NickDG

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Everything posted by NickDG

  1. Jimbo, you're way too old to be using the word "peeps." What's next? Saggy baggies and an askew hat? NickD
  2. Shortly after they cleared the tower the NASA guy said: "Barbara Morgan riding into space on the wings of a legacy." That brought tears to my eyes . . . NickD
  3. More here . . . http://www.airtrash.com/ NickD
  4. If you're 70s challanged (as in you weren't born yet) they are all here . . . http://www.televisiontunes.com/a-theme-songs.html NickD
  5. Derrick, If you'll allow me, here's some free advice. Keep a good balance up between your air skills and your ground skills. Too many candidates focus on the air skills to their own peril. A good evaluator will present you with the "student" you created in the ground prep. For instance; if you missed reviewing something like the pull signal on the ground when you present that finger in freefall your "student" is going to look at you like they never saw it before and act accordingly. Put another way. The ground prep is the soup you'll have to eat later. Of course, you'll never get a perfect student. There will be misbehavior in the plane, mistimed or balked exists, and certainly a roll over at some point. You can also bank on the "student" pretty much never pulling their own dummy handle. And while there is going to be some differences in how evaluators do things, it's nothing like the myriad of things real students are capable of doing to you. So be ready for anything. One time I watched in utter amazement as an evaluator completely removed his own rig on the way to altitude without the stressed out candidate even noticing it. And then there's the simpler stuff. I've made probably half a dozen AFF eval dives with my Protec helmet on backwards. (Very un-comfy!) When candidates complain that "real" students wouldn't do things like that they are missing the point. In the air, and after the release, when things start going awry (and they will) the order of your actions are first throw signals, if that doesn't work block, if that doesn't work re-dock, then fix the problem, and re-release. And keep in mind you are being discussed in the evaluator's room. So your attitude counts. (Read that as don’t show up with one.) They are also going to find your weak areas and focus in on them. The point is real AFF should be much easier than these eval dives. And I'll caveat that by saying real students are like time bombs. They are no problem until they blow up in your face Also, and again if I may, I've been reading your posts here for years. I'm going to guess you'll do fine . . . NickD
  6. Until the Instructor Corps becomes a separate entity, outside the influence of USPA and DZOs, it will continue to deteriorate. In the earliest days of AFF certification there were just two AFF course directors, Mike Johnston and Paul Sitter. I was in the first, or second, course held at Perris Valley and it was full of the hot skydivers of the day. Up until this time all prior USPA ratings courses, the Instructor Cert Course and the Jumpmaster Cert Course, could be classified as show up and pass. When this Perris course was over a lot of the AFF Instructor candidates were unsuccessful and walking around in a state of shock. This high level was kept up and in fact as time went by the course actually became harder. They kept raising the bar with the (good) idea that being an AFF Instructor wasn't for everyone. By the time Billy Rhodes, Rick Horn, and Don Yarhling took over as Course Directors the standard was set and these three did a very good job of maintaining that level. It was a time that "standardization" in AFF was at it highest level. It was a time a student could hypothetically do each AFF level at a different DZ and not miss a beat. Everything was humming along pretty well and except for an oddball once in a while AFF student fatalities were almost nil. Then the picture began to change as new DZs started popping up all over the place. It seemed like every schmuck with a Cessna was going into business. With all the new competition it didn't take long for DZOs to realize that one AFF Instructor, two AFF Jumpmasters plus a camera person for each student dive was killing them cash wise. So we now have all these hybrid programs to eliminate the second AFF Jumpmaster and Handicams to eliminate the camera person. Believe me when I say some DZOs are laying awake nights trying to dream up a way to eliminate Instructors altogether. I once heard a well known So Cal DZO wish for the days of static line when a DC-3 could dump out a full load of first jump students on just a couple of passes. And this with a single Jumpmaster dispatching them for just two bucks a head. We are getting closer and closer to getting rid of the air & ground AFF Instructors by using wind tunnels, video in first jump courses, and multiple tandem jumps. I really think we are heading to something like X number of tandems and then straight to solo freefall. Of course, in my opinion, we need to be going the other way. But it isn't going to happen. Nobody represents Instructors while low pay and poor working conditions continue to gut the ranks of the most experienced. Anyone reading my stuff over the years knows I predicted all the horrors mentioned upboard and now here we are. My wish list for AFF would be something along these lines: - Go back to just a few AFF course directors. I'll hedge that one by saying I do have faith in many of