lurch

Nope. Didn't need to be since the 6's basic wingshape still was, and leaving it single layered making a half pressurized/half not wing had the advantage of creating an unusually wide range of usable fallrates. The idea was to have it act like a monowing suit only when it was pulled tight between wrists and toes. That element worked very well... if I did decide to flock in it, I could, without having to fight to keep the wing shut down. As soon as I eased off a bit to a normal S-6 flocking body position with my arms back a ways, the zipons just sort of rolled back, undeployed themselves and got out of the way, and the normal S-6 characteristics dominated except for a little flutter at the sides. But when I maxed it out it got performance nothing but an M1XS could hope to catch. The result was a megasuit that could fly docked, and still get sub-30's after breakoff in the same jump, something I couldn't get out of its equivalent giant Tony suit which is one of the reasons I built my own instead of just buying it. I test flew a Mach something or other and loved it, the pressurizing down to the bottom made the superslow flight a lot smoother... but if I tried to do docked precision flocking with it I'd be straining to keep my arms behind my back and the wing forcibly shut down just to get the fallrate to even reach the flock. The mach suits float too well...I'm pulling high-mid 30's in a stock 6, call it a "medium wing..." a suit almost twice the size of THAT would be a poor choice for me, for most flights most of the time. The zipons were a workable compromise because you could turn them off completely. As it is I didn't flock that hackjob all that much, (Jeff dubbed it the "Godzilla mod") maybe 100 flocks or so total, plus another 100 or so nonflock flights. The joy it delivered at breakoff mostly didn't offset the disadvantages of flying a wing that huge, but it did make an ok daily driver suit for awhile till I got tired of dealing with the oversize wings. The only reason I never bought a Mach myself is simply that I couldn't justify spending that kind of money for a suit I didn't need, and the only advantage to me flying one and the only one I'd be interested in buying would be the biggest I could get as a dedicated "dragster" for my fleet... something meeting or beating the specs of the Godzilla mod but smoother and built better. I gotta give em credit... the Machs don't look as slick as the Birdman and PF offerings but if all you care about is raw power, technical function and how well the suit really works, Mach is the way to go. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Normally I never step into political threads and I know nothing of law, but I'm bored and this one piqued my interest. Mostly because I think I fully grasp Lawrockets position but I think theres an important argument against it. The people doing the jobs of Secstate or AG are in positions of high authority and responsibility and it is presumed they were put there because their judgement was best for that role. If they see a fault happening in the system they perceive as so wrong that they're willing to openly defy and break the law to stop it, shouldn't the fact that they're willing to go to measures like that set off a few alarm bells? I mean, isn't this what they are there for? Should they not be listened to? The only analogies I can think of are either nazis (Say, a banker refusing to confiscate a jew's holdings even though the law now requires him to do so) or the occasional draconian weirdnesses that crop up from time to time in America. For every teenager that gets busted for posession of a joint I'd bet there are 5 where the cop thought "Oh for christsake its only a kid with a roach and I'm not going to slap cuffs on the kid and destroy his life over it" even though the cop may be technically required to do so. It may be legal but its not Just. Cop is aware that "just doing my job" may be doing something terrible to that person and decide not to do it. Kids scared and polite. Not exactly your gangsta punk. Cop takes the kids stash, dumps it by the roadside and tells him get outta here. Which do you think serves the law better... draconian literalism? Bust every kid you can catch, subject them to maximum "consequences of their actions"...handcuffs, charges, rehab, bail, jail, lawyers, court time, big deal on their record and have them fearing and hating the cops? So far as I know, law says they can, and they must. Or the compassionate rulebreaker... kid knows cop coulda nailed him to a wall and didn't...kid learns respect for the cops and the law the cop just leniently enforced. (Technically, refused to enforce.) Kid stays out of trouble. A criminal is unmade. The law is served. Everybody wins. If I understand the situation with Brown, (based on 15 minutes browsing the issues) is that he was backing the proposition that would and technically already had banned gay marriage in Cali. And at the last second he abruptly pulled a 180 and said No I won't do it this has got to be stopped. I'd think society out to sit up and say ok, this guy just called emergency stop, lets stop and rethink this. Maybe we're about to do something really really bad to a whole lot of people all nice and legal and we ought to pause and reconsider before we pull the trigger on it. If the legal wheels then turn and decide he was crying wolf because of come corrupt personal agenda and theres no kind of