champu

?? If you figure about 1 in 1000 skydives result in a main malfunction that's 99.9% if you assume all malfunctions are attributed to packing (which is conservative.) That's pretty near 100% to me. I think your takeaway is right though that packing errors are already a small enough contributor to main malfunctions (provided you do a few basic steps correctly) that stressing too hard about it (e.g. packing with clamps) isn't going to make your jump any safer. Most of the "special" stuff you see BASE jumpers do is to prevent deployment issues that wouldn't develop as problems if they happened with a main canopy on a skydive.

Would you argue that anyone making more than the per captia GDP of the nation they live in is standing on the backs of the poor?

I've got it... Abortion... ...vending machines.

Well in any event, best of luck to those getting it going again. It's a pretty cool airfield to jump at, and handy when I lived in Ft Lauderdale.

I DON'T consider it to be okay. Now, Congress has the power to "raise armies." the SCOTUS held as much, so I won't say it's not Constitutional. I can even see philosophical reasons that are compelling for a draft. Nevertheless, the Draft itself becomes the slippery slope. Drawing lines becomes one of moral judgment rather than intellectual consistency. The argument then becomes, "Well, my reason for slavery is acceptable but yours isn't." I make a line in the sand. Slavery is bad. The difference with a draft, and I realize this is perhaps one of those moral judgements you're referring to, is that it's compulsory civic service intended to protect the whole framework underwhich you get to decide things like "compulsary civic service is bad" from external aggressors who don't give a crap about your framework or your decisions.

The Skydive Palm Beach owner too!? (or are you referring to when it was Skydive America? )

Oh absolutely. That's, in general, why I spoke up regarding the number 900, because it's a political number. It's the type of number a politician throws around when saying "I want to close 300 of our 900 overseas military bases, with more to come!" to a bunch of cheers in the audience. Then you find out that it results in no personnel coming home, little or no annual upkeep being saved, and forfeiture of $10Bs of dollars of infrastructure to the host countries.

Not that I'm sure anyone here cares, but... The US doesn't have 900 overseas military bases. The US has about 900 overseas defense sites. If you knew what qualified as a "defense site" you'd be laughing at what you just said too. Most of these sites have no personnel associated with them and there are probably less than 100 locations that a reasonable person would look at and say, "that's a military base." That said, the US spends around $100B/yr of its budget on overseas facilities (not including Iraq or Afghanistan) and has several $100B tied up in land and improvements. Closing, selling off, and/or consolidating a lot of these sites (particularly the preponderance of sites in Germany and South Korea) has the potential to save a lot of money, and politically it's about as painless as it gets in terms of defense cuts.

I agree that the level of precision, experience, and attention you need to pour in goes up very quickly as canopy size goes down, and underestimating the need for these resources is the root cause of many, if not most, accidents today. As I mentioned before, there's a level of canopy piloting that no amount of experience is going to 100% prepare you for, but there aren't that many people at that level. It's not "cool" or "cutting edge" to push your own personal envelope into well explored territory in a manner that's established as being stupid. But that doesn't mean you can't reasonably venture into that territory with proper coaching.

Yer on, dead center a disk...in a silo. How tall is the silo and what's under the disk? /edited to add alternate punchline: I reserve the right to use my experience to not even try it.

On one side of the coin... I would wager my experience and, say, a 126 against your experience and your 210 in any funky canopy piloting scenario you can come up with (a main-reserve entangled BOS not withstanding.) Given that, if it's okay by some measure for you to fly a 210 then it's even more okay by that same measure for me to fly a 126. After that the specific sizes and experience levels that are "justifiable" are a simple matter of negotiation. Now, on the other side of the coin... Most people who have been jumping small canopies for a quite a while made relatively little mistakes during their downsizing progression (fast downwinders, flying through predictable turbulence, turning way too low, tiling yourself into a corner and landing in a bunch of obsticles.) And because it all happened on bigger canopies, even though we didn't handle the situation perfectly the result was getting dirty and maybe some road rash. We learn those lessons the relatively easy way and we pile on the jump numbers to keep ourselves from making those kinds of mistakes again before we move on to higher performance wings. There's a certain level of swooping that really no amount of jumps is going to 100% prepare you for, but for every severe injury or fatality involving a jumper with several thousand jumps and a tiny cross-braced canopy I'll show you 50 severe injuries or fatalities involving a Katana/Crossfire and someone who was jumping it 500 jumps too early.

You just said "aff" and "the old days" in the same sentence.

oh hey, it's this thread again... weeee....

