yoink

I'd love to know any conclusions of the study. Were there any particular differences noted?

I've seen those but MAN they're expensive - The medium size is over $600!... can it really be worth that? I've cooked some pretty good food over a homemade brick bbq.

I'm guessing the discussion will go something like this.. http://www.dropzone.com/cgi-bin/forum/gforum.cgi?do=post_view_flat;post=4720083;page=1;sb=post_latest_reply;so=ASC;mh=25;

Just don't hit the water... Problem solved!

Seems like a good idea. Best of luck with it!

A good friend has one which I use regularly. I'm not a fan. If you want to do smoking, they work well and easily for that. You just put in the pellets, turn on the auger and forget about it. For typical BBQ though it just doesn't work that well. It doesn't get hot enough to get that seared, slightly burnt exterior done fast enough. If you leave meat (or particularly fish) in long enough to get that, you overcook the hell out of it. There's no beating a charcoal / lumpwood BBQ, but for convenience I can make a gas one work. Pellets are far down the roster IMO.

The USD spends well in many parts of the globe. That means you're part of Canada! I'm going down to Mexico this weekend for lunch. I'll be spending USD there. Does that mean Mexico is part of the USA as well? Why are we spending so much on border control if that's the case?

Make absolutely certain your closing loop is adjusted properly and watch what you're doing in the chopper that you don't knock it lose. This is a properly scary video from the UK a while back. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZnwEC2NcEg Could EASILY have killed everyone on board. Read this thread for lots of good suggestions, in particular the stuff about that specific heli and the restraints / lack of ability to check yourself by someone who was there.. http://www.dropzone.com/cgi-bin/forum/gforum.cgi?do=post_view_flat;post=4508332;page=1;sb=post_latest_reply;so=ASC;mh=25;

my mistake... Best get someone to spellcheck the letter before you send it!

I'd definitely take out this passage. I think you'd be right to refuse him, but stick to what impacts you. Whether he's classified as obese or not crosses the line in what the message should be. I'd also keep the letter simple and not mention possibility for liability or negligence if he gets hurt jumping. 'Dear John, After considerable thought I unfortunately cannot let you skydive at our location given your age, weight and physical condition due to concerns I have about your safety at this time. In order to jump here we would require: 1) your weight not to exceed 220lbs 2) An signed medical stating your fitness to parachute 3) and a modern digital AAD. Please understand that these requirements are for your safety. I wish you the very best, and if you do decide to meet these targets look forward to beginning your training. Kind Regards' etc I'd try to keep it impersonal and professional - if the guy wants to talk around the points in the letter via phone or in person that's when you can bring up the stories about the efficacy of AADs and the unachievable goals...

Tom - how are you seeing these BSRs being enforced? If nothing alters culturally within the USPA then you can introduce as many of them as you want - nothing will change. If the USPA introduces regulations, then they have to be enforced somehow. The only way I can see this happening is at a DZO level - they have to be held accountable by the USPA for the actions of their employees with some form of meaningful sanctions available. That responsibility will be passed on to the individual TIs from the owners. I don't think the USPA has the time or resources to try to monitor and enforce the rules on an individual basis.

It's an interesting exercise that people should try... What are your priorities for an AAD? Personally, my first one is that is must not fire when it shouldn't. Second is having no unsafe failure modes. Third is firing when it should... those are mine. What are yours?

In my experience this is something skydivers just don't believe... The idea of strapping a wing on and spending HOURS playing with it is completely foreign to them. I've launched from some gnarly exit points and never once did I wish that I'd spent less time kiting...

That's great! AAD equipped rigs are already difficult enough to get as carry-on on passenger flights... Thanks for the reply and for clearing up my questions. Best of luck!

But equally there has to be a cost / benefit cutoff. Already an AAD is often seen as a 'nice to have' bit of kit because of its price point. If cutting edge technology for only minor benefits drives the price up you may see it being difficult to get a large uptake. Take the data logging for example - is that really necessary? Or is it a function with only limited benefit to the user but will increase the cost? Personally, if I had the option not to have that functionality and decrease the cost I'd probably go for that... I like my AADs simple. Simple to set up. Simple to use. Simple when they function... My requirements are probably very different from the military ones. I'll be really interested to see what David and his team come up with.

