yoink

Kinda brings to mind the idea of a NASCAR swooping comp, doesn't it? Wouldn't it be fun to see what everyone can do on the same wing?

Jalopeno had already been taken. ETA: my suggestion to PD was to go with "Marshmallow" because: "It swoops, and then it swoops s'more" Not acceptable: not the name of a plane. AN-2?

From the video that Ian put up the Peregrine looks unbelievably twitchy - Maybe 'Responsive' is a politer way of putting it. Look at the guy coming in at 30 seconds - how fast and precise the canopy roll is with only a tiny amount of input. Its movement reminds me of seeing a Eurofighter fly - something that is inherently unstable and needs 4 computers to control, but with a wicked performance envelope because of that design. Going simply from that video it doesn't surprise me in the least that they're limiting who might have access to it. God knows the skydiving public wouldn't limit themselves. What I want to know is what it's like for groundlaunching big mountains...

Considering that far, far more kids die from prescription drugs (pain pills mostly) than from guns, should they find out which students have easy(ier) acces to those? Why does it have to be one XOR the other? If it's not car accidents, it's drugs. Or criminals... Or criminals with cars... Or immigrants. Or immigrants with drugs... Or llamas... Or some other such ridiculousness. Apparently we have to solve every other problem in the world, in a particular order first, before it's acceptable to look at controlling access to firearms. Makes perfect sense... no?

Considering that far, far more kids die from prescription drugs (pain pills mostly) than from guns, should they find out which students have easy(ier) acces to those? You're absolutely right. I regularly see stories of kids coming into school and wiping out a handful of their classmates with their parents Oxycodone...

"North Korea says it is proceeding with plans for a third nuclear test, and more long-range rocket tests aimed at its "arch-enemy", the US." taken from the BBC News... I thought only Bond Villians had Arch-Enemies?

Aw fuck. Bye Jim.

The relative work is impressive but that front flip thing the pilot does after is just insanity.

Kudos on showing up. When people are playing bounce bingo it's generally a last resort to get you to understand that your behavior will get you (or worse, someone else) killed. Not if. Not maybe. WILL. That video showed some of the worst piloting I've seen in a long time. There's a progression to learning to swoop that you seem to have missed fundamental theory on. FIRST, you get your pattern sorted. THEN, you increase your speed. THEN, you increase your rotation. All of this happens over hundreds, if not thousands of jumps. You've obviously got a taste for the speed and flying, and that's great! But the problem is that people who have gone down your route before are usually impatient to get back there, to the point that they believe they're exceptional - even if they take some canopy coaching it's usually a case of working on stuff for a few dozen jumps and then going back to believing they're hot shit and bringing back the poor decisions and crappy skills. Sorry guy. There's no shortcut.

5 on April 20th for me please.

2 people armed and shooting at each other, 3 injuries.. 2 or which were bystanders. Yup... arm everyone!

It looks convincing to you because you have a predetermined belief and an axe to grind. It's like the Bible looks like pretty convincing 'evidence' for young earth creationists... GET THE TINFOIL HATS!

You don't hear about this stuff in any other country - there has to be some underlying factor that is accounting for taking a gun into school and blowing away some of your classmates being seen as some sort of acceptable / cool / viable option.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-20975608

Remind me again about the end game of this scenario... we put armed guards in schools or arm the teachers to deter the nutcases, so,suitably deterred, they go and shoot up a library instead... So we put armed guards in the library or arm the librarians to deter the nutcases, so, deterred as intended, the go and shoot up a McDonalds instead... So we arm the the burger flippers etc etc etc.... The logical end result to that solution is that EVERYONE is armed, and every building has armed security, checking and scanning you as you go in in the name of 'security'. Doesn't this worry you? Aren't you the guys who are all about 'personal freedom?' 'Arm everyone' is not a solution. It's insanity. It doesn't even make logical sense. Think about it - would you really want EVERYONE you know to be walking round with a lethal weapon? That guy you know who gets consistently drunk and aggressive in the bar? The woman next door who always slaps her husband around? When do the kids start carrying in order to protect themselves fom an incident in the name of 2nd ammendment freedom?

I'm working on the design for a new school in LA right now and we're REQUIRED to include metal detectors, as well as designing the layout and shape of the school itself to control student movements so that the pupils can be easily screened at entry points. We've also had to consider emergency lock-down doors in classrooms and 'Incident Protocols'. We're deliberately designing schools right now in the expectation that that this will happen again. Think about that for a second. I've worked on school designs all over the world and nowhere has the same constraints and personally I think it's a tragic reflection of American society. You may have personal freedom, but it infringes on other freedoms - what about students freedoms not to go to school in a military camp? In other news: 11- Year old boy brings gun to school - says it's 'to protect himself and friends from another Conetticut style incident SUUUURE. There's no problem with guns in the states. Edit: I really wish people would get off the alternative 'car accident' arguments. It's a strawman argument. The two aren't related. You could solve both independently (and should!) as they both need different measures. It's not a case of having one or the other! Why not say 'well, guns only kill x hundred people a year - poverty and starvation kills millions! We need to fix that first!'

