conditions. I did not whine about being unable to make penetration in winds as an excuse to downsize early. I learned to plan ahead so I didn't need penetration. I flew that thing for my first 600+ wingsuit flights while I learned about all that stuff I didn't know about. To this day I experience a sense of laughing relief that out of all the stupid stuff I've done in the sky, at least I had the sense to listen to my elders and choose accordingly, so when my luck ran out and my normal margin for error was all used up, I still had an ace in the hole that saved me... more nylon, more time. That 200 jump minimum is another of those limits, written in blood and endorsed by the experienced jumpers that should NOT be pushed. You don't learn how smart you aren't, until your luck runs out. If you're as ignorant and cautious as I was, maybe your oversize canopy saves you. If you don't have one, it doesn't. A friend of mine once laid out a hierarchy of learning that goes like this: First you are unconciously incompetent: You're ignorant and don't even know it. Then you are conciously incompetent: You learn that you don't know a whole hell of a lot so you play it safe till you learn better. Then you are conciously competent: Now you've got some skills but you have to really focus on using em and try very hard to stay aware every second for fear of some creeping mistake you might miss. Finally mastery comes when you achieve the state of Unconciously Competent: You fly like a master and are automatically aware of everything you need to be aware of, without even having to think about it. Navigation is automatic and if you're in a bad place, you abort and fly home early without even thinking about it. Your pull is automatic. You don't have to think it through, because when you go for the handle, you never miss. Body position is automatic for the same reasons. Awareness works for you the same as muscle memory, without concious thought. NOW you have time to play while flying wingsuit because your habits have become built in survival instincts. This is why some wingsuiters are comfy doing docks and fooling around below 3500 feet and others are scared to pull below 4. If you're impatient to get into wingsuit, frustrated and don't know what you are waiting for, THAT is why you are waiting. When you've built enough experience to understand why you had to wait, THEN you are ready for wingsuit. I hope this helps you understand that jump number minimum. It exists in the hope that your sum total experience by then will be at least the bare minimum for you to have a chance to survive without incident. The lower your numbers, the lower your odds of surviving to 400, 600, 1200 jumps. The later you start, the better the odds you already know how to deal with trouble, automatically, without panic and without having to spend precious seconds thinking about it. In the race to get to do the advanced stuff, the tortoise always wins. ALWAYS. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.