The111

Just to be sure, Espen is "FatSnake"? I only ask because the pic looked like a DVD menu... that is the same pic as the cover art? Thanks.

VERY well said Glen. www.WingsuitPhotos.com

RE-UPDATE: Ok, my luck has changed again, for the better this time. I will be there on Friday, and Sat/Sun of course. Hope to see you all out there.

I can't answer about that canopy specifically, but in general, wingsuit openings (when done right) are much softer than opening from a track. Hell, they're even softer than normal freefall openings, for me. Like a nice subterminal hop n pop, very relaxed. www.WingsuitPhotos.com

www.WingsuitPhotos.com

Zhills is currently the most logical place in FL to have a large wingsuit event, and you will have fun there, and be treated as good as you deserve. www.WingsuitPhotos.com

Almost? www.WingsuitPhotos.com

Agreed, torrent DVD ISO would be ideal, if the "meeting" deems it ok. www.WingsuitPhotos.com

And people who dump high and fly their canopy perpendicular to jumprun for a long time can get into the same airspace as our pattern. I keep my eyes open for this very reason. It happens. When it does, I am often much closer to canopies than 1/4 mile (which I agree is a ridiculous figure), but I am not buzzing them either. www.WingsuitPhotos.com

Assuming you mean PM notification, same here... I have received several PM's in the past 24 hours and zero email notifications. www.WingsuitPhotos.com

Add my name to the list of people who will pay for a disc...

Double bump! I'll have BirdMan demo wingsuits for those qualified and interested.

You are talking about arguing on the internet, right? www.WingsuitPhotos.com

Agreed, that was my point in the other thread to somebody who said we should be NOWHERE NEAR THEM. All skydivers are actually pretty close to each other, anybody can fly their canopy under someone else in freefall if they do the right (wrong) thing. The only way to avoid this situation would be to drop one jumper at a time, every 5 minutes, which is obviously not feasible. So we take steps to minimize proximity issues and risk. Exit separation, tracking direction, canopy flight direction after opening, and wingsuit flight patterns all are a part of this. www.WingsuitPhotos.com

Come up with some more crazy problems for us to solve, it's fun! www.WingsuitPhotos.com

My opinion: take "canopy can't turn to intercept" and add a safe buffer to that. So the canopy can't even turn to make it "close". I don't know the exact number where the line is crossed, but as I've said in the other thread, if I see a canopy in my path I will make a point to avoid it by 50-100 yards (a football field). I think that is fair. I also make all reasonable efforts to avoid this situation in the first place. www.WingsuitPhotos.com

Ron, I am not disagreeing with you at all, but I have sort of a related question. Why is it that when the jump plane buzzes the spectators at the end of the day, everybody cheers? I was at a large boogie recently, at a very safe DZ, where a DC3 buzzed pretty freaking close over the crowd every night at sunset. Everybody (as far as I know), myself included, thought it was cool. Was that pilot the "best in the world"? I doubt it. I am not in any way saying the two situations are identical, but they are without a doubt similar. Every time I see an airplane coming almost straight at me, the #1 thought in my head is what would happen to me if that plane dipped its nose half a degree. But I still cheer. www.WingsuitPhotos.com

This is the second time you've responded with, "I don't know, and I don't care". Obviously you do care, since you've made many posts about how much we need to prevent wingsuit buzzes. Do you consider someone flying by half a mile away to be a buzz? The question DOES need to be addressed, otherwise you're saying that you can't identify the very event which you are condemning. I realize some people here have been instigating you and you don't have a reason to care too much about us right now, but raising issues about our flight operations and then responding to our serious quesitons with "I don't care" comes off sort of harsh. We're skydivers too, and we're not all dicks. Unless we fly straight away from the dropzone for our entire flight and land off, it is not possible to avoid all potential situations where there is a canopy nearby (we do avoid 99% of them though, as I will explain). Hell, on a normal freefall jump, if you open and fly your canopy straight up the jumprun, you can fly your canopy under the freefallers who exited after you. On ANY skydive you can get in somebody else's airspace. Every freefaller knows to avoid the situation described above (flying under someone else still in freefall), you fly your canopy away from jumprun after opening (you create proper exit separation too, obviously). The flipside of this coin is that if you CONTINUE to fly away from jumprun for a long amount of time and cover a large distance, you will be in airspace where wingsuits may be too. Assume a 1 mile long jumprun, and assume any canopy can fly at LEAST 1/2 mile off of jumprun after opening, that is ONE SQUARE MILE that canopies can potentially occupy. In reality it can be even bigger than that. As I said above, the only way for us to avoid that entire space would be to fly away from the dropzone our entire flight and land off. The way we do run our flight pattern avoids 99% of canopy traffic. Usually all the canopies are in a neat little line and we are way off to the side. Sometimes however, there is a canopy or two over where we are, somebody who has opened high and flown way off of jumprun. Again, speaking for myself, I keep my eyes open and identify canopies like this a full 30 seconds out (~2000 ft away). If I am headed into their immediate airspace, I alter my course a little bit and pass at a safe 50-100 yds. Not a buzz, but not totally bending over backwards to change my entire flight plan and fly the other way entirely. Plus, I'd prefer to keep them in my sight once I've seen them, and this is the best way to do this. My question remains - do you consider that a buzz? www.WingsuitPhotos.com

I very strongly disagree. Repeat: the act of buzzing someone is very safe, as safe as clapping hands. It depends on proximity... a question that has been raised by more than one person in this and the other general skydiving thread and has still not been addressed by anyone, including those who have the biggest problems with buzzing. What is a buzz? 10 yds? 100 yds? Half a mile? www.WingsuitPhotos.com