the new course directors. For instance if you tried to bribe Jerry McCauley you better bring a big gun and couple of friends. - The AFF Evaluator (the folks who play students in the courses) should become a stand alone rating with its own training course. It took me many courses as an evaluator to become proficient and I learned something new every time. Right now there is no format in which I can pass along that knowledge. So it just dies with me, and every other experienced evaluator. - Revamp the entire AFF program itself. It may have been all right to turn people loose after seven jumps twenty years ago, but not anymore. The main problem with the current method is experienced AFF Instructors can only teach a small percentage of what they learned in a lifetime of skydiving because by the time a student gets to the point where that info can be digested they are off into the hands of a coach who’s still learning the ropes themselves. AFF should be more like twenty jumps minimum (or as many as it takes) before being signed off student status. Instructing should live up to its billing. We should be turning out people ready to skydive. Of course that would mean re-structuring the per-jump pricing system to the detriment of DZOs and that's not going to happen. - Revamp the AFF certification course to become a Training & Cert course. It should be held in two or three fixed locations with two weeks of training and one week of certification. One of the banes of being an AFF evaluator is it's not a teaching course as it stands right now. So you bite your tongue while candidates self destruct right in front of you and cringe when you hear excuses like, "that's the way we do it at my home DZ." It's why I would take promising candidates aside at night and pass on useful info all the while praying Rick Horn wouldn't catch me at it. Then pre-courses became popular and encouraged. The problem was if you took a pre-course with a current evaluator or course director that was part of your cert course there was a certain conflict of interest. I'll say I never saw any funny stuff outright but the smell of it is there. If you took a pre-course with an AFF Instructor at your home DZ you were also screwed as the cert course is fluid and ever-changing. - Instructors have to get out from under the thumb of the DZOs. In a perfect world we'd all be contract workers under the umbrella of our own organization. Right now there are Instructors working in the field and the person they answer to doesn't hold AFF ratings themselves (a schmuck with a Cessna). "Sorry, the wind's a bit too high for the FJC today." "You're fired!" Think it doesn't happen? Guess again . . . - I realize we all have to survive financially. So we need to find some medium ground. But as it stands now Instructors have no ground to stand on. And every year a little more is taken away. We have gone from a time when we had just the normal amount of bad apples in the Instructor corps to the possibility the whole orchid is going to seed. - We totally went the wrong way with the Coach program. What should have happened is those positions should be filled with those promoted out of teaching basic AFF. The people putting the finishing touches on young skydivers should be our most experienced and knowledgeable, not someone with just a few hundred jumps. Coaches, if we must have that designation, should be someone who assists, alongside an experienced instructor, in first jump courses and such. A person should know how to teach a first jump course before they are ever certified to do so. Ever wonder what's going on in that closed up classroom? Over the years I've sat in on many FJCs. Sometimes I just spend a bit of time listening at a window or door and I've seen and heard both the good and bad. I've seen funny FJC's where the students are in stitches the whole time, I've seen somber FJCs where students are scared half to death. I've seen Instructors who don't seem to realize they must get a FJC student ready for every horrible thing that can happen on their very first jump. Think about that one for a moment. And think about how many Instructors really do that? Being a good Instructor means being able to adapt to every student. Not the other way around. Some students just get it. With others you have to be more creative. Instructors who can do that are worth their weight in gold. But as it stands now their worth is a pillar of salt. Instructors have a definite PR problem. The students we do our best work on mostly never become skydivers so they aren’t around to sing our praises. The ones who do go on to become skydivers tend to forget how goofy footed they were as students. They don’t recall almost puking the first time the door opened or how they clung to your jumpsuit in white knuckled fear. They forget the Instructor who leaned over to whisper just the right words at just the right time. And as the roll of the instructor is diminished you now have people on the DZ today who can't even recall the name of their Instructors. To end without too much with dome and gloom I do believe most Instructors are good at their job, or at least they want to be. But they are hamstrung by the system . . . NickD
  7. I took a photo for you as it's easier than explaining it, but basically its from the bottom of the three ring to the top of the hip ring. If the rig isn't articulated its to the top of the hip junction. The rig here has a MLW measurment of 15 inches even though the photo is a bit skewed . . . NickD