I've always thought that the attitude of fear of lawsuits preventing the progress of things we KNOW to be in the interests of safety is one of the shittier things about our sport. 'We know x is safer, but we're not going to say it specifically in case there's an accident...' Shame on us. Regarding the handle check on tandems - isn't that part of the diveflow that's taught in a TI course? I may be misremembering, but thought some of my instructor friends said it was. Again, if that's true, and it's taken a BSR for us to get a grip of people actually doing it, well that's just an embarrassing reflection on us. The mantra of 'we don't need rules - we're self policing' has been BS for years, but people still say it regularly. Maybe we need a few rules forced on us to start taking the responsibilities of self-policing seriously...

But equally, where does your responsibility lie? If you know someone doing this is running for office, shouldn't you be making THEIR name known and posting your evidence rather than being cryptic yourself? Doing it this way, you're just part of the problem.

Hey Charlie, I really appreciate the time you've taken to reply. Too often (particularly via the internet where intent can easily be misconstrued) people take caution or critisism poorly. At no point did I mean to put down the level of skill or dedication you've shown in getting to where you are, but I'm a firm believer that we're never good enough not to keep thinking and learning. Some people are exceptional. Their talent and dedication allows them to do things which the rest of us can only watch and go 'wow' at. The best of those people plan every detail as far as they can and go out of their way to keep others safe. The obvious examples are the factory team and demo guys. I've never met you, but your flying and explanation of how you got there seems to put you into that category. My issue is that for every one of you, there are a dozen other guys who THINK they're that good because of their jump numbers... (sometimes I wish we could stop logging jumps and come up with a different way of explaining our proficiency). This forum is a vast repository of knowledge; ranging from sublime to awful. I believe it's part of our responsibility to try educate people from things we've already seen before they go and do something stupid - Saying 'he shouldn't have been doing it' after an accident is far less useful than saying 'you probably shouldn't be doing that because...' earlier in the chain and possibly preventing the incident in the first place. Look at this conversation as an example of what should happen - I made a comment and you've come back with a great explanation and education. All too often people are afraid to say anything to others who have a huge amount of experience, or when they do they get dismissed with a 'I've got x-thousand jumps' type of reply, even if their intent is to try to keep people safe and to encourage more thinking. Even if my post got you thinking slightly about more 'what-if' scenarios, or gets others who read it to do the same, then it's a good result. All the best. I look forward to seeing more videos! -yoink-

That video is a perfect example of how NOT to do it - every single step of the way from setup to launch to pounding in. Even some basic instruction could have helped avoid that mess. Uggh. Videos like that make me cringe. Look at this one as well - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VOV-Fn4Iu6A He was lucky he was using a speedwing. I'd be surprised if a skydiving wing recovered as well that one did... Hell, he was lucky as fuck it recovered at all. Too much confidence, not enough skill.

Here's a video from a friend of mine a long time ago flying a BioAir Skim in high winds - You can't see too much but look at 3.00 in the video; he has a left side collapse but the canopy recovers almost instantly in little loss of altitude or heading. It's the speed of the recovery that's important. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vued598aev4 If he was on a Stiletto it would probably have killed him. Of course, flying a Stiletto in 40mph winds wouldn't be the brightest move in the world...

I'd go with a tandem skydive.... pull high and give the Pax a nice long net. One person to drive, the other to do the shopping...

