lurch

Of course! Thank you, thats the missing piece! 3 things to try then. Bring back the megaboots everyone teased me about, Try big big silly sneakers, Then try my usual normal shoes with a couple pounds on each ankle. One or more of those 3 keys will make my flights further and longer with no extra effort. Funny. Some people think its all about "number chasing." Its not about the numbers, they're just measure. Its about Flying more. I already have an RW weight belt with a bunch of little weights so that'll be easy to try, too, just a couple pounds and some duct tape. This might be better than boots and ought to help isolate the factors that created that sense of "feels right." Is it the added mass? The added suitstretch area? Both? Neither? Its occurred to me it might be entirely the mass and stretching the suit may actually be counterproductive. I know it is when I try too hard with my armwings... I just did 2 dives recently comparing "feel" again with totally different "wide" techniques to kind of re-verify to myself what I think I've learned... One where I flew pressing down hard on the armwings in the classical maxed-out mode, (142 seconds, 13.5-3000) and one where I didn't "press" at all and just sort of laid down got wicked wide and relaxed... (170 seconds, 13.9-3000 and damn near overshot the DZ in the process)

Yuri, you know me so you can easily imagine the size of my grin right now. Russian Chicks....mmmmmm...... I'm bouncing up and down right now, all excited cause I can't wait to get back in the air and try big boots again... I knew it felt right, I knew it! I shouldn't have walked away from that, I did and I regret it. Intuition was trying to tell me something and I failed to listen. I'm listening now. ARGH! I think you're right about the balance, too. I still want to try big silly lightweight sneakers to compare against but since I already have the boots I'll try them first and see. Last time I was still so new at flying I didn't really know what I was feeling, this time I have hundreds of flights and can make my GTI sing and dance if I want to so when I hit the air with the old boots back on, the difference should be instantly obvious to me. WOOHOO! Thanks Yuri, I think you just gave me back a set of keys I tossed aside a long time ago and shouldn't have. YEAH! Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Now THAT is interesting... Because you're the first bird I've seen report this phenomenon and when I noticed it I wrote it off as an illusion created by my inexperience at the time. This was about 3 years ago, long before I'd learned how to REALLY use my GTI, and quite awhile before I knew how to get 3 minute flights...I had under 50 WS flights total. I was wearing a pair of monster Caterpillar Steeltoe boots maybe 3 pounds each, and felt exactly what you describe, but I was wearing them because I wanted to extend my toes further than sneakers allow and the bulky boots really filled out the suit booties to the fullest. I stopped using them figuring with all that weight they probably cost as much glide as they gained in surface area and worked on learning other ways to get more freefall time. Now I'm definitely going to try them again with the perspective gained by several more years of flying suit and see what happens. If it suddenly makes it much easier to manage a 3-minute flight despite the added weight, it'll be useful flight knowledge indeed. Hearing someone else say this has me kicking myself in the ass for dropping what might have been a VERY productive line of research if I'd stayed with it. Although I wonder if maybe the reason you got the result you did isn't the other way around and not the balance but the fact that you were truly stretching the suit to its fullest with the bulk? I'd say what we need to do is try the bulk without the weight... I'll see if I can get some clownishly oversized sneakers and try for the same longer-toes effect without the weight and balance changes. If heavy boots do it but oversized toes alone do not, we'll have solid data. Has anyone else tried this? I discontinued the big boots long before I'd accumulated enough flight experience to know for sure or have any real basis for comparison... I remember thinking I flew much better with them on, but that impression flew in the face of everything senior pilots said, so I gave it up. Anyone? Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2006/06/25/free_flight/ I know, I know. Shameless self-promotion. I suppose I can expect other birds to pluck a few of my feathers about this one, but c'mon guys, this is media. I thought they did a great job. A lot of media exposure for the sport is negative in nature. This is as positive as anything I've seen. I'm tickled pink, and it took a surprising amount of work to make this happen. I love how tales grow as they go. By the time I hear this from people I meet I'll be flying 20 miles from 5000 feet and landing on phone wires with no canopy. Superhero and a penguin? There is no emoticon for a grin this big... Special Thanks to: Doug Belkin-Boston Globe reporter Bill Purdin-media exposure Reed Searle-advice and stuff Justin Smith-cameraman Phil Roberson-Still camera for the actual paper edition Fran Strimenos-DZO Don Mayer- Master Rigger Tom Noonan, Gray Winey, Chip Steele-mentors guides and teachers Jari Kuosma and Robert Pecknik-Suit design and manufacture Performance Designs... Sabre2 170... 3 years later, 100% perfect canopy, 0.0% failure rate. And all my DZ friends who've been there with help encouragement and support. Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