I disagree. If a pilot chute goes out the door then the jumper connected to it is going to manufacture a new door opening, somewhere between the trailing edge of the existing door and the tail of the aircraft. Not only will this severely compromise the structural integrity of the aircraft but it’s very likely that the control mechanisms will also be damaged in the process – not great for anyone still in the aircraft, especially the poor pilot. Don’t be fooled into thinking that the jumper will be able to respond quickly enough by diving out of the door after their pilot chute – if they were that switched-on then they wouldn’t have gotten themselves into this situation in the first place. Hopefully we’ll never get see which one of us is right about this. Pete. I don't think they're automatically going through the bulkhead although I agree it's possible. Depending on the exact seating configuration of the Otter there are only a few people who are likely to have a pilot chute get out the door. I'm used to seeing said people sitting pretty close to and and at least slightly forward of the door such that if they were just sitting there haplessly with their seatbelt off they'd get slammed into the doorframe and drug out before the slider came "down." That's just my speculation. I agree though, I wouldn't want to see either scenario.

is there a thread or video of this incident? It happened back in 2006, here is the incidents thread about it http://www.dropzone.com/cgi-bin/forum/gforum.cgi?post=2569712#2569712

Your stereotypes Shah... What's happening to your stereotypes?!? hu? long legged blond...Uma Thurman I mean your stereotypes about skydiving women.

So a toilet seat and an ashtray walk into an Army bar .... Bartender says, "Hey assface, there's no smoking in here."

Your stereotypes Shah... What's happening to your stereotypes?!?

At the rec center center we had plenty of outs. You had your choice of rooftops or power lines.

I didn't hear anyone say that. Did you? Where? Reading comprehension problem? I didn't hear anyone say that either which is why, in the last third of that sentence, I asked anyone who held that opinion to simply say so. What people had been doing instead was making sarcastic comments about cutting stuff they simply don't want. That's great and all but, as rehmwa pointed out, there's umpteen dozen threads of people bitching about things they consider 100% wasteful already. Turning this thread into yet another one by answering the question in the original post while rolling your eyes is NOT clever. Hmm. Point finger and blame. Nasty selfish people want the government to spend thier tax dollars more effectively. Read the thread. I've heard some ideas to voluntarily pay more. Those of us who belong to the half that pay income tax would like it to be spent more responsibly--if that concept requires a better explanation, you wouldn't understand it anyway. I haven't pointed fingers at anyone and I'm not going to kiss anyone's ass. I think people are sticking thier nose up at an interesting idea for a thread so I said something. It doesn't just have to be about increasing revenue just because "tax expenditures" seem to be things people are bringing up a lot. It could be closing a military base near you that brings jobs/money into the area, or infrastructure cuts that affect you, etc. Use your imagination.

Some rich people cheat taxes by adding paperwork. Some not-so-rich people cheat taxes by removing all paperwork. The rest of us use taxslayer, turbotax, h&r block, etc. and pay what we actually owe.

By the way, everyone in this thread who is saying they'd give up [feigned benefit owed to program/spending they dislike]... You're not being clever. You're very clearly making Dave's point in the original post that people are approaching the budget issue in a selfish manner. If you honestly think that you, personally, don't actually benefit from anything the government spends* money on or that you feel can't be eliminated/reduced to help get us towards a fiscally responsible budget then say so and defend your position. * I put an asterisk here because, like many of you, I don't like the attitude implications of the term "tax expenditure." That said, forget what you call it and look at the math that works out the same irrespective of the name.

It depends a great deal on where you're talking about. In California it's not difficult to get above $11k with just state income and county property taxes.

I'd give up the "OA" out of OASDI benefits with no change to how much I pay, although that's a bit of an empty offering as I don't expect the program to be solvent by the time I retire. I think providing "S" and "D" are defensible, but having the government finance people's retirement on the dime of the current working population is idiotic, has always been idiotic, and will always be idiotic. You can choose either sales tax or state income tax to deduct in addition to property taxes (and some other taxes/fees.) I could either do without those or do without the mortgage interest deduction. I say either because getting rid of both would dramatically increase my federal tax liability. There's a difference between asking me to cut back on recreational activities and asking me to halt recreational activities. On the spending side of things, most of the big government programs in my corner of the industry have already been cancelled over the last three years to save money. So unless you want to just cancel research and technology development all together, I'm not sure I can think of anything else I'd get rid of that would affect me.

Wasn't Geritol supposed to be for housewives?