FrogNog

Not a down-plane, exactly. That's two canopies working together to point straight down. Your issue is called I think "diving". With your previous post, the reason you don't want to flare partially higher up is because the flare is a way of landing at low downward speed by getting the canopy to make more lift than normal for a short period of time. This is done by tilting the canopy up a little bit which makes it make more lift but slows it down. If it runs out of speed, it will start to fall again and will deflate, too. The goal of flaring is to keep the canopy flying normally until juuuuust the right point very near the ground, and then use up the canopy's speed to make a soft landing, depleting the canopy's speed right as you step onto the ground. (Give or take. ) If you slow the canopy down before you get to the ground, it can't give as strong an arrest of your downward movement. Your two options with a slow canopy are: 1. allow it to regain a little or a lot of its speed (which means it will dive a little or a lot) or 2. keep it going about that slow and have less (or no) ability to flare. This second option can be not so bad, or inconvenient, or dicey, or somewhat painful, or very painful, or life-threatening, depending on how slow you got it, how your canopy reacts to being that slow, and what happens with changes in wind. I have landed a 290 sf student canopy at half brakes with no flare and I was OK, because it wasn't coming down that fast. In fact, that's what they told us to do on our first jump course IF we were going to have an off landing and before we learned how to judge our own flares. But it's not the ideal way, and I sure wouldn't want to do it for fun on smaller, faster canopies, so do what your instructors tell you.

I did S/L and after I passed my 15 s, my next jump was from 13k. The kilometer-wide student field looked like an ant. I saw Alaska, Japan, and Mexico at the same time. -=-=-=-=- Pull.

Just pretend you're back on the ol' static line. -=-=-=-=- Pull.

Do you have any buddies at the DZ that you can borrow gear from? Obviously if you do this you have the risk of owing even more if you're wearing their gear when something unexpected happens, but if it goes well, you can get some jumps and save the price on rental. I've got something of this deal going at my DZ right now. Also, if you get just two jumps in between now and Jan 30, properly spaced, you will retain currency under the rules. This may or may not be better than waiting until then and having a coach jump. But if it's what you want, see if you can beg for that money from somewhere. Uh, I'd send you some, except I'm trying to pay for my first rig, used canopies, used Cypres, etc.. But on rainy weekend days I have considered getting a cardboard sign for the offramp.... -=-=-=-=- Pull.

Strangers are strangers. Some of them are good, some of them are bad, some of them are in between. If you don't know how many jumps they have, you don't know if they're really even a skybrother (or sister). -=-=-=-=- Pull.

My Infiniti is going to kick this concept up two notches. Just a couple more months.... -=-=-=-=- Pull.

I think they're just two points on the continuum of how far you turn in your turn, as seen from above. I'm guessing a 90 degree turn would be a carve, but a 180 or a 270 would be a hook because your path from above would look like a fishhook, meathook, etc.. -=-=-=-=- Pull.