What do you mean "trying?" She IS hot! Unless your definition of hot ONLY includes overmakeupped barbie-doll Brittney Spears wannabes. She's neither scrawny nor saggy, and as a racedriver she must be smart, quick, tough and capable. Total head-turner. What more could a guy want? I envy the husband mentioned in the article. Good catch, buddy. Equally likely, woman like that, SHE caught HIM. Bummer she's off the market. I'd love to be found by someone like that. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Exactly!!! THAT is nothing but a rodeo on the theoretical suit I just described, with no pilot inside of it! Now refine it greatly...make the sucker airlocked, and not quite so grotesquely cartoonishly oversized, streamline the shit out of it, make it wearable and easily deformed by pilot input and THAT is exactly the vision I had in mind. Entirely landable given sufficient evolution and skill. Landing without canopies isn't impossible....its inevitable. I'll bet anyone here a year's income I'm 100% correct within 20 years and probably less than 10. 5 or less if we put our minds to it. It is but a matter of time. Anyone? -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

What is your location like? Lot of industry in your area? I lost my job of 5 years a bit over 2.5 weeks ago. Spent a few days messing around doing nothing serious deciding what to do, then went into industrial overdrive. Selling my skills as an industrial technician I went psycho with it, scattering resumes everywhere even to long-shot jobs I didn't think would pay off, and going to interviews I was certain were losers, following through no matter how I felt about it. Monsterjobs.com is great but goes out of date quickly. Through headhunters and temp agencies I suddenly started getting results. After a 2 week period of no bites, over a period of 48 hours I scored a stack of interviews all at once and now I have to choose between the job I already scored and the jobs being offered. Be aggressive... Ever play fighting games? Combo attacks are great for points and fast wins. Don't wait for them to notice you, MAKE them notice you. They'll likely blow off a mere sent resume as jobhunter spam. So use a combo attack. Submit a resume online... wait a few hours, maybe a day or two then hit them again, and again... call, try to talk to HR, ask to schedule an interview for X position. Show up at their office or HQ in person and fill out an app... don't expect to talk to anyone, ask but don't expect it, showing up unscheduled their time is probably already booked... But suddenly they become aware theres this guy with the skills they need and he's practically breaking down their door. They'll open the door at least to check you out if for no other reason than to get you to stop bugging them. You're in their faces everywhere they look... Their secretary tells em they got a call from some guy... Then they check their email and there you are again, Hello, I want to work for you! They show up at their office a day later and find a real paper application on their desk, same guy again....guess he really wants the job, and if he is THAT persistent he must be really sure he can do it better than that loser we ignored last week. Hunter-gatherer tactics... Scouting missions... I toured the local industrial park making a list of probables, possibles and not-likelies and ran searches for all of them... Most did not have help wanted signs, but then turned out to have ads online, and I already knew where they were and what they did. Don't drop the hunt when you score one, it might not work out and you lose time and lose ground... Keep attacking until victory is assured and you are on your way to work on day 1. Confident but not cocky.... you're packing the skills they need, all you gotta do is get em to look at you long enough to show them. These tactics work, and have kept me employed, and restored employment long before I would become eligible to collect Unemployment even when the job market sucked. Go get em! Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Yeah. I never do. EVER.

I may be the one in the superman costume but the real hero is the one in the gray shirt. Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

