The111

My friend had one of those, but a 750, and I saw him do some things that seemed scarier than skydiving to me. Wheelies at 100mph+ through traffic and around corners (even over a bridge in one case), for miles at a time, stoppies starting from 100mph. He said the scariest thing by far though was taking it to 160mph on a long straight empty road... he'd have to focus on the horizon because any bumps, etc in the road would only be visible for a split second before he had to react, and he literally had to hang on for dear life as the wind tried to take him off the bike. He only wrecked it once, in a really funny way, doing a wheelie by some girl's house he was mad at, going about 80mph in a residential zone with no helmet while mooning everyone... he couldn't slow down enough for a turn coming up and laid it down at about 40mph and rolled into the grass unscathed, with his pants still down. After getting 12 points on his license in one year he decided to sell it... www.WingsuitPhotos.com

My dad has been doing this his whole life, but the kicker is - he doesn't find crap. He has found two nice sets of 100W floor speakers (one set is sitting in my room

I made a jump with Jari and his arm wings each had a rigid plastic rib between the two outermost cells, if that makes any sense. Not sure if it was a S4 prototype per se, but it definitely was something more than an S3. www.WingsuitPhotos.com

Sorry if this has been posted before. http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2&u=/ap/20040505/ap_on_re_us/attacks_redevelopment www.WingsuitPhotos.com

What'th a lithp? www.WingsuitPhotos.com

What part of that did you misunderstand? I was talking about this part. It seemed to me that you were implying that the common perception is that "getting long flights *does* mean you suck" and you were offering a different perspective. Oh well, maybe I'm still missing something. www.WingsuitPhotos.com

Yeh, I understand your point here, it's just the original post you replied to was Steve saying he sucks because he can't go long... and you said going long doesn't mean you suck... which wasn't what he was implying. I thought what you meant to say was "going long doesn't mean you're great"... or "not going long doesn't mean you suck"... but I could be wrong. I did understand your intent though. www.WingsuitPhotos.com

Heh... I thought it said AAD at first. Had to think about that one... www.WingsuitPhotos.com

Assuming you pulled at 2500, that is an average of 26mph. Is that possible? In the "3 minute men/women" thread people are making a big deal out of 40mph averages... (though admittedly, those averages are over longer durations, hence more difficult). www.WingsuitPhotos.com

Surprisingly enough, getting long flights sometimes even means you are good! Assuming you typoed and left out a "not" or something. www.WingsuitPhotos.com

Not speaking from practical experience, but I could see that it is possible, if you had a lot of forward drive when you dumped (not the way I dump) that you'd open in less vertical distance, because of horizontal sniveling (like a hop n pop). www.WingsuitPhotos.com

Yeh, I do understand that it's no normal skydive, especially with the suit. It looked to me like you were able to "push off" the balloon, which is nice. I still have no balloon jumps, having done my beer still air exit just a few months ago (without wingsuit obviously) from a helicopter. I did 3, and they were fun, but it sucked not being able to push off (although falling off does have its charms too). www.WingsuitPhotos.com

Yeh, I'm planning on getting a Neptune sometime anyway, I forgot they had a clock on them. Thanks. www.WingsuitPhotos.com

Well if no one else will reply I will. Cool video Steve. :) You're one step closer to our mutual dream of taking flight off of giant walls. But I question the etiquette of saying 3-2-1-cya on a skydive. www.WingsuitPhotos.com

That's the exact point I made above - the watch is NOT needed for utility while in freefall. But if I'm the kind of person who likes to wear my watch all day long, I was curious if it's necessary to take it off before each load. www.WingsuitPhotos.com

It could be argued that knowing your altitude is so important that it's worth the risk - whereas knowing the time of day in freefall is not even remotely as important, and therefore not worth the risk. I'm still undecided on this, but for now I don't plan on wearing the watch. Not that I'm jumping in the next few weeks anyway. www.WingsuitPhotos.com