  8. Yes, that's right. Sorry. I get them mixed up since I blew up a Security reserve on a terminal reserve opening. NickD
  9. And the topper . . . >>I think: "How kind of them to give me half of the $439.3 billion US defense budget!
  10. Funny. The closer to the truth we get the faster we get moved to the ash heap of the speaker's corner. That sucks . . . On another front. When the BASE Zone got the heave where was the disscusion? It's like the transition was seemless and that can't be right . . . NickD
  11. HH, Why is "BASE Jumping" in my post above now a link to your new BASE board? If I wanted to steer people there I would. You're putting words in my mouth, and assigning untold meaning to my thoughts. Please stop it. Nick
  12. I'm not naïve enough to ignore that some wars are justified. But raise the military enlistment age to 35, rather than 17, and most ancillary wars wouldn't occur. You can say what you want about us old hippies, but, "What if they had a war and no one showed up," is more valid today than ever before. Like most in my generation, I feel used and abused. Someday, and with no joy, I'll venture you will too. NickD
  13. I'm with you on that . . . On my seventeenth birthday in 1971 I enlisted in the Marine Corps and served 4 years. On the other hand I'm not 17 anymore and that was 36 years ago. I've learned a lot since then . . . NickD
  14. Glidepath, which later became Flight Concepts, used flares only to avoid paying a license fee to Steve Snyder for his method of direct line attachment. Too bad jumpers today are still paying the price for that business decision . . . On the up-side, except for the unstable turbulance killers like the Nova and the Clipper canopies, they also built the Fury and the Unit, which were popular in BASE jumping because they were built well and worked okay if you removed the slider and packed really neatly. I guess you can change the name, but not the pedigree . . . NickD
  15. Long time jumpers will find a certain déjà vu in this subject. In the '80s whenever (and it was generally only occasionally) PARACHUTIST ran a photo of a military jumper there were grumbles. "The Army has their own pipeline to distribute this sort of stuff," is what some thought, "and why is my dime (USPA dues) being used to facilitate Army recruiting?" I remember one PARACHUTIST that showed a loaded down HALO jumper in full military garb exiting right on the cover. The Freaks of the sport freaked out. But there has always been, as mentioned upboard, a strong symbiosis between civilian and military jumping, but there is more to it than just shared technology and technique. I started jumping in a military club in the '70s and I can tell you there wasn't much difference between the civilian side and the military side. We also (military jumpers at the time) secreted beers behind the hangar between loads and rolled fat ones. If you read the older magazines from the 70s when Norm Heaton was running things at USPA (out of San Francisco) he did a monthly column called "In the Wind" where he recapped the various goings-on around the sport and this always included the military clubs. It was innocent enough with things like, "Sgt Rock makes his 100th jump," or, "Major Minor gets married," and things like that. And that seemed fine. In the 70s, in the midst of all the freaks on the DZ, there was still more than a few sporting crew cuts who still shined their jump boots. Then began USPA's fascination with the "operational" side of military jumping. And this includes the Knights and at first it was just a bit weird, and than it became a little creepy. It's hard to write about recent history because it's too recent. But you can draw your own conclusions. And while you do - remember this was the 1980s and not 2007. Nowadays whenever I see something military in PARACHUTIST it still reeks of recruitment on my dime, but it’s a different world now and the majority seems to see nothing wrong with it. DZ.com is a totally different story. It's not an "association" and I don't pay dues. HH can run ads for anything he wants and I can't say anything about it. Except this . . . Leaving politics aside, leaving right and wrong aside, surly some impressionable 18-year old will see that DZ's advert, enlist in the Army for good or bad, and maybe loose his life. And all he came here for in the first place was to ask about a good place to make a tandem. Oh boy, Skyride's got nothing on us . . . NickD
  16. Jim was one the best para-historian out there. I always enjoyed the newsletters he did and he always had, if not the exact answer, than a good lead on any questions I had about skydiving history . . . I always made it a point to spend some time with him at PIA conventions just to soak up knowledge. NickD
  17. >>Mostly it came down to selfish motives and lack of respect for the natural beauty our national parks are about. It was a short relationship...
  18. Bob, Post the photo of the short Evaluator meeting with Lincoln . . . NickD
  19. We were crossing a freezing ass creek and I came prepared . . . the rest wore garbage bags . . . And that's the last photo of Pat Swayze with two good feet. He had one amputated on a San Deigo tower jump that went wrong shortly after. NickD
  20. It's "in house" . . . What don't you understand about that . . . ? NickD BASE 194
  21. Outstanding footage . . . But, regardless, if you want to help sell a crap drink to children, why are you "using" BASE jumping? You are giving away something the corporate sharks couldn’t get their hands on in a million years. Enjoy your few minutes of fame . . . NickD
  22. And who's this? "Freedom Bridge, Az" in the early '90s . . . NickD
  23. Correct again, Jay . . . (Maybe "you" should be writing the book!") Jan, Dick's son was named "Richard" too (after his Dad) and was present when Dick was killed jumping from a Building in Wilshire district of Los Angeles. That was a horrible night . . . I miss Pedley. I believe (I'm pretty sure anyway) he was the original "Dick" from the tee-shirt that said, "See Dick Hook, Don't be a Dick!" One night Dick and I had planned a building jump and I was to meet him downtown at 2:00 AM. I decided to take a nap and overslept waking up at 4:00 AM. I jumped into my car and drove the 40 miles thinking there's no way he'd still be waiting for me. (This was a few years before cell phones). When I arrived and turned the corner by the building I saw Dick's parked car. I walked up to the driver side and there he was fast asleep up against the window. I knocked and he rolled the window down and he said, "You ready? Let's go!" He was a classic . . . NickD
  24. How 'bout this one . . . NickD