I got something good to say. I got separated from mine before I ever even knew he was my father. He was waiting with open arms 15 years ago when I escaped a psychotic stepfamily who valued things like poverty and violence. He took me in, gave me a bicycle and set me free and hung in there for the long haul while I got past all the resultant personality damage I'd incurred surviving it all. Never gave up on me or my future when I'd written myself off as a total loss. Set an example of success and hard work, an example it took me half a lifetime to learn how to follow. Took me to the bottom of the ocean, taught me to Scuba dive, led me through the wreck of the New York just recently at the bottom of Subic Bay. Made it look possible to go for what I really wanted. So I did. Watched me work my ass off trying to break into the skydiving world, cheering me on every step of the way. Nagged me to get my ass in gear when I needed it. Could have just thrown money at me, told me how to jack up my value instead, to make MYSELF a success. Refused to accept excuses. Tolerated my bullshit but let it be known it wasn't cool and wouldn't get me anywhere. Kept pushing me not to settle for what I could get and keep setting my sights higher. Became my role model, but made no demands except that I pull my own weight. Last time I visited the Philippines he'd said it'd be cool if I got to jump while I was there. When we got to the DZ, it no longer really existed, no jumpers around, no business but a flight school. He decided to stop at nothing to get me in the air. And was in the plane with me when I bailed out of a chartered cessna he made happen, allowing me to become the first wingsuit pilot in Philippine history. And the determination to live up to that role model no matter what it took just landed me my dream job today in a high tech lab, at long last fulfilling the potential I've always been told I had but never really believed. I do now. The headhunter agency tells me I made an impression. I start work there in three days. I love you, Dad. -Brian Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Matt... I kept restraining myself from putting in further to this thread mostly because both you and Darren kinda stomped my idea and both of you have either superior experience or better physiological data available to you, and I would have been defending the ideas for the sake of defending them. Not the right way to do it. I needed to put more thought into it, to figure out how to articulate what the intuitive understanding voice in the back of my head kept trying to tell me. I had a hunch there was more to it, and hunches are usually half-formed ideas based on unarticulated understanding. It took me till now to figure out HOW to defend them. I don't have the expertise you guys do, but consider this: It isn't an answer I have for you, its another question based on the observation that we are not airplanes: If my thinking is flawed... Why do raft dives work? If my thinking is flawed, they should not work, at all. They should collapse and fold in half like an overloaded airframe the second they hit the air and load up. But they don't. Rafts inflated tightly enough hold up just fine with people in them, at least for awhile. They aren't dynamically adjusting, so their structure fails halfway through the dive as they deflate, creating the usual comical clusterfuck we've all seen on raft dive videos as the raft gets squished by increasing air pressure, but WE are and we don't. The S3 legwing is just as tough to close at the bottom as the top. Build a raft like an S3 legwing only with real ram-air airlocks and funnel-shaped inlets and you could ride it till pull altitude. Rafts taken out of aircraft aren't really rafts...they are poorly designed wingsuits. Build one shaped like an S3 instead, theres your wingsuit of the future. Just a thought. I've been wrong before... Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

!!! OOF. Hadn't thought of that. Figured the fact that I was looking to replace an extinct employer made it ok. Wonder how many times I shot myself in the foot with that and never knew it? Glad I asked... Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Gotcha. Advice heeded, pen and paper added to gear load... Question: I've been wearing my Twin Mtn uniform shirt to various job interviews for that professional presentable appearance. Its mint condition with my name on it and ex-employer patches, standard Cintas stuff. I've been hoping to give that serious-about-it image. Am I helping or hurting myself by so doing? Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

*Austin Powers Fat Bastard voice...* Ah don't swing that way laddie but if Ah did you'd be on mah list... *end FB voice* Thanks, I think.... *cracks a beer for the DZ.com community, a more supportive and hilarious group than any I've known, anywhere...* You people ROCK. Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

That job is yours, all that's left is to go explain the situation to your new employers. Vibes and good luck. Now THAT is a kickass way to view it. Thanks. I wasn't expecting this much of a boost from just one thread, totally made my night, people. Still laughing... Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

*goes back to empty factory, douses self in gasoline, lights match and sits there grinning, making a nice pretty light and a bad smell* Any further requests? Laughing till it hurts.... Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Taken exactly as intended, man. I laughed and grinned when I read it. Thanks. Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Well, keep in mind that statement is coming from a guy who has spent 99% of his flight time flying a GTI... I've only flown a BIG suit 3 times and two of those were flocks where I was flying any which way but maxed. The one maxed-out flight I did have on an S3 I was way too busy just experiencing it and trying a zillion little changes to get technical with it beyond noticing how much different it felt. The way I see it is when I put max effort into my GTI, I get increasing performance up to a certain point of diminishing returns, past that point further effort causes my performance to drop off radically instead... When I backed off and let wing pressurization do its thing to shape the wing combined with that relaxed lying-flat effect, my overall performance went through the roof. With a Classic or GTI anyway, a portion of the force is taken by the skeleton/muscles, and a portion is taken by the suit I'm lying down in. I'd noticed when flying the S3 that the legwing pressurization was so much more effective than the GTI it took a real squeeze between the knees to collapse it prior to opening, as if the thing had airlocks, felt like deflating a tightly filled air mattress between my knees. I have to HOLD my GTI's wing open, the S3 felt more like it held ITSELF open and (felt as if) it would largely retain its shape even if I let my legs go partially limp. I got the impression the wing was taking far more of the load than my GTI's legwing does and my comment was an extrapolation of that impression. My impression was the perfect (or maybe excessively perfect) armwing design would be the same, staying drum-tight on its own more or less, and kind of like a cantilever effect, would support most of the added load of bigger size by itself, taking its semirigid structure and load capacity from internal air pressure and taut fabric leveraged against itself rather than muscular/skeletal rigidity by pilot effort. Taking that to an extreme, imagine a -totally- sealed set of wingsuit wings, inflated drum-tight and capped like normal groundbound inflatable toys, rafts or what have you. It would require NO effort to keep such a suit maxed out because ALL of its structural rigidity and shape are its own, the pilot is just along for the ride, steering it and guiding its flight rather than exerting effort to "make" it stay open and fly... The thing would fly efficiently even if the pilot went totally limp. But the tradeoff would be a suit with a very narrow range of flight modes, eventually requiring pilot effort to DEform the wing to change or increase fallrate. Does this make any sense to anyone?