Half brakes makes your canopy fly slower. If this effect is achieved without altering the angle of your canopy glide (i.e. your forward speed and your downward speed are attenuated proportionately), and the winds are not high enough to make you move backward at half brakes, then you are precisely correct that half brakes flying against the wind will make you land closer to where you are now than full flight would, and half brakes flying with the wind will make you land further from where you are now than full flight would. When the winds are above a certain speed, however, this is no longer true because the definition of "closer" is ambiguous with respect to direction toward or away from the target. (If "closer" is redefined in terms of "positive distance in the direction you are facing", then again you are precisely correct, even in winds great enough to move you backwards.) The quick example is if you are at full flight into the wind and going to touch ground straight down, then if you go to half brakes you will land backwards somewhere which would usually not be classified as "closer". Ignoring higher winds that blow you backwards at full flight or in brakes, the other catch is that on all canopies, after a certain level of brakes, the glide ratio worsens; that is, the reduction in downward speed of the canopy proportionately outpaces the reduction in forward speed of the canopy. This happens because ram-air canopies are wings and a significant part of their slow decent rate is caused by generating lift as they fly through the air. Reducing their speed through the air reduces this lift, and it also reduces the ram-air pressurization necessary to maintain the wing shape, typically decreasing its lift-generating efficiency per units of speed. The reason we say you are "usually" right is that there's a gray area between how far into brakes you are, what canopy type/size/loading you have, and how much wind we're talking about. In light winds it's also hard to tell what will happen. With some canopies, the ones trimmed "pointed steeper down" than others, slight brakes is rumored to actually improve their glide a little bit. Rear risers is supposed to do this more. If the increase in glide ratio from trimming flatter (via slight toggle input or some rear riser input) outpaces the reduction in canopy flight forward speed component, your extra time in the air will afford you more forward movement through the air. If there is no wind, you will land even further in the direction you are facing. I believe if the wind is less than than the average of your full-flight forward canopy speed component and your new forward canopy speed component, you will land further in the direction you are facing, if the wind is more than the average of your two forward canopy speed components (full-flight and new) you will land less far in the direction you are facing, and if it is equal you will land in the same place but be in the air longer to enjoy the view and work out your arms. The simplification of all this calculation is this: your canopy movement across the ground is determined by your canopy's forward movement component plus or minus the wind speed (plus if you are flying with the wind, minus if you are flying against the wind) multiplied by the time you are in the air. You have the ability to flip the sign of the wind component (by doing a 180 to face the other way) and you have the ability to adjust your forward speed component and time aloft using the toggles - but this control is limited and the two outputs are inversely, nonlinearly related. (Please accept my apologies for the simplifying assumption that all flight is done facing directly toward or away from the wind, or in zero wind. It gets only slightly more difficult to compute and understand but extremely more lengthy to describe flying at an angle to the wind.) -=-=-=-=- Pull.

Actually, this would train the kid to deal well with carbon dioxide poisoning. The actual quantity of oxygen in that container will long outlast the point where the exhaled carbon dioxide concentration becomes fatally toxic. Unless this was in Denver. Then I'm not so sure. -=-=-=-=- Pull.

I think anyone who wears those pins is a poser, "real" skydivers included. Of course, that's just my personal reaction to people who have to show off how stinking cool they are, combined with how stupid I think those necklaces are. I've never cared for shark's teeth necklaces either. Pins are different. :) -=-=-=-=- Pull.

Sweet! Nice view, quiet time to enjoy it with the spouse, then a balloon jump! WOO! -=-=-=-=- Pull.

Nah, it just means you need to buy a ticket. -=-=-=-=- Pull.

I have 1 cutaway on SOS as student and 0 on TAS, so I'm not experiened appropriately for the topic. However, I have a conviction. Some of my early drills were in gun culture, and there depending on a fallible, mechanical safety device can kill. Fast forward to RSLs, and when someone tells me something is a backup device, I do all I can to make sure it stays a backup device. This means acting like it isn't there, and doing my procedures. Only if that is interrupted (e.g. by my noticing a huge white canopy overhead, instead of freefall) would I cease my original plan. It all depends on how quick I was on the reserve handle vs. how quick my RSL-opened reserve opens. -=-=-=-=- Pull.

Sorry, I am LAME, I am going to be in Cabo for the holidays. But in spring I get my first rig, and after summer tapers off in these parts, I plan on seeing some sights and jumping out of some different stuff. Edited to add: BEER! -=-=-=-=- Pull.

The only thing about women who skydive that scares me is gear-checking them. I'm still struggling to find a polite way to move things around to check their chest strap and 3-rings. So inconvenient! -=-=-=-=- Pull.

Girls are generally smarter than guys. That's my theory. -=-=-=-=- Pull.

i think that can be aranged. I'm sure most guys would agree to date 5 girls at a time , for the sake of not fighting for us Oof, I dated two girls at once and it had its finer points, but it wore me out. Basically you're busy dating and they get alternating days off. If you want some time to yourself, how do you explain that when they already think you have half your days to yourself? So I picked a different girl who was as good as both of them put together. But to put it more succinctly, dating 2 or more women at the same time would leave NO time for skydiving, which would be unacceptable! (The one exception would be if you dated all the women on the same nights. So, if you took the twins with the twins out to dinner, movie, and dessert together, then went skydiving the next coupla days, that would be OK. A third woman would break it because triplets never work out, you only have two arms, etc..) -=-=-=-=- Pull.

