FrogNog

Cats are like small dogs that can use litterboxes, give themselves baths with their tongues, and don't care about anyone but themselves. What's so horrible about that? -=-=-=-=- Pull.

Don't you mean "get a pipe and save on gas"? -=-=-=-=- Pull.

Chai is what tea is called in India and some other parts of the world. It is quite different tasting. If you want to try it, go to your friendly neighborhood Starbuck's (30 new stores now opening on your block!). It's tea with a magic ingredient not found in other teas, I believe: cardamom. -=-=-=-=- Pull.

Someone found my chest strap completely not done on a pre-board check once. As a result of this: 1. I studied the SIM check procedures and am checking things in threes now (i.e. leg strap, leg strap, chest strap) 2. I try and always get a pre-board check done. They are not purposeless, they can make the difference between feeling foolish and feeling dead. 3. I try and do up my chest strap before my leg straps. (This is personal and certainly won't apply to other people as much as the previous two items.) -=-=-=-=- Pull.

Word. My motto is if you can get the locking stows done, you can shoehorn in any amount of canopy puffing out the edges of the bag. (Just think of the bag as a funny-looking diaper.) And personally, I look forward to putting the first jump and second pack job on the new main attached to my new, first rig. Maybe I will be lucky and find Ralph left the main unpacked so I would have that additional honor. -=-=-=-=- Pull.

That's my plan. But I think like all "recently off student status" jumpers, I need to think long and hard about just how dangerous each type of jump is. (And, obviously, I would not be cutting away at 2,200 feet. ) I figure intentional cutaway setups are a good way to get used to flying a canopy backwards. (Some of my friends would say BASE is better, but they're just not well in the heads.) -=-=-=-=- Pull.

One jumper at a time, bitch of an exit, and think of the fuel and maintenance costs? We'd do better buying hot air balloons. -=-=-=-=- Pull.

Maybe the tandem passengers are not noobs. There are reasons to do tandems besides introducing someone to skydiving. -=-=-=-=- Pull.

I get all sorts of bruises from the leg straps. Some of them look like bowties, some like lines, some like big square bruises, etc. etc.. It's nothing compared to the bruises the ground can give ya. -=-=-=-=- Pull.

I like to look at the landing area, too, so I make sure to do this on the first jump of the day, after I open. Slightly more seriously, at my DZ students and x-jump wonders like myself land at a field a few miles away from the airport, so checking this out ahead of time would be a chore. However, doing chores is good for you. And unlike the original poster, I don't have tandem Paxen trusting me with their well being, and I have twice as much sport canopy over me, and etc. etc.. other differences. So mostly I just check the wind board on the ground as I gear up, ask the pilot what he thinks the wind is doing, check the ground wind as I walk to the plane and note whether it is different in direction from the alofts, then make one last check when the door is open ("Yup, I recognize this general landscape") and go! Everything after that is done on my feet, so to speak. -=-=-=-=- Pull.

Did you see more than one deployment on video? One of anything as variable as deployments seems an improper basis for making a rule. -=-=-=-=- Pull.

This is self-correcting. -=-=-=-=- Pull.

I'm not sure if you were joking or not, but I laughed...and I'm not sure if that's a good thing or not. That'll do. -Kramer There are two kinds of swoopers... -=-=-=-=- Pull.

CJ's profile sez he/she has 9 jumps. -=-=-=-=- Pull.

Don't feed the S/L trolls.

You didn't list this one so I will add my own here. Most important to me is maintaing the aircraft. Fast rides, cheap jumps and all the rest isn't worth squat if an aircraft isn't well maintained. Just my .02 High Fives B^2. DAMN STRAIGHT! Are you speaking as a pilot or a jumper? Because it makes sense to me that aircraft maintenance is #1 to a pilot - he wants his ass to get back to the ground in one piece. If the ride takes longer, that means less money if he's paid per load but I think jumper dumping rarely pays well enough to be considered "good hazard pay". And the higher the plane goes, the harder it is to breathe. I can see a pilot being interested in what kind of door he flies, but he's not typically supposed to be part of jumpers' freefall formations so again that's a minor concern. I, too, am most interested in seeing the wings stay on the aircraft at least long enough for me to jump out of it. (And if it lands safely that's good because I can go again, and I do care about our pilots, who are people too.) But maybe it wasn't part of the poll because it was a given? I fear the poll that says "which of these would you want in exchange for proper aircraft maintenance / jumper pilot training?" -=-=-=-=- Pull.

You get money back by paying too much in taxes, effectively giving the government (your best friend in good times and bad!) a no-interest loan. Personally, I'm getting $95 back. And I made out well* on ESPP this year, so somehow I managed to not owe tax on that. This sounds great to me. (* all things are relative.) -=-=-=-=- Pull.

Maybe because we don't want to go where Patrick De G was going. -=-=-=-=- Pull.

Amazon has huuuuuge... dive loops. She should post a pic of them. I think they used to be seatbelts. -=-=-=-=- Pull.

Were your riser stows tight? Maybe you had riser-dump. -=-=-=-=- Pull.

Time is money. Cheap jump tickets aren't cheap if it takes 20 minutes to get to 10k, because I can't do as many jumps per full day, and I typically only get 2 full days max per weekend. Maybe if I were unemployed I would rank cheap jump tickets higher. -=-=-=-=- Pull.

My theory is this is a psychological defense mechanism: always blame someone else. If a person screws up, they have to be mad at themselves, which is painful. It's much less painful (even pleasurable, in a self-righteous sort of way) to blame someone else. The key to maximizing the defense is for the person engaging it to believe it - to fool themselves. Like a liar who lies to cover his previous lies, someone who blames someone else incorrectly is now at risk of being wrong twice, and as a result will work even harder not to admit they were wrong in the first place. Thus the utter futility of trying to explain to people who are mad at you for what they did that it was their fault. Better to just beat their ass. -=-=-=-=- Pull.

I heard someone had an accidental main deployment on the step of a 182 and the canopy did clear the tail, but the jumper did not. The horizontal stabilizer caught him in the neck, and he landed in two places. So for me, I will stick with leaving the airplane before I initiate deployment. -=-=-=-=- Pull.

For me it's 2000 feet _bare minimum_ PLUS the height of the largest hill I could be over PLUS the height of the trees on that hill. As I regularly exit w/in 1/4 mile of a hill that's 600 feet tall, this means 3k in an aircraft emergency (according to my altimeter). If I knew for sure we were over the big wide farmland, I would consider taking it down to 2k, if it was a "calm, controlled" aircraft emergency. -=-=-=-=- Pull.

I've pretended to pull my reserve handle about as many times as I've actually pulled my main. (I do have to admit I pretend to pull my main about 2x as often as either of the above counts.) The only thing I worry about with a reserve handle is how hard it will be to pull. If that baby is within spec, I feel confident I can tear it out quick and well. -=-=-=-=- Pull.