NickDG

Happy B-day, Bro! NickD

>>And coming up next.....

I probably wind up like these folks . . . http://www.askmen.com/top_10/dating/top-10-lottery-tragedies_1p.html NickD

Don't reach over into the glove box while the police are following you. They'll think you're trying to hide something, or worse, going for your Glock. In either case, to a cop, it is acting "hinky". NickD

Sorry guys, I just realized I spelt "mook" wrong! Of course I meant moke! LOL . . . NickD

Can't, because some new world mook will just delete it again . . . I like that word Mook. In the 80s it was a more polite way of saying asshole . . . NickD

That was the last straw . . . NickD

I remember when my friend Rich Stein wanted to make his first skydive in about 1988. He'd already made a hundred B.A.S.E. jumps but never a skydive. We were at Elsinore and I taught him how to go up to manifest and get himself on the plane. Walking back in after the jump he told us how different it was. It was the only jump he's ever done without a pilot chute in his hand. And he told us how weird it felt to be hanging under a parachute at 2000-feet as he'd never been that high under a canopy in his life. There's other ways to skin the cat, is all I'm saying . . . NickD

Maybe because we've lost sight of a the very first emergency procedure. If the skydive is getting away from you then just stop the skydive by pulling. Few taught the old way didn't have to do that at one time or another. And in the end few of them ever went in trying to get stable because they knew pulling unstable still worked almost all the time. And I'm not advocating a total return to the dope rope. I'm saying we need a more realistic instructor-to-student jump ratio. I'm saying take for instance a student pilot who does his very first solo flight. And imagine after that his Instructor waves bye bye forever. That's basically what we are doing with AFF. Figure out a way to make 30 jumps affordable under direct supervision of an instructor and maybe we could actually start turning out competent skydivers from the get go . . . Look at it in extremes. I could take a total whuffo from first jump through "A" license plus teach them how to do demos, midnight bandit jumps, and even B.A.S.E. jumping. And not just me, I, and many others, could be turning out well rounded jumpers, but no, instead we are turning out chum. This whole thing would be funny except I know you all think you're right simply because times haven't caught up with you yet . . . NickD

>>Honestly, if my daughter ( 1 tandem ) wanted to be a jumper, I would give her 2 or 3 tandems, then S/L course including hop and pops and short delays, then do AFF type jumps !! That's what I think.

>>Would they be able to turn many RW points on their 17th jump (which is only important as it is a great achievement that gives them enjoyment)?