Oren, I am going to play devil's advocate again, but first I will agree that unplanned buzzes are not cool. But as I pointed out earlier proximity plays a huge role in the definition of buzz. If I see the jump plane fly by my open canopy a couple hundred yards away after opening, I will smile and think "cool". If I see the jump plane 20 yards away from my canopy (I have, at certain DZ's), I will get a little scared and still think "cool", but that's just me - I would not blame somebody else for getting angry in such a situation. Of those two jump plane situations described above, only one qualifies as a buzz. There are two questions at stake here. (1) Is it acceptable for a wingsuit to fly by at a certain distance to your canopy? (2) Is that any different from somebody tracking by your canopy? Your above question is #2, so I will suspend #1 while I answer it. It is VERY, VERY different. In fact, as I pointed out earlier, a wingsuit buzzing your canopy has more in common with a Velocity flying by, than it does with a tracker. It is not the SAME as a Velocity, but it is definitely a world away from a tracker. Have you flown a wingsuit? (I am not disputing your claim about safety considerations being similar in the two situations, just pointing out that wingsuit flight, physically, is fundamentally different from freefall) Please don't take this as criticism, but this statement alone shows (or seems to show, my apologies if I am wrong) at least a partial misunderstanding of how wingsuits work and what they can do (and this, a lack of awareness on either side, is a root of the problem here). A standard, safe wingsuit flightplan does NOT include opening up in the same place a non-wingsuit "last group" would open. The ideal flight pattern is to spend half the flight going away from jumprun, and the other half going parallel to it, in the direction of the DZ. Usually in my experience you open up far to the side (cross jumprun) of the first group... or sometimes even past them if you want (we open at least 1-2 miles from where we exit). This is the best flight pattern for wingsuits, for a lot of reasons I won't go into here, but is not without problems - sometimes the earlier jumpers who pulled high spend a lot of time flying crosswind and end up near us (wingsuits) before we pull. I am a local at Zhills and when I am where I should be, there are often tandem canopies in front of me @3k feet, far off the line of flight. I will not say they are "in my way" since it is very possible they are not aware of the wingsuit flight pattern (a problem for both sides, we all need to strive to be more aware of what the other types of jumpers are doing). As I said in an earlier post, I turn to avoid the canopy and fly by at 50-100 yards away, not a buzz by my definition. I have had quite a few people approach me afterwards and say that was cool. I don't plan buzzes and I don't look for them, but if people end up in the same airspace as me, the bottom line is I am going to be flying by their canopy at some distance, so I make it a safe one. I am not going to tell somebody they were in "my" airspace either because I am fine with it and keep my eyes open when I fly. BUT if somebody ever tells me I was in the wrong for avoiding their canopy at a VERY safe distance, I will have to point out to them that the standard wingsuit flight pattern will always have wingsuiters descending .5-1 miles off of the line of flight, and if you are uncomfortable with that you shouldn't fly that far away yourself. That said, you have a right to be uncomfortable if anybody is buzzing you extremely close because (1) they thought it would be fun or (2) their eyes weren't open. We all share the same airspace whether flying a canopy or a wingsuit, and we all need to keep our eyes open and keep respectable distances. As I pointed out earlier, any reasonable person would get pissed if I flew up behind them under my Spectre and yelled in their ear. Speaking of sharing airspace, I have seen more than one glider very close to me while flying my wingsuit at Zhills, which is another good reason to keep your eyes open when flying a wingsuit... www.WingsuitPhotos.com

Welp, I'm lost. For one, I don't know a thing about standalone drive. Two, you're using good media (good enough that that's not the problem). Three, in my eyes, based on my knowledge, what you describe is impossible. Try the forums at cdfreaks.com. It is to disc burning what dropzone.com is to skydiving. You may find an answer there. I doubt you will here. www.WingsuitPhotos.com

Call me a skeptic, but my guess is along these lines... I don't think there will be huge leaps and bounds in wingsuit technology anytime soon. We're inflatable gliders, that's all; there's not a whole lot to improve upon. On the other hand, I do see a huge potential for the sport, not in terms of suits getting better, but in terms of flyers getting better. I am plenty happy with my S3 and will fly it until it falls apart. My skills on the other hand, I expect to progress and I will never stop learning new things, even if I stay in the same suit forever. We are supposed to fly these suits like extensions of our bodies, so I plan on staying in my suit until I am so accustomed to it that it feels like part of my body. Unless there is a REALLY compelling reason to change suits. I would like to see a higher performance suit with backvents/airlocks, if such a thing is possible. www.WingsuitPhotos.com

I have a lot of experience burning CD's and DVD's. My guess is between the quality of the drive, and the quality of the media you are using, you have run into some crazy coincidences with read/write success/failure that makes it look as if what you've described is happening (when it's obviously not possible). These days, quality media can be read in almost any drive. A quality drive can read/write to almost any media. The first test I would do, in your situation, is take the media that will not be read by your drive, and try to read it with a different drive. That will shed some light on the situation. What brand of media are you using? EDIT: I searched for info on "ILO" DVD hardware (since I'd never heard of it) and couldn't find much... is this a standard IDE/SCSI burner, or is it one of these weird external standalone things (which I don't know much about)? www.WingsuitPhotos.com

I will be there with BirdMan demo wingsuits for anybody who wants to try and is qualified.

You can use my video footage... it will be all wingsuit jumps. www.WingsuitPhotos.com