crisis or harm about to be done, then it gets implemented anyway. Those pharmacists for example. They thought they were making a stand for life, refusing to notice that in doing so they were claiming absolute authority over someone else's reproductive health and behavior based on their particular take on religion. If Jerry Brown is suddenly willing to break the law to stop the law from doing something he may perceive as a grave injustice, especially after, if I read it right, he was backing it all the way up until he suddenly switched and said it must be invalidated, isn't he doing his job by refusing to do it? Perhaps he rethought it and realized it was going to do a lot of harm to a lot of people, and stopping it would harm none. Maybe someone explained that to him. Maybe he got some info that convinced him prop 8 was a successful project by a bunch of people getting the legal system to enforce their religious beliefs on the other 48% of society and he just wasn't going to let it happen. I'll leave out addressing whether or not there are proper channels for them to be taking such actions through or whether there ought to be. I don't know what the legal mechanism is for doing what they're doing, I just think before judging them so harshly for breaking the rules we ought to consider why they felt it necessary to do so. There might be a whole lot of people really grateful to Mr. Brown a little later not because he enforced their wishes on other people for them, but because he stopped the legal system from doing something really bad to them. My .02$. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

You don't see them because they're incredibly difficult to fly. I know... I built one. A zip-on mod to a Birdman S-6 that took the wing to the ankles with a connection to the toe allowing me to use the suit like a suspension bridge or a sail. If you dig around in the threads for pics from FnD 3.5 October-ish '07 I flew it once at the event. So far as I know that convertible suit is still the only one of its kind and I still fly a slightly cut-down version of it minus the toe cables from time to time, I keep the zipon panels stashed in the suit for whenever I feel like doing a solo specifically for freefall time/cloud surfing because thats all the thing is good for. The only wingsuit pilot who ever managed to stay with it for any length of time was Jeff Nebelkopf in one of his own supersized suit designs. It delivered fallrates consistently into the low 30's to high-mid 20's for as long as my arms could take it, resulting in at-will flights of 3:10 to 3:40 or so. When my arms toughened up a bit and I learned how to really use the thing to take advantage of all that wing the fallrates became sustainably so low that eventually my Neptune was no longer detecting freefall at all and would only log the part of the jump it considered to be freefall- the part from folding the wings to deployment. But guess what: such a suit is effectively useless for flocking and general purpose wingsuit flight, all that extra wing only becomes useful if you're trying to sustain sub-35 fallrates, and actually DOING that is excruciatingly hard on the arms. You can fly it in a flock just fine, but all that wing just folds back and flutters and does nothing useful. It also complicates deployment considerably, deploying a canopy designed for 120 mph at 30-40 mph down/60-90 forward past a suit with a burble the size of Nebraska severely interferes with the opening depending on your technique and tends to pitch you over head down when you go for the handle because a wing that big can't be entirely shut down or contained. If most of your wingsuit flights are done flying with others, you'll never need anything even close to that big. I did a series of test jumps on several versions that were much bigger than even THAT... actual exoskeleton pieces made of lexan, ZP and snowboard bindings donated by a friend extending the tail 12 to 18 inches past the end of my toes, plus those zipon wings making the arms as big as your picture there. The thing was almost unflyable, keeping it open was so difficult I gave up on the design within a dozen jumps. The Tony suits megamach designs are about as big as a practical wingsuit can be made. Anything bigger goes way past the point of diminishing returns, vastly increased risk and difficulty for an extra 5-10 mph of fallrate you'll never need and seldom use anyway unless you like flying alone. Didn't do much for the glide ratio either, since the extra drag from all that crap mostly offset the gains in performance. It got fallrate, but not much more distance. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