Is SCUBA diving really that dangerous, or do more people just manage to kill themselves doing it? I think SCUBA has less inherent danger than skydiving but much more opportunity for people to take on risks they aren't prepared for without realizing it. Of course, we don't have to deal with sharks.

OK, I don't want to hear anything about being colorblind, or any questions about whether various articles of my skydiving kit come in men's versions. And that's a Hornet 190 I load at 1.2:1; a friend has been kind enough to let me jump it a few times while I wait for my own gear (which will make my color coordination even worse - trust me). That's my "two-step soft landing only 25 meters from target" smile. -=-=-=-=- Pull.

Alcohol: getting all sorts of freaks laid. -=-=-=-=- Pull.

If you had the right equipment or knew how to use what you had, administering the punishment would wake her up by itself, and you'd save yourself a step. -=-=-=-=- Pull.

I'm not saying I believe what I believe because of the goodness of our government's heart, or because of their excellent transparency, or etc.. But Occam's Razor is clear here. (It's not infallible ever, but in some cases it does make a clear suggestion.) These trails appear all the time, all over everywhere. They would seem to require a lot of material - they're hundreds of miles long and start out as wide as the wingspan on a commercial jetliner and spread out, remaining visible, to many times that. This implies a lot of something is being used here. If it's not something commonly used somewhere else, surely the multitude of people moving it and loading it into the planes would have some questions and would find out some answers. Keeping all those people quiet is not impossible, but it's unlikely. Or, these could be commercial flights leaving contrails that don't all behave alike. I don't think I need to get into anecdotes about contrails I have seen personally to validate the possibility that contrails have variety. We can also look at the observers. There's less to be proven here, but some interesting things are missing. First, these airplanes aren't very far away. Less than 20 miles, even if they're magic military planes. They're visible with the naked eye. But there's no telescope photography of any of them to help shed light on whether these are contrails or spray, and whether the airplanes are commercial or military. One guy saying he made a phone call to ATC and they said there were no commercial flights doesn't mean a thing. He could be lying, ATC might have told him a creative truth to get him off their back because they think he's a whacko, there could have been any of a number of miscommunications, etc.. I'd like to see the colors and logos on the planes. Back to the Razor, if we see commercial colors and logos then either our government is putting significant quantities of sprayables into these airplanes and flying them with commercial airlines' colors and logos, either landing them at government airstrips or terminals at public airports or they're loading up commercial airlines with this stuff without the commercial pilots' knowledge or the airlines are conspiring together with them or... they're just commercial jetliners. One I'm not sure about is whether ATC radar data is subject to FOIA. If it is, anyone with an atomic clock and a GPS can check for themselves what was flying over, where it went, and where it came from. If most of these chemtrails directly connect commercial or shipping travel hubs, that might tell us something. But, yeah, I want to believe our government is fiddling with the weather, keeping it a secret out in plain (plane?) sight, and they're doing a good job at both. (edited to add the word "job". So close, and yet so far.) -=-=-=-=- Pull.

He probably won't have to pay for the heli, he'll have to pay for the salvaging, the repair, and the restoration. If the water isn't too deep I reckon they can get it out OK, and I further reckon the heli isn't damaged too badly - narfed blades, sick engine, water where there shouldn't be any in the avionics, etc.. If he gets to fly again, hopefully he'll have learned that this stunt requires a much longer line. -=-=-=-=- Pull.

I gave my bottled water to a tandem pax that lost his lunch on himself (and the tandem master). Tandems may be more "entertainment" than "sport" but I know my welcome at the DZ as a licensed jumper would drop off if I don't treat them kindly. And to be fair, they're doing the scariest part of skydiving - the first jump(s). I decided I was a skydiver when I became more anxious than scared at most of the preparatory phases of skydiving. That I now consider hot loads "fun" instead of "even more nerve-wracking" is a big one. At about the same time I began to love the action parts of skydiving instead of just doing them, and that was another sign. Mmm... unstable exits! Whee! -=-=-=-=- Pull.

Scary. -=-=-=-=- Pull.