My recent post concerning Harry's fatality, in the Incidents section, while not directly related to his cause of death did touch on several things I believe we are doing wrong regarding student instruction. And judging from the amount of PMs I received there are more than a few who agree. So maybe it's time we have the discussion in a fuller form. The great AFF experiment has been an abject failure. Okay, cool your jets, keep an open mind, and stay with me as we try to sort this out. This is aimed mostly at those of you who never did a student static line (S/L) jump, or taught S/L students, prior to the advent of AFF in the early 1980s. I learned how to skydive via the S/L method and taught it to students for years before AFF was invented. And nobody was more excited about AFF than I was when it became, "the new thing." I was in the second AFF certification course ever held and it's impossible to recreate here the excitement all of in that cert course felt. This was the answer! This would move us out of the stone age! This would allow our freefall skills to finally match up with our teaching methods! Now here we are almost thirty years later and where are we? The amount of active skydivers is about the same, the overall fatality rate is about the same, the student retention rate is about the same (or lessened). And if not for the ten-fold improvement in gear and technology over the years I know that today we'd also be dealing with a ten-fold increase in fatalities. Now, I hear you. "Yeah right Nick, S/L is the cure for everything!" That's not what I'm saying. God knows S/L had its share of issues and problems. But I do offer that we could have fixed most of those things if S/L had been allowed to progress. But S/L technology went stone cold in terms of development. And the death knell of S/L training wasn't that it was overtaking by a better method called AFF, it was simply we ran out of jumpmasters and instructors who believed in it or even knew how to properly conduct it. Overall this is a very broad subject but let's just look at it just from the point of view of three groups of people. The students, the instructors, and the DZOs. Students overall are very intuitive. How many times have you landed with an AFF level one who says, "Wow, thanks man, I could have never done that by myself!" Well, if you're a post-AFF instructor you take the complement and move on to the next student. If you're a pre-AFF instructor you smile but in the back of your head you know the student could have done it themselves if you had just taken the effort to teach them how. You know we are teaching walking at the expense of crawling. When I made my very first jump, a S/L from 2800-feet, I knew I had just scratched the surface of skydiving. I could plainly see a path to becoming like the big boys, I could see the goal of getting to be an up-jumper and what an effort it would take. But today many first jump students making their first jump by freefalling from 12.5 can easily come away with the idea, "Skydiving, okay I crossed that off the bucket list, now let's move on to something else." Okay sure, getting through all the AFF levels is still a challenge, but it's not the quality of the challenge of forcing yourself to face a solo journey through to terminal velocity. You hear it all the time, so I know it's true. Skydiving is not for everybody. But the overall state of the sport, and this is easier to see if you've been around for a long time, is full of the under-confident. And don't confuse bravado with skill and confidence. We've got plenty of the former and not enough of the latter. Too much hand-holding took care of that. Unless you've done it I can't explain to you what it takes to step out of an aircraft for a solo twenty second delay knowing full well you've got a bad spin problem. And you have to figure out a way to overcome it yourself. It sounds cruel in today's terms but this was the "weeding out" process that I think think we need to reinstate in skydiving. Students left to their own devices are somewhat self regulating. I actually never heard of the "bowling speech" until the advent of AFF. Static line students who couldn't hack it didn't need it. They just stopped showing up one weekend. In an age when everyone gets a trophy for just showing up is fine at the high school track meet but in skydiving failure and feeling bad is way better than injury or death. I did my first demo jumps at around two-hundred jumps. That's unthinkable today, so ask yourself why? Plenty of people at that level, at that time, were capable of it. What's different about today? It's we are turning out sub-par parachutists by the boat load, and the boat is taking water over the side. We Instructors have all see them, but I had a "frequent flyer" student from hell who took about thirty AFF jumps to get through. At the time, when everyone else had washed their hands of her, I thought as long as she was willing to try I was willing to take her. She throw-up in the plane from nerves, she had no altitude awareness, she spun like a top, she refused to jump on many occasions, but she kept coming back. And she finally made it. And I accepted the accolades from my peers for doing the impossible. But in hindsight I'm not so sure I did her, or the sport, any favors. Okay, while here, let's look at it from the instructor point of view. The one thing I never liked about AFF is simply this. Seventy five percent of what I ever learned about skydiving from experience I never get to teach. Especially if you work at a large DZ you get seven or so jumps with a student and then they are gone, handed over to some coach with a couple hundred jumps. The old S/L program was heavy in jumps under supervision. There were several jumps at every level and it wasn't uncommon for a student to be finally signed off student status only after twenty or thirty jumps. The point is time spent with a particular student. The current seven levels of AFF, and the TLOs they represent, leave little room for the nice to know lessons. If in the current format I tried to teach a student everything I know about skydiving it's impossible. I would overload them to the point of not getting the job done. So I submit we, as instructors, are doing the wrong job. It used to be we had only two programs of instruction. S/L and AFF. Nowadays we have as many hybrids of the two than you can count. We have tandem to AFF, we have S\L to AFF, and at some DZ's I've been to I have to ask, "What the heck are you guys doing?" Which brings to the last group, the DZOs. The bottom line for a DZO is simply that, the bottom line. I was sitting one night with a DZO I worked for as she was going over the books. When she added up what she was paying out to the instructor corps I almost had to stop her from going into the loft and hanging herself from the rafters. "You guys," she told me, "are the cash cows!" And I could see how her wheels were turning. Get rid of us and her bottom line would soar. Do you still wonder why Tandem Mills came about and why they do so well. Well, there it is. We went the full circle from teaching skydiving to "providing" skydiving. Personally I think anyone who works for, or runs a tandem mill should be taken out and shot. But in lieu of that ghastly fix go ahead and pencil out what an Otter load of AFF first jump students, and an Otter load full of S/L first jump students would effect your bottom line? Providing one single instructor and one video person with the rest being revenue seats? Student's leaving with a real sense of accomplishment because they did actually make a parachute jump all by themselves. And a better return rate because we leave students wanting more! Instead of fulfilling someone's dream of skydiving let's just make it possible if they have the goods. Why is it most girls don't put out on the first date? Why is it if you want to be Marine you don't just sign up and someone hands you an Eagle, Globe, and Anchor device? Why is it if you want to be a rock star it takes hours of practice and the blisters to prove it. The why of it is because it's worth the journey. Take that away and you're just a whore, in the Army, or a hack musician! Okay, we aren't going to turn back the clock. We'll never but demon AFF back in the bottle. But there are things we can do, as a group, to fix some things. The first thing is we must get the instructor corps to being a stand alone entity. The conflict of interest between DZOs and instructors must end. If you don't see that than you really aren't what good instructors must be in the first place. A teacher, not a bookkeeper. Back in the 1980s I could make two dollars a head for slinging static line students and ten per head for teaching the S/L FJC. I could do it full time and eat and live just fine. I went without a family, a good car, and possibly some secure future because I was the one thing this country wants everyone to be, a teacher. I suffered eating Top Ramen every night, I was called trailer trash by the new influx of yuppies into the sport. But I got something out of it that made it all worthwhile. Every once in a while at a boogie someone would come up to me and grab my hand. "Nick! Do you remember me? You were my instructor twenty years ago!" And I knew I'd made a difference to that person's entire course of life. And you can't put a monetary value on that. It's priceless. After that I could happily go home to my trailer that leaked in the rain so much I wouldn't have a pot or pan left that wasn't used to catch the drops in order to cook up my noodles. But I slept like a baby . . . NickD