If we wanted to get all technical with it theres an industrial machine vision software suite we use for everything around here called Visionscape, comes with an editor called Appfactory with which you can edit and run it in realtime. Getting it to pick out heads and decide if they're all where they ought to be is easy. Will run on almost anything from a 700 mhz early pentium on up. We use it for reading the datamatrix codes off a rack of 96 or 384 tiny test tubes, also in a vision-guided engraving laser. In that laser its already "picking out heads"... the current app, we have it looking at a photo it takes of the test tubes, analyzing it to detect the tubes and isolate the centers, then engrave matrix codes on them. If the stamped mark on the bottom of the tube is either not-round or damaged or absent it leaves it blank. Wingsuiter not in slot! It'd actually be easier to tune for judging a formation than for industrial use because it judges based on numeric color values in the image it sees, and we'd have blank blue sky between heads, so long as its an underneath shot. On the other hand, a lot of the shots from the WWR formation were from above, and the visual noise from ground clutter was so bad that watching the videos half the time half the formation was invisible-gritty moving dots against a gritty moving background. That vision system would be utterly helpless against that, almost impossible to come up with a discrimination criteria for it. It couldn't tell us all from the background. You don't have to run it in an industrial machine, either. Doesn't even have to have its own camera, you can just as easily run it on a laptop, tell it to do its thing on any photo you provide and it will give you an answer before the wingsuiters have even deployed- but the software is so insanely expensive I seriously doubt anyone is willing to pay that much for it. Contact Siemens/RVSI or the Rofin-Baasel laser people for details and they might even throw in a free hat. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Wow. That was deep, man. (trying desperately to stop laughing) Bravo! -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Damn! Cutting it a litle close, there... How you been, Ed? Not quite 5 years back I was making a science out of exiting Otters like that. This was before I started the wingsuit school, at the time I was the only bird around so with no flock to fly with I was amusing myself with various flight experiments in distance speed and time. I had a pilot who was willing to jack the exit speed up about 5 knots per jump, let me feel it out real careful like. I'd cross my arms across my chest so my wings wouldn't snap open and decapitate me on the tail-at 140+ knots I'd blow straight down the length of the fuselage without dropping any till I saw the tail go by overhead, then pop the wings and climb. It was insane, but fun, and I actually never got anywhere near that close to the tail...scary. Interesting video, shows what would have happened if I hadn't been so careful. I eventually got a PFI rating, trained the first few birds around here in what eventually became Flock U when Justin started promoting it and quit doing those exits, half because I didn't want to set a bad example for the new guys and half because I figured if I kept doing it complacency was going to bag me and the day I made that mistake I'd never even know what hit me. Tail to the back of the head. No thanks. I had a helmet and a Cypres and I didn't want to test either one. The whole experiment backfired on me later-since I'd got my reflexes dialed in to high speed exits from Otters, the next half-dozen times I had a chance to do high speed exits from tailgates I blew em all because I kept instinctively compensating for a one-sided windblast that wasn't there. Embarassing. Resulted in funny video. I should have jumped out sideways, probably would have worked fine. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Nice. Bet you nailed it first guess. Now to fit the standard SC pattern, we cue the stern self-righteous guy that pops in and tells him you broke the law now deal with the consequences, if you don't like the rules change em the legal way through the system, till then you're criminal scum and deserve it. To which I'd reply with a quote from Pat Condell... "What are you gonna do... Vote? (Snicker) Good luck with that." Then we get some rebel shows up loudly claiming he does what he wants and the man can't keep him down, somebody else pops in with some vaporous statement about the spirituality of ganja and how its natural so its ok, then the legals jump on them for it, and eventually somebody turns this into a gun thread. Or maybe Chuteless shows up and tells us all about gods WORD and how the U.S. is done for before Bush's term is out, he knows cause of the secret magic codes hidden in gods WORD and we're all goin to hell. Can I call em or what? -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Nother question Doc, how far do you think heavy lift and space industries could have gone if we as a nation had spent the couple trillion wasted on the W.O.D and in Iraq on space exploration? I think the Liftport group could have built us a space elevator and gained access to effectively unlimited resources with that kind of cash. We whine about funding a few hundred million to Nasa and nobody seriously considers the hundred-trillion dollar economy that'd result from airline-style consumer access to space. Unfortunately I don't see it happening without somebody spending 500 million just on the ad campaign to try to get the public to back that kind of thing. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