Absolutely. In my experience it's difficult to find that kind of environment and so people push it slightly. Either launching in slightly adverse conditions or picking sites which have inherent dangers - maybe one they're not aware of simply because they're new to it. When I started the only people speedflying were Jim Slaton, Duane Hall and a couple of guys in France. I had to work some of it out through trial and error. I spent days speaking with paragliders and hanggliders... Now, there's a wealth of experience out there and no excuse not to try and find some sort of instruction to mitigate those dangers. The point about overcontrol is well made. I'd treat it like a beginner looking to get into skydiving - I'd recommend a reasonably docile first canopy and spend more time groundhandling with a student from a skydiving background than one from paragliding, for example. One of my concerns with using a skydiving canopy for any length of time (apart from the mechanical risks talked about earlier), would be the psychological comfort level it would instill. Lets say our student makes 50 flights on his stiletto... He now considers himself no longer a beginner at the sport and so might choose an intermediate speedwing for his first dedicated canopy. Now he has all the same problems of transitioning that he would have had in the beginning, but onto an even twitchier wing than he would have learnt on. He's also more comfortable flying closer to the ground because of his experience which may increase the liklihood of an accident when he does transition and have to relearn the input habits for those types of wings. For me, the safer option is to deliberately train someone on something they're unfamiliar with because there's a greater liklihood that they'll recognize this unfamiliarity and be a bit more cautious in their approach. The absolute worst scenario is someone who tries to teach themselves and doesn't recognize the difference in the gear, and so wrongly assumes that because they're confident with a skydiving wing that all of those skills directly transfer to a speedwing... Is the risk of collapse in your first few flights on a skydiving wing worth the purchase of a speedwing? Probably not, if you pick the right conditions... but I wouldn't suggest more than a couple of flights to see if you like the sport. After that - make the change. Groundlaunching / speedflying is very much akin to high-performance canopy flight, almost regardless of the wing you choose. Just as in that discipline overconfidence is an absolute killer. As a complete aside, talking about suitable / unsuitable canopies, I've still got a prototype Ozone Bullet from about 2006 in storage. It's AWFUL... There's about 4 inches of brake control before the wing completely stalls out. It nearly killed me when I first flew it! It was basically a mini-paraglider... Talk about something NOT to learn on! The speedwings have come a LONG way since then.

The biggest factor for me is how they behave in turbulence. Almost every dedicated speedwing I've flown will snap recover from a partial frontal collapse with only minor loss of altitude. Skydiving canopies tend not to do that - you need to put input in to force a recovery and you lose altitude and control while you do that - altitude you typically don't have while speedflying. You can mitigate those risks with site selection, flying in no winds etc, but having been on the receiving end of multiple collapses I'm quite happy making the blanket statement that it's safer if you're under a speedwing rather than a skydiving canopy. (while we on it, micrometerology and site selection is something everyone who speedflys should learn. It's not as simple as picking a hill and hucking yourself off it...) just for reference - my experience is somewhere around 800-1000 flights, on almost everything you could get your hands on until a few years ago. The Spitfire is one that I missed, but have heard good things about.

I'm sure we've tried suggesting this before... with the same reactions Yes. You CAN learn to ground launch / speedfly on a skydiving wing, but it's as dumb as learning to BASE jump on skydiving gear. While a Stilletto or even a Sabre (what I learnt on) is launch-able, it's lightyears away from being a good teaching tool. Skydiving wings don't behave well in hilly / mountainous environments... they're designed and built for other concerns. C'mon guys. It's time we treated this with a bit of respect. 'Skydiving' isn't the answer to everything... use the correct gear for the job. It's that simple.

I'm sure you're right. Or at the very least they've seen him do it a thousand times before. But that's the easy bit... It's the random visitor to the DZ who's not supposed to be in between the generators but is anyway for some stupid reason, or the in-on-it spectator who sees a spider on his bench and moves at the last second that cause those kind of accidents. They're ridiculous examples, but they serve a point. You can't plan for the randomness of people. 'Hey guys. Sit there and I'll swoop through you' is a bad idea. It looks fantastic, particularly in slow mo. But that doesn't make it any less of a bad idea, no matter how good a pilot you are. By all means, go big. But do it away from spectators, or at the very least, with clear lanes marked. I know. I'm the typical dz.com no-fun-nazi. The flying is sick. I love it. I just think it might be displaying some poor decision making.