http://www.brucerossmeyer.com/ NickD

Really cool, it's like I was 15 years old again . . . Plus on the TCM channel they are airing "The Three Stooges" go to Venus! Can't get any better than that . . . NickD

J, I understand what you're saying. But I just think it would be better to have a Bob's Doctor Shop on every corner. As for the liability thing, I would think as long as a doctor did the best they could that should be the end of it. But, like you said, there's the rub . . . Okay, how about this? Putting it in skydiving terms - we already have a system in place where no one can have a successful career as a AFF/TM if they are seriously lacking in the basic skill set. No, wait a minute. Now that I think about it, maybe I haven't solved the heath care issue at all . . . NickD

>>What's it cost to get yer Ball-Sack dried these days?!

Brian, good stuff, thanks . . . I remember in Hawaii in the 1970s they had something for automobile drivers called "No-Fault Insurance." Everyone paid a flat $50 a year and no matter the outcome of any accident my insurance paid me and your insurance paid you. No trials, no courtroom, no nothing. I know it scares people (not you) when we get close to using the "socialism" word. But that's a hold over from us being so scared of fat bald headed Communists who banged their shoes on the table at the UN Building. I prefer to think of it now as Yankee Ingenuity . . . NickD

Guess I got shoveled off to the SC because the topic didn't measure up with, "Drying Your Ball Sack!" NickD

I was working out in the garage on Nina (my motorcycle) this morning, but it's too hot in So Cal for that so I decided to come into the air conditioned house and figure out a way to fix health care . . . My working in the health care field for the last few years has opened my eyes to what the biggest problem is. I'm old enough now to remember when I was ill as a child my Mother wouldn't hesitate (much to Dad's chagrin) to call a doctor who would actually come to our house. Dad would grumble but he payed the $35 dollars anyway. Dad was strictly a blue collar tradesman with five children but he still could afford these occasional costs. The bigger ticket items like the Tonsillectomy procedure I had and the stitches from when I tumbled down the stairs Dad paid off in small installments. To make a long story short, in the 1950s, health care was affordable to the average family. Fast forward to 2009 and that's not the case anymore. In fact back in the 1990s I was working at the Cal City DZ when I developed a killer toothache. Of course being a AFF/TM didn't come with any health care benefits. "I can pull your tooth for $75, "the dentist told me, "or I can save it for $350, what do you want to do?" Does anyone believe there's a place for such a "Sophie's Choice," in health care? A few years later I was jumping in New Zealand and I broke my leg on a B.A.S.E. jump. They have free health care there, and it was my first and so far only encounter with such a system. I had two major operations and got a bill for a couple of hundred dollars. In the States I would have been liable for between 30 and 40 thousand dollars. It would have wiped me out. Being a good old American capitalist I found it hard to believe their system was viable but I finally understood why it worked when at a party I met a woman who was a New Zealand Doctor. Here in America Doctors are considered scientists but more so we endow them with some God like power. But in New Zealand they are just considered workers like the Butcher, Barber, or Panel Beater (auto body worker). They make a good living and nothing more. What are doctors really? They are nothing more than skilled technitions. If "A" or "B" is occurring in your patient you recommend "C" as the fix. Big deal - it's the same thing the auto mechanic does with your car. Nobody fawned over this doctor in New Zealand like would happen here in the in the States. Everyone treated her like a regular person. She had the same exact status as the Panel Beater. Later back in the States I met a skydiving student who was a traveling surgical instrument sales woman. She was showing me some of the instruments she sold when I remarked a certain clamp she had would make a excellent roach clip. "Well, "she laughed, "I'd give it to you, but that clamp costs eight hundred dollars." And yes, I understand that, in America you have to figure in research and development, liability, and all the rest of it. Okay, so here's the fix . . . Of course what works in one country may not work in another because of need, population, and general health. What I suggest is we don't nationalize health care, instead we nationalize health care education. In other words - we make medical school free - come one come all! We keep the standards for graduation the same (in fact we could actually raise them with such a large pool of candidates) and open a half dozen tuition free government funded medical schools and start turning out doctors by the ton. Eventually supply and demand would level the playing field and bring down health care costs. I used to be in automatic awe (like most people I suppose) of doctors. But now that I see medical practitioners in their day to day roles I think we missed a very big lesson from 1960's television. "Dammit Jim, I'm not a miracle worker, I'm just a doctor!" NickD