I'm not going to argue with any of that. I guess the point I was trying to illustrate was the psychological laziness and inanity that lets the public buy a car that 2mpg better than the last one, thereby participating in the latest empty catch phrases and thinking now that they've "gone green" their car is good for the planet. Its a token gesture and in and of itself is a good thing to do but its the kind of shallow fashion oriented thinking that bugs me. Wanna "go green"? Fund nuclear fusion till we crack the riddle and can power the nation with it on an industrial scale for fucks sake cause we can "go green" all we want, even convert all America's auto fleet to high tech electrics and it don't mean diddlysquat until we work out a better root energy supply for this civilization. The one advertisement I've seen in the last 5 years that made any sense is the one that says "there is no such thing as clean coal." I think the end fate of humans in space will be that as oil gets more scarce and it gets more and more expensive to develop and launch each "next step" eventually those steps will simply stop happening. I think we might already be right about at that point. If I remember right the moon landing cost about 2 billion at the time. Now we don't even blink when the DOD spends two billion on a single plane that does nothing to forward the growth of the species but Nasa has to beg to fund a bunch of fucking robots. Granted the robots are an incredible achievement... last I heard, years after the public stopped paying attention, the damn things were both still running in the most outstanding example of space hardware outlasting its warranty in history. Just another example of the kind of tech we could be using on a mass scale if people didn't care more about the antics of useless celebrities than they do engineering and progress. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Then I envy you, man. What I wouldn't give to meet one of those guys, the last real pioneer heroes. At least their legends will live forever. I laughed till I thought I was gonna puke when Buzz punched out that lunar-hoax asshole. Modern whacko-media mindset versus old-school "right stuff" and Buzz demonstrated hes still got the stuff. Unfortunately I think we're going to have to wait for this cycle of civilization to fall and rise again in a few hundred years before we see the likes of him again... to me it looks like we're on the downslope of the sine wave and it could be centuries before we see something like the curve we saw from about 1950-1969. If that curve hadn't plateau'd out so soon we'd have had thriving cities on the moon and mars 20 years ago and still be explosively expanding today instead of obsessed with "going green", downsizing and outsourcing everything and gazing into our media navels. Oh well, next civilization will go further provided theres any resources left over from ours for them to do so with. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Here. A tribute to the greatness my pitiful generation never aspired to. If this don't choke you up a bit nothing will. As near as I can tell its THE pinnacle of our civilization and although tech has become much higher and more user friendly, we're further away from being able to repeat this feat than we were in the early 60's. I always figured our civilization has been in decline since we let these things become museum pieces on the lawn. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2rXtG3vfAlA I find this kind of depressing. Once America wanted to achieve something and GO somewhere. But all I saw from my own generation was they wanted to be "gankstas" "ballas" and watch fucking american idol. My grandparents got to see their peers create the technology and go to the moon less than a decade after the president announced we were going to try to go there. My generation watched Christa Mcauliffe die live on television and as near as I can tell the space age died with her. Now whenever I hear about return to the moon the timetable is always 12,15,25 years, safely far enough away that nobody here, now, expects to see it or bothers putting much effort into promoting it. Its unpopular. We've given up as a nation and turned away. I read somewhere they estimated these things at about 190 gigawatts output. Professor, what do you think it would take to wake up the nation and get it to aspire to this kind of thing again and stop fucking around and go DO it? Burt Rutan is about the last hope I see, but compared to the scale needed to make orbit/space travel truly accessible, he's still building go-carts. America should give him 10, 20 billion and get the fuck out of his way and maybe my grandkids will believe enough to bring this stuff back from the dead. I'm kinda rooting for the Chinese here...maybe if we get pissed off at getting our asses kicked in space by the Chinese over the next 20 years we'll get off our asses and get moving again. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Mr...Biceps? Watching your conduct in this forum has been painfully amusing, like watching someone repeatedly and viciously stabbing themselves in the forehead with a pencil. Its probably not going to be fatal but damn, its gotta sting a bit. You didn't mess around with any of that useless "respect" shit and went straight to insulting the first high ranking birds you spoke to, while simultaneously announcing via your posts that you are a person who has not bothered doing the slightest homework or research in here, or you'd have known the answer to your question before you asked it. Bravo! You're clearly going to go a LONG way in wingsuiting. Peggs already said pretty much everything I would have said... When you decided to mess with Matt you were making an ass of yourself in truly spectacular fashion. But you weren't thorough enough. To do this, right... I mean really do it right, you ought to make a list of the top 50 birds in the sport and make sure to insult em all...you've already got two down, keep going! Cake, and grief counseling will be provided at the conclusion of the test... -B Oh... and I had 218 jumps when I started wingsuiting in '03. The reason I made out alright is I'd spent most of my runup time doing everything I could to train myself for it, from tracking and slowfalling in baggy freefly gear as "pseudo-wingsuiting" to reading everything I could find on the net about it ahead of time to make sure I knew everything I possibly could know so that when I DID speak up in public, I'd hopefully have chosen my questions carefully and be asking ones that mattered so the top gun birds of the time wouldn't take me for an idiot... not that I've ever seen anyone do THAT on the net before... Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Careful with that ipod, Spot... I hear those things cause uterine fibroids... -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Jeff. I just laughed till I thought I was gonna puke. I will happily buy your slot and shoot video, I'll even spring for the chainmail condoms if you're into safe sex (safe!?) just so long as I get to witness your first attempt at roller bungee shark fucking. Where you get the shark, and whether its consensual or against the wishes of the shark, is your problem. But I do suggest you don't cheap out on the skates-buy high end. General note: I find myself amazed at the relentlessly insistent grinding negativity being displayed by some in this thread. I gotta give credit for balls, though, it takes some chutzpah to try to loudly call bullshit on the 71 team. Funny. WE were the ones who actually flew the damn thing and the announcement and teaser pics were good enough for US. Why all the tear-it-down armchair quarterbacking? I mean, what about in six months when all pics slated for release are long since dispersed to the public and we've seen fifty different views of the thing and the world has long since agreed its The Record and its still not boxed up enough for you... What are you going to do then...keep challenging it insisting it ain't real till the NEXT one? We who flew it were the ones who put everything we had into it. We did it. We're happy with it. Get over it. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

NICE!!! Scott that made my morning. Laughed my ass off. Back in the day, Tom Noonan, one of Strong's tandem I/Es asked me if I could whip up something for night jump video... bright but not -too- bright, gotta fit on a helmet... I made him a disposable one-shot light grenade out of: a flat rectangular 65 watt automotive high beam, A cd case, some note cards, (put em over the bulb to use as a photographer's light diffuser) silicone sealant and a dozen expired Cypres batteries. Cypres batteries are lithiums designed to supply very very small current loads, forever. BUT If you stack em to jack the voltage, then stack more in parallel to handle the current requirements they can be forced to give up their charge in one big burst. Although I'm not big on math, an intuitive understanding of ohm's law goes a long way. It actually worked. The thing would burn at full brightness for 5 minutes, then go dim and go out over the next two, by which time the batteries were hot enough to be just shy of smoking. The thing was never actually used in freefall, can't imagine why... -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

How much extra care? A lot. You planning to fly with any others or alone? First time out, I suggest you go alone, last out, unless you have an experienced escort-and if you're asking this question here I'm guessing you don't. At Zhills they use strobes under canopy- I strongly suggest sticking flashlights inside your wings or lightsticks all over it. I did a night jump at Zhills awhile back while escorting 3 first-timers who'd asked me to lead em. I had a good friend who was flying with us try to alter the dive plan 5 seconds prior to exit and insist that my students and I turn on the strobes in the plane and I damn near detonated on him for trying to pull a poorly-thought-out last second change in plan. I never did get a chance to explain to him what that was all about, and I did feel like an asshole for yelling at him but there was no time for manners and I was scared shitless he was about to guarantee we were all limited to 30 foot visual range-(so if you find this bro, now you know what that was all about) Don't turn on your strobe until after you're under canopy if you're flying with other wingsuits. Having it on in freefall guarantees visibility from a distance if you DO get separated, but flying up close to a wingsuiter with a strobe turned on will limit your vision to the strobe's 30-foot blast radius and if theres a canopy ahead of you and down a ways you'll never see it till you hit it. Being rendered functionally blind in freefall is no fun. Dim lights in freefall, bright under canopy. If you're in freefall with another wingsuit, keep it tight till pull time, stay close. You do not want to lose visual lock on those you fly with. Also suggest no more than two "newbie night wingsuiters" at a time, preferably no more than one. This is both to cut the chances of getting confused and losing a guy, and to make sure you can keep everyone in your flight in sight at all times. Too many targets to track is bad mojo. Make sure you really, really know the landscape well. Good navigation has never been so important, you do NOT want to