NickDG

That was all big fun in a virtual way and it sounds like you made the right call. After all you don’t want to Agnos it . . . Now go home and give her a big kiss for us . . . NickD

Being sort of an oldie I came up with warning boards and groundings, but after reading Mike Truffer's editorial in SKYDIVING not long ago, I changed my mind. In general she'll never make that same mistake again, so grounding her serves no purpose. I'm still for punitive groundings for experienced jumpers who intentionally endanger others but in the above jumper's case I'm not so sure "we" or at least the system didn’t fail her . . . NickD

No way . . . I'm not going to sit there all cinched down for twenty minutes especially dealing with checking a student's gear and all that. I put my rig on just tight enough for a quick emergency exit, but I always cinch down before a normal exit. I'll agree not having your chest strap threaded or your leg straps all the way loose blows for the reasons you stated. NickD

It's cool. Velcro saved us when we didn't know what we were doing, but pin rigs (with proper education) are much better overall. But, Jimmy . . . I'm quitting altogether as soon as you go back to spring loaded pilot chutes and ripcords! Except of course for wing suiters so they can use the new BASE AAD . . . NickD

Okay, that explains a lot. And a note to Dad, it's been trying for us too . . . NickD

I'm going to carefully word the following as I don’t want to offend or discourage anyone, but if we agree a student losing their life is the worst thing that can happen, then the following needs saying. Since I first posted about the "hole" in the Tandem fatality thread in the Incidents forum I've received enough PMs and e-mails to realize there are way too many people saying, "Wow, I never even thought about that!" Here's a lesson for all, especially Instructors both veteran and newly minted and of all disciplines. You don’t know it all. None of us do. We tend to worry more about the "new mistake" a student makes, or a piece of gear displays, that no one expects. However, that discounts all the other things that have gone wrong in the past and will go wrong again. It's easy to make a few thousand jumps with students and feel you have a handle on it, but do you really? The answer is don’t fall into the trap that any student jump is routine. There is always an "x" factor and no two students are alike. There are ones with physical problems like amputees; there are the slow witted ones, the meek ones, the ones more full of false bravado than real sense, and so on and so on. Instructors must carry themselves with confidence in order to instill confidence but you must know when to say when. There nothing wrong, when presented with something out of the ordinary, with grabbing a couple of other Instructors and running around behind the hangar and thinking it over and talking it through. Many Instructors probably just wing it with an attitude they can handle anything that comes their way. But it's not just your reputation that's at stake, it a student's life. I don’t think most instructors start their careers with huge egos, but some grown them after all the student praise that just naturally comes their way. Keep in mind a student will love and think you a skygod just as long as they don’t die. This is false praise. It really only matters what your peer instructors think of you that matters. So none of us can say we know it all, but I venture to say collectively we do know it all, at least when it comes to knowing what can happen sometimes. We need to pull all that information together and incorporate it into training new Instructors. Right now, for all intents we certify Instructors when we should be teaching them to be Instructors. There are many small and medium sized drop zones that are too inbred. What I mean is all they know is all they know. And that disadvantage is passed down generationally from Instructor to Instructor at that particular DZ. The bigger drop zones have the advantage of a larger Instructor corps, Instructors coming and going from all over the world, and a bigger body of knowledge that percolates into every Instructor on the staff. The way Instructors are taught and certified should be changed. You can see people are learning how to get through the cert courses rather than learning how to "be" Instructors. Early on when I started evaluating in AFF courses I was continually berated with, "Nick, you are here to certify, not teach." And I was continually biting my tongue because it was so obvious so many candidates needed that schooling. We throw the title "Instructor" around pretty liberally nowadays. Look at tandem. I'd rather designate people who only carry students as Tandem Masters, and I think to be called an Instructor means you stand up in classroom full of people in the morning and carry them all way through a solo AFF or S/l first jump in the afternoon. I think there should be Instructor camps. Gee, we have camps for CRW, camps for free fly, camps for big ways, and camps for everything else. Instructor camp would be a place you go, outside the influence of your home DZ, and do nothing but breath, eat, and poop skydiving instruction for as long as it takes. It should be normal that an Instructor, after a long and successful career of teaching first time jumpers, takes the last few years to teach the teachers. We are wasting a valuable resource otherwise. I think every prospective Instructor should be sat at the foot of a Jumpmaster that failed to hook up a static line and learn first hand, how it's possible, and about the horror of living with a student fatality for the rest of your life. Too rough? I don’t think so. What we call "fluke" accidents today are really Instructors who learn a lesson after the fact. We could eliminate most, if not all of those, if we just supported each other more. Instructors must stop thinking of themselves as working at DZ-X-ray and those other Instructors across town at DZ-Z-ray suck and don’t know what they are doing. As an Instructor corps we've been divided and conquered and we now only eat at the whim of whatever DZO employs us. Jay Stokes has probably come closest to getting it right. Years ago when he explained his idea for "Certification-Unlimited" to me I was beside myself with excitement. His original plan was a fixed base operation and potential instructors would come to him. I was going to spend my golden years there. In reality most of the time Jay still has to take the show on the road and no matter how much of a straight shooter he is, when you are playing in another man's field, who have to watch what you say or you don’t get invited back. New Zealand has a similar setup now and jumpers from all over the world are going there to pick up all the ratings with the idea of becoming professional skydivers. It's time we took instructing seriously and end the "part time" skydiving Instructor bit, as to me it's like being a part time doctor or something. Only then will Instructors make a decent living and stick with it. Every year we lose experienced Instructors to family pressure and money issues and they are replaced with new and inexperienced Instructors and it's the students, and eventually all skydivers, who pay the price for that. I remember a time when every skydiver said the beginning was the scary part. But now you hear very experienced skydivers saying it's scary all the time. If nothing else does it that should clue you to the fact something is fundamentally wrong. In the 70s the Instructors were better than the gear they had to work with. Now, the gear is making up for a lesser kind of an Instructor . . . and that's a dead end. NickD