N/A

Ron, I think you're a bit older than me but we are both the same generation to be sure . . . I often wonder how it happens that two people growing up in the same country, at the same time, with the same backdrop of world history and the same current events, can wind up seeing things so differently. Was it our teachers, our parents, did we actually choose it or were we somehow predisposed to it? In the end I think we make our own world. The reason I know this is because so many people over the years have asked me, "What planet are you living on?" The horrifying parts of both my liberalism and your conservatism is our skewed ideas of right and wrong, and our mixing of truth and ideology. I mean we can't both be right, but I do see ways we both could be wrong. I envy you in a way because living in a black and white world (America right or wrong) seems like it would be somewhat comforting. But I see the world as more complicated than that and I've resigned myself to dying without ever knowing the truth of things. And I'm convinced that's how it's supposed to be. When we both get to heaven you'll walk right in and be happy as a clam. I'll be the guy holding up the line demanding to know, "What the fuck was that all about?" It's possible you served in the military like I did. And it was our generation that carried the brunt of the Vietnam War. When my four years in the Marines was over in the mid-70s I landed at an airport in California and you know who was there to meet me? Not my family and friends, Not protesters either. It was worse, it was absolutely nobody. I was like the guy in that current TV spot where the returning soldier sees no one as he walks around a deserted city. The people I did see not only acted like I wasn't there they purposely looked away. But I didn't start squirting tears. I understood and I got over it. I picked up my seabag, walked out the door, and got on with things. Our military actions are a matter of public policy, and public policy is set by - wait for it - we the people. And this modern idea of treating our Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, and Marines like sacred cows is very worrisome to me. It's like we have a cart and a horse but we can't figure out which one goes first. Do you honestly think it was Uncle Walter who changed the minds of the American people on the war? The majority of the people were already against the war when he said what he did. Everyone I served with, besides the most brain-dead, knew the war in Vietnam was at worst un-winnable, and at best a stalemate we could have continued on with indefinity. But fifty eight thousand American lives lost in Vietnam was enough for me. Did we waste those people? No, because, when you get right down to it Soldiers fight for the same thing in every war. They fight to keep themselves, and the guy next to them alive. And the old saying is wrong, there are atheists in foxholes, but what there isn't, is politicians. Since we are on the way to SC I'll add this. You pick up the Bible and find truth in it. So much so you include Bible quotes in your sig line. That's cool, it's a book full of very witty stuff. But I can pick up Melville's Moby Dick and find the same truths. But I'm not going to base my entire existence on a fictional white whale. Two important men died recently. Walter Cronkite and Robert McNamara. One man was a seeker of truth and the other was an asshole with American blood on his hands. Do you know which was which? You can learn foreign policy from John Wayne movies, or you can base it on something real. We have that choice in America. And that's the one and only truth of things . . . NickD

For my parents it was Ed Murrow, for me it was Uncle Walter, for you guys it's who? Hannity, Beck . . . ? It's fitting he died on the 40th Anniversary of the first moon landing, his most famous broadcast besides the time he came right out and said the Vietnam war was lost and changed the course of history. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g_sWmD6NvMY NickD

Break out your hanky for this one . . . http://www.maniacworld.com/are-you-going-to-finish-strong.html NickD

CNN is reporting. NickD