get clotheslined out of the air by powerlines trying to land out, in the dark somewhere. It is entirely possible for normal freefallers to get disoriented, be lost in the sky without a clue and still make it back once they figure things out under canopy since they DID get dropped almost directly overhead. This is not the case with wingsuits-your odds of reaching the ground safely are very very low if you blow it and get lost up there. Spend as much time as you can, studying the layout out the windows on the way up. Jump in daylight at the same DZ and study the available outs with particular care-note any subtle obstacles, powerlines, poles, slopes and such. You get lots of bonus survival points for being creative in anticipating hazards so be thorough about it. Consider scrounging a bigger canopy for the day if you're running something small. You may be a past-master with whatever you're flying and can land it on a postage stamp, but are you sure you can do it on a randomly selected out with a totally unknown surface...in the dark? If you've already got 20 night jumps you know how the patterns of lights shift in brightness and perspective as the plane orbits its way up... You can be 1 mile south of the dz and everything looks familiar, then look away for a minute or two, look back and you're 3 miles north of it and everything looks totally different. The same ability to travel long distances that makes a wingsuit fun can get you into deep shit at night if you don't know exactly where you are and where you're going. And have fun! For those obsessed with how "extreme" they are, night wingsuit is about as extreme as it gets, so max caution and zero complacency all the way and you'll make out alright. Flying above a city light grid under a full moon is eerie, awesome and mindblowingly beautiful. Most people, the closest they ever get to this is watching that scene with Neo hauling ass across cloudtops at night in Matrix:Reloaded. You'll be doing it for real. Let us know how it goes, eh? -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

I wonder how many of us have done it. Took me 525 jumps to make that mistake, while taking up a wingsuit student no less. Theres this guy name of Muppet jumps out at Jumptown and maybe Lebanon, caught it in the plane. Muppet, I owe you one. Steve, you and the others I fly with regularly have probably seen my solution for this, its why I'm always running my thumb over the buckle in the plane, cause if I've done it right it feels a certain way, one line of metal one line of fabric. You might have noticed I also have another weird gearcheck habit of grabbing at my 3 rings momentarily when we're all getting prepped for exit. Reed caught me with a twisted riser once as a newbie that had somehow folded under and locked in such a way that it didn't want to come loose when we untwisted it and almost certainly would have made opening/cutaway very interesting. I used to do the "check of threes" thing when gearing up, but after getting into wingsuit,(which added 3 more handles and 6 more zippers) then camera, (more velcro, straps buttons batteries and stuff) then modified/homemade wingsuit and still flying camera with it theres so many critical points to check that a simple recital of it would be a speech. So I just built compulsive repetitive checking habits around each item as I added them to the skydive and I run through the check loop over and over till exit. One man's OCD is another man's vigilance. Works for me. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Introduction? Hmph. Some of us have been doing freefly in wingsuits for quite some time now... -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

You're the same Pierre I met at Elsinore, right? Those pics are AWESOME. a 3 way docked standing rodeo? Holy shit. Just when I thought I'd seen everything... Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Aha, someones been paying attention. Theres some weird kind of zen thing tied up in the concept of understanding how many birds can fit on a phone line. I knew you understood it the day half the flock wound up on the birdhouse roof, (our phone line) wondering how many we could fit before either A: one falls off or B: Franny yells at us to get off the roof again. Theres a number of relationships there including the inverse one where the odds of not being noticed and yelled at for being on the roof get twice as bad with every bird that goes up there. Or something like that. Whatever. 1 bird could stand up there for weeks, unobserved. Ever since I pranked Justin with the chain-mail perch I've been trying to think of a better one thats both hook knife proof and Franny repellent. Tug boat anchor chain, maybe, only need a couple of links... -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

I remember that 20-way, I was 4 or 5 slots back and saw that wave coming as each bird fell a few feet in turn when they arrived at that exact point in the sky. It looked and felt like we were all falling off a step somehow. I've always wondered about it, what it was. I always figured maybe it was a wingtip vortex off a passing airliner a few miles away... I once saw such a vortex line drawn in fog at ground level during takeoff and the vortex tube itself just kept slowly travelling down the runway for quite a few minutes after the plane was gone until it was too far away to see. Given how tightly it stayed rolled up I think it could have travelled much further than I saw it go. It rolled down the length of the runway and didn't even look like it was beginning to dissipate when it went out of visual range. It was quite beautiful and an amazing demonstration of physics. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