Well, that could have been worse. They didn't overly identify the site and they didn't bring John into the studio. It was pretty much a replay of the angle we already saw on the local news. He did say he's quitting BASE jumping, and for his sake (two accidents in as many weeks) and ours, I'm okay with that . . . I'm a firm believer that the worst offenders among us can be rehabilitated, as sometimes it's they don’t know any better early in their BASE careers, but it's been said John's been at it for eleven years, and if that's true, he does know and just doesn't care. That's a much harder thing to fix . . . NickD

Many, me included, have had hang-ups with pin type toggles too. The earlier ones needed to be initially pulled on a right angle away from the riser. Pull straight down like a normal toggle and they sometimes wouldn't release. We took to calling these events "misses" rather than hang-ups, but I remember crawling out of the bushes and saying, "Yeah, those work good, we just traded one problem for another." NickD

Deal with her the same way you'd treat anyone that gets in the way of BASE jumping. Fib like hell! Go jump and then show up at the party and just smile. Keep the secret to yourself, and let them just see the glow. "Gee," her girlfriends will whisper," your new boyfriend has an inner quality . . ." BASE isn’t something you'll always be able to do at will. Age, health, job and family issues will eventually stymie you, so go for it now. Besides, no matter how much you like her, you'll like the next one too. Women are like buses, just wait ten minutes and another one will come along . . . NickD

Up in the bonfire Skymama reports John Agnos will be on ABC's Good Morning American today (Tuesday). The show starts on the west coast at 7:00 AM. Skymama didn't otherwise comment on his appearance, but I'll venture it's going to have us all upchucking our Cheerios . . . NickD

>>Nick, wasn't this in an era when the cloth stub actually stuck directly through the cat's eye?

BASE . . . NickD

I don't know, many jumped rounds from buildings at one time and they didn't steer or move forward all that well. A ram air, even with a fixed brake setting, would still out fly and out land a round. Nick

Since it wasn't mentioned yet . . . The reason we went to Zoo type toggles (toggles with steel pins) is we had a few instances where during a lineover the jumper couldn't get the cloth toggle out of the cat's eye on the brake line. A steering line over the top of the canopy will exert much more pressure than normal. On one of these I saw a jumper trying to clear the toggle and because it jammed all he did is pull the whole riser down and further increase the rate of turn. We tried coating the cloth toggles in bee's wax but that didn’t help and they picked up a lot of dirt and grim. While not scientific you can simulate the problem by having someone pull up on the steering line while you try to fire the brake. You'll see it sometimes (depending on the design of the toggle) doesn't take all that much force before you can't release it. With a steel pin you could put a thousand pounds of pull on the line and the pin will still release. Toggles it seems have always been, and probably always will be, a weak spot in BASE gear. For Russel, who lands mostly in the water, (for now anyway ) I'm wondering if doing away with the steering lines in their present form might be an idea? You could replace the steering lines with much shorter lines that cascade into the "c" lines and be done with it. You'd have to experiment with length to find an optimum between opening characteristics and forward flight but the shorter lines should be less prone to lineovers and he could steer and land with the rear risers. We aren’t going to solve the toggle problem unless we think outside the box and find a new way to steer and land canopies. So let's experiment with Russel . . . Maybe someday someone will invent a cloth hinge and we can go with ailerons or spoilers for steering? NickD