Welcome to my nightmare... I set up, filled, pushed aside, stacked and put away anywhere between 60 (when making 11.2 oz bottles)and 140 (when making 20 oz 38mm neck sportcap bottles) of these things per 12-hour shift for months. Now include throwing around as many pallets, and putting plastic bag liners in each and every one of these things... We used to have an army of illegal immigrants doing this, in the end there was nobody left but me. I thought I'd died and gone to hell and never noticed when exactly it happened.... Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

You're terrific! Thanks Jenn. I just hope they will feel the same... God knows the last factory didn't, judging by how awful the job became towards the end... That last job taught me a whole new definition of pain and endurance... One by one they laid off the laborers and assigned me their duties as well as my own, by the end I found I was capable of pushing a giant 48" by 48" by 56" box on a pallet that weighed 5x what I do on a smooth concrete floor nearly nonstop for 12 hours at a whack 4 days a week. I figure it was the rough equivalent to walking 3 marathons a day pushing over 500 lbs the entire time... Forklifts wouldn't fit into the narrow space and don't move fast enough to keep up with the output rate anyway. It IS possible to go blind with fatigue, and after all that effort and sheer will, the factory finally died anyway. Saying goodbye to Twin Mountain was not exactly heartbreaking, but the place certainly whipped me into shape, as if I wasn't already... It was the ultimate game of "last man standing" and I was him. Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Can't....breathe...must....stop....laughing....need....oxygen.... Thanks Jenn, I needed that. Thanks all, I'm hoping if I come at this with the same unstoppable attitude got me this far in skydiving (toned down a bit naturally, industrial people don't handle yahooing very well) I'll land this big fish and between the Tandem rating I'm going for, the wingsuit school I'm establishing, and this job, will succeed in getting my life together better than before. Only thing kept me at that last job was raw desire to fly and make it far enough to get a Tandem rating and make the sport pay for itself... So naturally Reality pulled a practical joke on me and pulled the plug just a few yards short of the goal. I regard stuff like this as stimulus to upgrade and improve, and I WILL have this job... I could actually have FUN doing this! Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Short story. I'm a tech freak, build my own computers, fix anything, blah blah. Spent the last 5 years in a nightmare grind job that paid for everything from AFF through jump #495 fixing machines at this factory just went under at last. Been unemployed for 2 weeks now rapidly going under, Jeep just broke and for once I can't fix it, sheared the head clean off my last breaker bar trying, put it in the Meineke shop next door to let em have a whack at it with impact tools but this will break me financially. Just when I was hitting the point of total despair I find the most perfect job listing imaginable over the net just 2 miles away from my home... Instead of mindless technical production drone, this one is 100% perfect for me by the description, building assembling and testing electronics hardware and industrial machinery for this company called Presstek. I've never wanted a particular job more in my life, and I find it right when I need it the most. What this job wants is what I spend half my free time doing for fun anyway! I already applied online for it, and will hike there tomorrow morning to apply in person as well. I have no idea what it pays and I don't care. They'll pay enough for this function, I already know that just by what the function IS. Normally I'm not a huge fan of asking for vibes, preferring to rely on my skills, always had this attitude of "you make your own luck" but here I can't think of anything else to do. I'm as perfect for the job and as skilled as they could ask for and its not a job I'd take because I have to, I WANT this job so bad I can taste it. Theres a desperate skydiver at the end of his rope sitting here right now asking for anyone to just root for me, send me whatever vibes you can spare, I want to work for these people and will be there when their office opens tomorrow morning... Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.