This is probably another case of me thinking too much... Would wearing a metal watch on my right wrist in freefall present a snag hazard? I remember getting back into the sport a year ago and trying to remember which wrist to wear my alti on... besides looking at everyone else, my first thought was that on the right wrist, a bulky alti could present a snag hazard. But I have a metal watch that is pretty low profile and I normally wear it on my right wrist... just wondering if I could leave it on for skydiving. www.WingsuitPhotos.com

There was a contest like this on Fark a few weeks ago with some cool entries... There are also real hybrid animals in existence, though none are that crazy. My favorites are ligers and zonkeys. www.WingsuitPhotos.com

Or PAINT which comes with Windows. www.WingsuitPhotos.com

That calculation still wouldn't prove which is safer - just which is more successful, i.e. which resulted in less deaths. Driving results in many more deaths per capita than airliner piloting, but it is not safer. The participants are just trained better in piloting and stupider in driving. The intelligence or level of training of those participants says nothing about how safe the activity itself is. www.WingsuitPhotos.com

I never thought I'd be speaking for Ron, but I think his point is that if the danger was taken more seriously, incidents would happen less frequently. As a newbie, I always hear that in the "old days", gear failure fatalites were common... but now that those are almost things of the past, the new killer is low turns - something which can be prevented by giving people the right knowledge and attitude. I think that's what Ron's trying to do... www.WingsuitPhotos.com

fire From Zhills, New Years Eve, taken by Stacy. www.WingsuitPhotos.com

Do you realize how impossible it is to statistically compare two acts that are so different? For example, which of the following do you look at? Car accidents per car ride VS Incidents per skydive Car accidents per driver VS Incidents per skydiver Car accidents per minute of driving VS incidents per skydive Car accidents because of equipment failure VS Incidents because of equipment failure Car accidents because of driver error VS Incidents because of jumper error Most drivers spend hours in their car every week but only get in and out the door a few times. Most skydivers spend a few minutes in the air every weekend and get in and out of the door several times. Since you can make such conrete, certain statements comparing the safety levels of the two activities, I can only assume you've conducted a statistical analysis to back up that claim. Feel free to post it, or a link to the countless threads that have attempted to do the same thing and always ended up presenting all the problems associated with it. All that ranting aside, statistics are good for nothing. They don't tell which is safer - they tell which is more successful in practice, which depends on other factors. I was in a long discussion about this same thing on a kitesurfing forum the other day. Someone claimed that a jumbo jet is the safest way to travel. I laughed. Just because less people die on airliners does not mean they're safer than cars. It means the pilots are trained much more thoroughly (because it's so dangerous) and it's regulated much more (because it's so dangerous). Only an idiot would claim that flying miles above the earth at 100's of mph, moving in 3 dimensions, is safer than moving along the surface of the earth, in 2 dimensions, at speeds usually much less than 100mph. Skydiving is inherently more dangerous than driving. You are much higher off the ground, you are moving much faster, and you are moving in 3 dimensions instead of 2. Or as an engineer would say, your potential and kinetic energies are much higher so an impact will damage you a lot more. You depend on your gear to save your life every time you use it, also unlike driving. Statistics do not tell you anything about safety and even if they could, you cannot conduct a fair analysis of this situation. EDITED to add one more thought - Even if it could be proven that skydiving was "statistically safer" than driving, it would be almost entirely in part to the higher level of training and regulation in skydiving (similar to the jet explanation above). Next time you're yelling at the idiot on the road going straight with his turn signal on and a cell phone stuck to his head, imagine someone with that level of awareness in freefall. Imagine a world of ignorant drivers in freefall. If all drivers took up skydiving, the incident rates would be so high that the population would be visibly smaller... www.WingsuitPhotos.com

What - How is that even possible? I dunno, I heard something about it once. Still trying to figure it out myself... www.WingsuitPhotos.com

Probably because you have a life outside the internet... www.WingsuitPhotos.com