It's a matter of degrees of hurt. I'd rather drop the remaining toggle and "jedi" myself to landing rather than spin in with a line over. The only thing in BASE that can claim more saves than the line over modification are John Dragan's boats at Bridge Day . . . NickD

If you are over rotating you are pushing off too hard or too late. Don't jump off as much as hop off. And don't wait for your third jump to start practicing. Find a pool or gym or an old mattress and do some practice right now. The problem with doing early jumps on a hard object is you may be thinking more about separation from the object when overall stability is probably more important in the long run. It's a delicate balancing act that once you learn it you'll wonder why you found it difficult in the first place. And congrats by the way . . . NickD

Yes, Jaap, you managed to voice that in an effective way and it's something we first noticed at early Bridge Days when the skill level and gear were nothing like today. We watched every mistake that's possible to make being done over and over, and people were getting away with it. Blown launches and out of control deployments? No problem . . . it made us think of the old saying about drunks and fools. However, the sobering thought to keep in mind is this: If that was the New River Gorge Building, and not the New River Gorge Bridge, you'd need a mechanical industrial sized squeegee to scrape people off. Also, if there were no river the injury rate would skyrocket. I remember one 1980s Bridge Day and being in a hotel room with the core of the hard core in BASE jumping, all the big guns of the time are there, and we are talking about this very thing. We wondered just how long we were going to keep getting away with it year after year. We talked about everything from making the event invitational only, to mandatory gear choices, to giving actual first BASE jump courses. The year after Steve G. went in with a towed pilot chute we thought our luck was about to run out. The next year we wondered who was it going to be? Moe Viletto came back from walking down the long line of waiting jumpers and told me, "I saw him. He's about an hour away from launching, his helmet is cinched down tight, and he's about to bust a vein." But it never came to pass and we realized we made a fundamental mistake about the future of BASE jumping. Sure, we knew we would be over run when a new generation without preconceived notions concerning BASE finally found us, but we thought a high level of carnage would also follow that wave. And it didn’t. Of course ninety dead since 1981 is nothing to sneeze at, especially since so many are our friends. But the reality is what Jaap says it is. Sure, you're going to get hurt, and probably going to get hurt bad, but the chances of dying are nowhere near what seems logical. But here's a warning. That's the state of things as they are now. Is the wave of new jumpers here now, or are we just seeing the tip of the iceberg? Do we have just one John Agnos per one thousand BASE jumpers and what will happen if someday in the future when have ten, or fifty or a hundred? One side of me wants to take some credit for the current state of the sport rather than chalking it up to pure serendipity. I think we, all of us, did this, all of us who keep and pass on the history, all of us who build good gear, all of us who teach the sport by mentoring one jumper at a time. But, I also see how easy we could lose control of the whole bleeping thing. How is that skydiving, which is way more regulated, seems more out of control to me than BASE jumping does? I think the answer is we aren't driven solely by profit and we use peer pressure more effectively. But there's something more to it than that. People drawn to BASE are a different breed of cat. I say this after knowing thousands of BASE jumpers; they are intelligent and curious without being overly reckless. Sure, we talk a good game, but even the most overzealous of us can be found off to the side looking over the gear for 10th time in as many minutes. I stood in the lobby of the Holiday Inn for a few moments at Bridge Day, sort of off by myself, just watching people from all over the world laughing and packing and just being BASE jumpers, so cool and so competent. Bill Legg walked over and caught me smiling. "What's up," he asked, "what are you smiling about?" And while I think he expected me to say something more sinister or at least more smart ass, I looked him in the eye and said, "I'm just so proud of these people." So yeah Jaap, I think we are doing all right . . . NickD

>>especially looking at the fact that they had to rescue some person who put himself in a precarious situation while committing a crime.