How can it be a knee jerk reaction in response to a decade of people shooting up schools? That's like saying the 3-ring circus on a rig was a 'knee jerk reaction' to the last fatality that had a capewell... I've already said that I'm willing to compromise my moral stance to try and take baby steps towards a solution - it's never going to be 'fixed' in one big go, but I'll ask again - what about you? Are you willing to compromise? At all? If you're going to sit there and say that under no circumstances should ANY form of controls be tightened in the wake of yet another massacre that would mean it's more difficult to get every type of gun in any number, then it's you not being part of the solution... not other people. Of course, if you don't think there's a problem that needs a solution, well, that's a different problem.... I had a cabbie ask me today 'Why do Americans have such a problem with gun control? They want to lead the world in controlling the production and quantities of nuclear weapons just in case some nutcase gets his hands on them, but why can't they do the same on a small scale for guns?' I thought it was a good simile.

'If it will save one children, it's worth it' is the most intellectually deficient argument out there. We already can see from the rest of the world that bans don't stop these statistically rare events from occurring. But it does enable those people to be very 'successful.' IMO, there is more to be gained by limited the potential carnage. There were 3 other points I raised in my post as well... Anyway, I was very precise in my wording. I called it a moralstance, not an intellectual one. The intellectual stance is to realise that the 'ban all guns' ship has long since sailed for the US and that alternative methods of stopping crazies going on shooting sprees needs to be sought - personally that's morally repugnant, but I can get behind it because it's the right solution. I've not seen any sort of compromise that limits guns from the pro-gun camp... Quite the opposite! Do people really need an arsenal at home? What if families were limited to 1 or 2 guns? Ignore the 'how' for now... If we want something enough we find a way to make it happen. If there can never be any compromise and the right to have pretty much free access to guns will always have priority in someone's mind, then I tend to agree with Kallend. They have to then assume some of the culpability when guns find their way into situations like this.

The idea that arming everybody is a solution to stuff like this is a fantasy for a load of reasons. Take the Batman cinema shooting... Pro gun people have this image that if they'd been there and carrying a gun, they'd calmly have shot the bad guy, saved the day, been a hero and proven that having gun saved the day... far more likely would be that in the dark, noisy cinema people would panic and start shooting each other by accident. The idea that you could be calm, rational and controlled in that situation without the sort of training that they give to military personnel is a fiction. Ok, well what about deterrence then? Surely if all the teachers are armed then the shooters will know not to go on a murder spree there, right? No, not necessarily - you're applying RATIONAL logic to a subset of the population that are crazier than a box of frogs! Most of these people end up killing themselves anyway and for all you know the idea of their fantasy massacre turning into some romanticized image of the gunfight at the OK Corral in their warped brain might be an even bigger turn on for them. Even IF the deterrence idea did work, where does it end? Great, schools aren't getting shot up anymore because all the teachers are armed, trained and wearing flak vests. Maybe these nutters are logical? So they pick a different target... a cinema. A library. A McDonalds. Is the end of the pro gun argument that we just arm EVERYONE and let people always carry guns around? Think about that for a second... think about the people you've met. Would you really want all of them carrying a lethal weapon all of the time? All of that aside, the 'how could it make it worse?' argument is a morally terrible one. If people aren't standing up and saying 'we have to STOP these thing happening' after this one, then their priorities are way out of whack in my opinion. Now - Stopping it in the future isn't the same as saying 'ban everything!' I'm bright enough to realize that that ship has sailed already, but there has to be some sort of control in place. How many 6 year olds are worth your constitutional right to carry a gun?

Red herring. How many of the many massacre perps had a record of being violent criminals? They are crazy people. How many people have the many massacre perps killed compared to the numbers that the many violent criminals that already have records that are walking the streets with illegal guns? Pales in comparison I would wager. Why does it have to be one or the other? Why can't you tackle both? they may well require different measures, after all. OK, if you stop the statistically unlikely mass murder sprees, you may only drop the death rate by 2%, but isn't that a good thing? I can't see how ANY decrease in innocent people being shot can be bad. You can then challenge the harder problem of illegal gun crime as a separate issue - better intelligence, more policing etc.

Hold on a sec! I just need to get my poised exit setup!

Heathrow terminal 5 is one of my favorite airport terminals in the world and I travel a LOT. I'm typing this at LAX at the moment and Heathrow is lightyears better than this place. Don't even get me started on shitholes like Philly or La Guardia, and for the love of all that's holy, stay away from Miami. And in terms of rants I got stuck in Honolulu airport last week because the United flight attendants decided to go on strike - ONCE we were all on the plane and waiting to take off! Seriously - they told us themselves over the tannoy and linked it to long hours they were upset about. When we went to the United desk to try and work out what hotels we would be put up in: "I'm sorry, the reason for the cancelled flight is showing as 'WEATHER' in the computer, so we're not obliged to offer accommodation.' FUCK UNITED. God. I'm still furious.

So, it's been a while since you posted this, Joey... what did you do about it? I didn't see you asking for advice on moving toward swooping in the Canopy control forum as some suggested... maybe I missed it. Did you go and talk with a local instructor or mentor as others suggested? Or do you think that most people here are unaware of how good you are and so you're still trying to find 'what you can get away with' but are asking other people who might be telling you what you want to hear? genuinely curious what you've done and what gear you've bought. oh.. Where you're jumping too.

I'm more tolerant of federal power and oversight than many on this site, but THAT is not cool. My handwriting sucks too much to go back to mailing physical letters!

They're much, much more sensitive to control input, I can tell you that. Most skydivers who take up paragliding have a habit of overcontrolling their wing at first. Send Shropshire on here a PM - he's a tandem paraglider instructor and can probably give you some info.