FrogNog

When you set the rig on the floor/ground, take the PC out, and pull on the bridle, the pin pulls and then what happens when you pull more? Does the entire rig lift off of the floor? Or does the bag come out of the rig before the rig comes completely off the floor? Not that this is any sort of "official, guaranteed, no problem!" test. This is just a simple test that has been used for similar issues before (I think for pin stickiness) so it gives a benchmark. -=-=-=-=- Pull.

Are you saying that immediately after you graduate and get your own gear, you don't plan to have an AAD, but after you continue to jump for a while, then you'll get one? AADs help when something totally unexpected and usually unpredictable happens, or when the jumper loses altitude awareness. Both these things can happen to anyone at any time, but there are certain risk factors, and I would think having 100 jumps would be a big risk factor. I have a second rig I am not jumping right now basically because I haven't bought an AAD for it. I'm not saying I won't jump without an AAD (I have done this when demoing gear*), but for my own rigs my rule is if an AAD is appropriate, I can't afford to jump the rig until I can afford the AAD. (* I realize that demoing gear is a risk factor. It made me sweat. I compensated by simplifying my dives, preparing for and planning them harder, and doing only a few.) -=-=-=-=- Pull.

I've seen this sign with modernized prices. There was an additional line below that: "If I watch you pack it: " and it was twice the price of the preceeding line. All the items seemed fair - they were straight estimates of time required. -=-=-=-=- Pull.

If an instructor watches you pack it but doesn't correct you while you're packing it, you have the opportunity to ask them whether they would jump it. That's another good gauge on how bad you did. Personally I only care about the basics: lines in the middle, slider up, line stows don't look like they'll wrap around each other. Other than that it could look like cat barf and I'd jump it. -=-=-=-=- Pull.

I think this whole "who should / shouldn't be allowed to wear closing pin jewelry" thing could be solved by just etching some things into the pins. There would be "WHUFFO" pins, "STUDENT" pins, and a number of graduate-level pins - for examples "HUMBLE A", "MEATBOMB", and "SKYGOD". Personally, I stayed away from pins because they were too popular / cool / trendy for my tastes. (My jump buddies can correlate this to my jumpsuit and helmet styles.) -=-=-=-=- Pull.

One or two of my instructors suggested I do that, too. I think they were testing my ground/book knowledge. I told them I didn't think it was a good enough idea for me to do it personally.

Manufacturers can typically make the main container on the harness so it can easily hold one size step smaller than the size it was intended for, or even two size steps smaller (although it could get "squishy" at this point). It is my understanding (with only a handfull of handfulls of jumps and a year and a half in sport) that new jumpers who get kit made for them will ask the manufacturer to make it a tight fit for the size of main they want to put in it to start out, and that will last them two downsizes, which can be quite a while. With the smaller canopy in there, just shorten the closing loop appropriately. (The manufacturer can tell you what is safe to do with their containers with real numbers.) I don't know as much about reserve sizing. I seem to recall they can go down a single size in a reserve in a container, but I don't know for sure about two. And so far it hasn't bothered me because I really, really like having a big fat reserve canopy. (It cushions some of my landings. ) -=-=-=-=- Pull.

Anybody have comments on one of the original poster's questions: what if the packer totally hoses up? For example, what if you have a PC in tow, land the reserve, and find the packer's power tool still in your main closing loop? Sure, the jumper sort of deserves that for not checking his own pin, but this is different from "must have been your body position." -=-=-=-=- Pull.

Some people ("swoopers") do this when landing for fun. The ones who do it longest tend to learn it carefully and work at it so they don't actually kill themselves. But the drop zone may still require them to land in a different area to keep them separate from jumpers who land differently, to avoid conflicts. (Think fast lane and slow lane on freeway.) -=-=-=-=- Pull.

I was surprised once to find that it took me more than 500 feet to get my hand back in my second toggle, just from the way it turned, how the wind kept it closed, and how tough a time I was having getting my gloved fingers in there. Good thing I wasn't super low, but I was "concerned." But I wouldn't know that about my toggles if I hadn't tried it a few times. -=-=-=-=- Pull.

At the risk of being called a pedant or grammar nazi or something like this, I would like to point out that some of the numbered list here is ambiguous. A reader who conducts a thorough reading or your post, inspection of the attached pictures, and has prior field knowledge can figure out what you mean, but by itself each numbered item is a sentence without a subject and as a result it's ambiguous whether each sentence is equivalent to starting with "the rigger's work I saw was wrong because he had ..." or "when doing this repair you should always ...". With technical information on life-saving equipment, I'm a big fan of writing things so they cannot be accidentally interpreted exactly the opposite of the intended way.