This brings to mind a past time in BASE and an interesting, but cockeyed, idea we had concerning wing loading. When smaller and faster canopies first began appearing on the scene we were mostly still jumping our F-one-eleven 7 cells both at the DZ and for BASE. We did have BASE containers and jumpers swapping out containers is a common site on the DZ after the sunset load. Most of these canopies were in the 220 square foot range and besides being many years away from realizing these were too small for BASE (in fact it was years before there were any BASE-specific canopies at all) some of us, including me, are actually thinking of downsizing. The mindset in those days is hard to imagine today, but we were doing a lot of building jumps and wake turbulence is something we are just learning about. In those days there's an old saw that the faster you flew through turbulence the less upset you'd experience so it was a short leap for us to think a faster canopy would be better for BASE. What we were really doing wrong is jumping in conditions that today most jumpers wouldn't touch. Higher winds were actually favored and no wind was frowned upon from a landing standpoint. This is almost the exact opposite of what we later learned. We were smart enough not to jump directly into the winds, but we didn’t sweat crosswinds as we didn’t know there was a connection between them and the lineovers we were having left and right. But the main thing was the feeling I had hanging over Main Street aiming for a small parking lot and just not being able to get there. I remember saying out loud in about 1987, "Isn’t there anyone that can build a canopy that goes where I point it?" To me, at that time, the answer seemed to be the ability to go faster. So I, and a few others tried it. We were still some years away from ZP and the Stiletto class canopies (thank goodness!) but there were some 9-cell higher aspect ratio canopies available like the Nimbus and I tried one off a local 600-foot tower. I had the worst opening I ever had on a BASE jump, up to that point, and barley missed being the John Agnos of the era. Another friend, also trying out a Nimbus had a horrendous line over that spun him into the rocks below a bridge and almost killed him. It was then we realized opening reliability was more important then wind penetration or soft landings and that boxy (lower aspect ratio) canopies gave cleaner openings. We then went too far in the other direction and tried out five cell canopies like Strato Stars and Flyers and while they opened great, landing those downtown was a leg breaker. It took us a few years to learn slower, not faster, is better for BASE. If you had told me in the 1980s I'd be BASE jumping with a 285 square foot canopy today I'd have thought you a nutcase. I guess my point is remember the things you say and do today, (and boy, I read some doozies here) as in twenty years or so, you'll be a good lesson for newer jumpers. And that's not a slam; it's what you are supposed to do . . . (Opps, sorry for the hijack, but I got going before I realized this was in the Bonfire, and not the BASE Zone

>>Was it Dennis McGlynn? I never did quite get the whole story or how much jailtime he did, but I do recall there was a dissapointing amount of support from the BASE community. Correct me if I'm wrong.

You'd be screwed by the second definition of "parachute" below . . . par·a·chute ( P ) Pronunciation Key (pr-sht) n. 1- An apparatus used to retard free fall from an aircraft, consisting of a light, usually hemispherical canopy attached by cords to a harness and worn or stored folded until deployed in descent. 2- Any of various similar unpowered devices that are used for retarding free-speeding or free-falling motion. NickD

Well, I'm happy John is down and safe, and I wasn't saying much about him personally because I don't know him. My first thought was, okay, it could happen to any of us. But, here's a lesson in how to make things worse. Now he's doing on-camera interviews and burying us further. http://cbs13.com/topstories/local_story_301210755.html and click "play" on the video. Up until now it appeared the media thought this a fellow out on a lark for his birthday, but now they are reporting this site gets jumped all the time. Who told them that? Also, his talking about legalizing BASE jumping right after a mishap and rescue of this nature is a bit counter productive not to mention he left the impression we are so out there we want the right to jump private property. Gee, shut up already and use your head. What is so hard about saying it was just a wild assed idea he had and then he tried it? Why not say, "I've never even heard of BASE jumping." It's called falling on your sword to protect your brothers and sisters. Instead he shows off his BASE tattoos (and like BASE bumper stickers on your car that'll help when explaining it wasn't you) and talks about how he accessed the site and then all about the "visuals and the rush." How is it possible for someone in the sport for eleven years to be so selfish? Is John A. another John V. . . ? BTW, in the accompanying copy to the video there's this concerning BASE jumping being illegal at this site . . . "Jumping from our tower has been such a persistent problem that years ago CBS 13 spearheaded a county ordinance that specifically makes it a crime punishable by up to six months in jail and a $1,000 dollar fine." Oh, and as Tom mentioned, this fellow is on a roll . . . http://www.gazette.com/display.php?id=1311375&secid=1 NickD BASE 194 edit for thread title ~TA

Bullshit r/l, jOnes said we conspire to commit criminal acts. The BASE number list isn't really confidential, except by tradition. However, there are certain names, especially on the early part of the list that are marked confidential and a deal's a deal, even if that person is deceased as some of them are. Nobody is asking jOnes for an address and phone number, but he's playing the same silly games in here as he/she did up-board. I mean look, now you and I are arguing . . . NickD

>>I never put personal information out for the entire world to see. IMO putting your full name, address etc on a forum where illegal activites are discussed and planned (aka conspiring) is a poor idea.

>>Obviously no RSL... and as I recall this was in the days before mandatory RSLs on student rigs was enforced.