A couple other thoughts here... Justin, did you notice during the 71 event that the only flocks we got that were as glassy smooth as that 16 way were during early jumps with just our wing? I'm not talking about whether everyone was there or not... but early on we had a couple where my video is smooth and nobodys bouncing around in my field of view, you and Spot perfectly level, no unexpected motions at all. After those warmup flocks and for the rest of the event there were massive constant vertical and horizontal buffets hitting us all the time, everyone up, down, constant unexpected pushes and drops. I think much of the difficulty keeping that monster together was still the wake off the guys in front. I think our entire wing was flying in a giant, vague burble. I also noticed people going low tended to get bumped around then kicked off to the left, much further away than I'd have expected them to go and the ones I saw you ask didn't have much of an explanation for it, just "couldn't get back in." What to do about it for bigger flocks? -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

If I remember right we had that puppy already built and flying before Scotty B even got within camera range. THAT was a perfect flock. We might not have it "defined" yet but I know it when I see it. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Well I can see a true "record" flock being one in which Mike didn't geek the camera, not even once, but he's GOT to geek it at least once for it to feel complete. I still have him on tape in what has got to be the longest camera geek EVER... I was like what the fuck, we're having a blast here, and just kept the cam on him. 37 seconds after exit he was still geekin' when we finally had to make the first turn and break the geeklock. I was like "Man. Doesn't your tongue dry out something wicked like that?" Mike, you gotta get up here again ASAP n come freeze your ass off with us bro. We missya. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Yo Rick! hen again, if you are only flying solos, then about all you have to "play with" are the numbers (right, Lurch??? Damn right. Numbers are important to me for technical reasons, performance measuring, ninja tricks and suit hacks. Flocking, its all relative. One mans dirty flying is another man's maxed out. Flocks, its all about hanging out with friends up in the sky. Anyway heres a thought... I'm not sure if its more about judging it or a method for making a real gridperfect flock... Brian Snarr and I got to talking about this at the event. He'd mentioned using lasers in a way that I thought wouldn't work, can't remember exactly what he said but figured maybe hes onto something there, and started imagining a setup done with off-the-shelf industrial laser counter/emitter/pickup modules. Problem is the expense. When I thought about it for a bit I realized you could actually automate flock building and alignment. 45 degree lines off the lead bird, low intensity visible/IR, wide beam divergence meaning the line is a beam a foot wide at the far end of the formation with about a 5 foot wide fringe to the beam. Each jumper has a pickup module with output coupled to audio producing a tone varying in intensity by signal strength. We use this stuff routinely in industrial automation for object presence detection. Jumpers either have beam repeaters on their tails/rigs to deal with beam obstructions, tune it so it deals with a large black area in the center of the beam and temporary total beam obstruction or you could go for REAL brutal accuracy, use two beams and keep all birds between the beams by that audio feedback. You get near your slot, you get tone. Get closer to perfectly aligned, tone gets louder? Higher? Lower? Faster. Whatever. You're probably looking at sticking a laser reflector return decal on each jumper to make it easy for the modules to see the jumpers buts thats trivial. Totally doable actually but insanely expensive, several thousand dollars per bird minimum to pull it off. The modules themselves are 3-700$ each, the logic to make use of their output and make a "flock gps" protracklike gadget out of it would triple that or more, easily. Might be able to pull a few shortcuts with consumer bluetooth gear though, get these things to talk to a headset through a phone or even an Ipod or something. The same tech can be used in a different way for true proximity/location sensing and feedback if all birds have 4 emitters and pickups on all sides getting yes/no/how close feedback either by audio or a simple line of LEDs across the bottom of the goggles would suffice. One of the modules I have in mind already has both a scaled numeric and bargraph display right on it, you could just bolt it to a fullface helmet. But come on... do we really want to automate this? The expense required to pull off such an insanely complex effect would not match the return in effort needed to do it. We get robotic enough with it people will mistake us for RW guys or something. Couldn't we just sort of do it the old fashioned way, by, you know, improving our skills and stuff? -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.