One reason I like the Infinity is because they're an hour's drive away. I assume people in other parts of the country (or even world) feel the same way about their local manufacturers. Since you're in North Carolina, is there anything near you? And as someone else has said, Kelly is an awesome customer taker-care-of. My other reasons for loving the Infinity are somewhere in the archives. Typical stuff like great looks, great value, love all the features and don't hate any of them, rig feels solid, blah blah blah. I feel I have a duty to be honest and say your mileage may vary on all these things. Or "different stokes for different folks." Since most of my student rigs were Infinitys I got to know how they felt. (Nice reserve handle, too.

Aren't 7-cell canopies usually cheaper than 9-cell canopies, as well? Does the solid, not-custom-order coloring have any effect? -=-=-=-=- Pull.

So... those 3 gallons... If we leave them in the container - lets say plastic.. are you willing to have 26.4 lbs dropped on your head from 20 feet? Or would you think that's bad? t I like the semi truck comparison. How fast would a semi truck (without trailer, say) have to be going to have that much kinetic energy? Would you be willing to stand in front of a semi truck going that fast on level ground (with frictionless tires, wheel bearings, and transmission) and stop it all by yourself? I believe the answer for me is "heck yeah!" The reason is I get all the time I need to stop it, gently, and I can spread the force it exerts on me out over my hands or shoulder. (In this experiment I assume a wall is not going to "back up" my efforts at stopping the truck.) With three plastic gallons of water falling on my head, I pretty much only get as much time to stop them (absorb their kinetic energy) as the time it takes them to compress my spine and leg joints, and I only get to spread it out over my crown. Oof! and with a bullet, I get even less time to try and absorb the energy (say one nine-hundredth of a second for a pistol bullet or one two- or three-thousandth of a second for a rifle bullet - I believe that's 300 microseconds) and I only get to spread it out over a circular part of my body 9mm (or 18mm, depending on subsequent mushrooming) to 20mm in diameter. That's where things come apart. -=-=-=-=- Pull.

I'm another. File me under "Christian: Other". I am also of the "preaches only to himself" sort. -=-=-=-=- Pull.

One USAF and one Navy pilot chute? Oof, that's got to be a tense pack job in there. But we all know which pilot chute really gets the job done, eh? -=-=-=-=- Pull.

Is the Ipanema carbureted or injected? The energy density of alcohol is concerning; alcohol is significantly "puffier" than gasoline or kerosene. But I think that's only a volume issue, not a weight issue[1]. If someone wants to show I'm wrong on that, too, I'm listening.

Thanks for the picture. When I searched I kept getting risqué beach pictures. (That's good and that's bad.) -=-=-=-=- Pull.

You may be right, but my thinking is that volatility does not necessarily make for a poor motor fuel - it may make for a better one because it can be boiled and mixed with air more easily. (I understand part of the problems with gasoline car engine efficiency are because it contains so many different types of molecules with different boiling points that it takes a long time, relatively speaking, to get it to become gaseous and mix with the air prior to burning.) The people who really have to make that sort of decision are the aviation engineers, not us.

i'm assuming he watched the same video I did - with the guys skydiving with a car (and I'm assuming the video was genuine...) The video I know about showing this is Joe Jennings' "Good Stuff". They chuck the cars out of what I believe are CASAs outside Eloy. (At least, they showed Eloy.) Based solely on what I saw in that video: they drop the cars in parts of the desert where they don't expect anyone to be. They clean up their messes. They prepare the cars (according to the video) to a great degree, probably to make them lighter, safer to ride in, and easier to clean up. They sometimes have injuries from the car beating them up, but sometimes they get a car that decides to fly real nice. It's all in Good Stuff, which if I may plug, is cheap and a fun watch. Edited to add: this video is why I'm a skydiver right now.

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clicky http://www.thestar.co.za/index.php?fSectionId=132&fArticleId=2449210. I didn't find any pictures of this thing so I wondered if someone else had any info. I'm an alternative fuels fan, and of course an aviation fan, so the idea of them going together is pretty exciting to me, even if the Alaskan interior will be collapsed ten feet below sea level and Luigi Canni will be landing a 5 square foot canopy by the time one of these is certified in the U.S.. -=-=-=-=- Pull.

The movement isn't depending on weight shift, it's depending on fluid dynamics. If you drop a penny in a swimming pool it tumbles irregularly too. -=-=-=-=- Pull.

The higher up you go, the easier it is to break the sound barrier because gravity does not appreciably decrease at atmospheric altitudes, sound travels slower as the air gets thinner, and air resistance decreases a LOT. -=-=-=-=- Pull.

Fresh air and a job with a view. Not bad. -=-=-=-=- Pull.