NickDG

Bump . . .

I'm guessing a Jeweler could do it. They engrave the inside of rings that aren't much wider than closing pins. Probably going to be spendy though . . . Sounds like a cool jump, have fun! NickD

A Metrolink train carrying approx 350 people collided head on with a freight train in Chatsworth which is just north of Los Angeles. From the TV pictures it appears the locomotive of the Metrolink telescoped into the passenger car behind it and that's where most of injures seem to be. So far six are confirmed dead. Many are injured and the death toll will probably climb. I know this area and have ridden the train through there a few times. There is a big sweeping turn where the collision took place. No word yet which train was in the wrong place. Also no word yet on the fate of either of the train crews. This is the worst train wreck here since 11 died in an Amtrak accident in 2005. Oddly one man who survived that crash was in this one too. Local news is carrying rescue efforts non-stop and this will go into the night . . . NickD

A few good ones for hurricane watching: Baywatch The Gale Storm Show (1950s) Open Water (Okay, a few movies too) The Perfect Storm Hell or High Water (Old war movie) Key Largo (Hurricane movie with Bogart) The Prince of Tides (Okay, I going dry now) NickD

A few of us are breaking out the flashlights and tequila in California for a sympathy hurricane party in honor of all of you. We'll be watching on CNN . . . Make sure you all check in tomorrow when you can! Sweet luck you guys! NickD

Bigger canopies are far more forgiving to lines going out of trim than smaller canopies. Lines go out of trim (trim being the lengths they were when they left the factory) by either becoming longer or shorter. The lines that contact your slider grommets shrink from the heat generated by the descending slider. The other lines stretch just from the loads put on them by normal openings. With smaller canopies the problem creates off heading openings that can lead to lines twists that sometimes must be cutaway, and sometimes, like the OP said it can affect the openings by making them harder. Keep in mind, however, that any canopy can open hard, for reasons that are hard to determine. Sometimes it can be the slider starts down before the canopy begins to spread, or bag strip, etc. That 230 of yours will probably spank you sooner or later but just take it in stride and know now you're good for awhile. But a lot of canopies, like my Stiletto needs new lines every three to four hundred jumps. Your 230 if you pack on a mat and look after it and baring any damage could possible go a 1000 jumps without you noticing any differance in openings. In fact of the lines are Dacron and the fabric is not ZP, but F111, the opening will get even softer over time . . . Edit to add: Opps, didn't fully read your question, never mind the lesson! NickD

I know this topic is about "Coaches" (good title USPA, what are they doing? Spotting young gymnasts?) But all this talk of teaching skills, classrooms, and so on relates more to what Instructors do. Coaches are more day care for novice skydivers. You can have all the teacher training in the world, and years in a classroom, and still suck out loud. I've been in plenty of college classes thinking, man, if this guy was teaching skydiving the student fatality rate would skyrocket. It's like taking acting classes for a lifetime, if you have no talent, you'll always just be a server taking dinner orders. Some people just have the gift for teaching and some don't. And its one thing USPA, and skydiving in general, never paid much attention to. If you teach FJCs for a very long time it really becomes like a Broadway play that runs forever. Opening night is a bit rough, but performance after performance it gets tweaked. You trim here, you add there, you say something one way, then you try to say the same thing another way, and as long as the applause grows louder each night you know you're on the right track. But unlike Broadway, and more like college, when our little one person, one act play is over our audience doesn't applaud, Instead they get to take a final exam. And if it goes badly it could be a real and true final exam. And you aren't just teaching them one jump. You never know which one or two people in a FJC is going to continue so you have to give everyone of them the tools to make it through the next twenty jumps or until licensed. And you have to understand that almost anything that could happen to any given jumper on any given jump could happen to someone sitting in your classroom. So you can't neglect anything. From aircraft emergencies to two canopies out and every possibility in between has to be taught (not just covered) in a way first time jumpers can understand and act upon. And it's in these details where some student's eyes begin to glaze over and many Instructors go down in flames. And I've seen some Instructors who rather than bother (hey, they're mostly one jump Charlie's anyway) skip some of those details. One even said to me he didn't teach two canopies out because they look at the issue from the ground then advise the student via the radio (and besides, it's so rare.) And I've heard the same lame idea about pilot chutes over the nose, canopy damage, and things like that. They rely on the student doing a control check and falling back on when in doubt whip it out. Two things at least these guys still teach. You can get away with all that for a while but not forever. And if a student does a cutaway he didn't need to (although you'd never tell them that) it's really not the teaching success some Instructors will claim it is. As an Instructor you can't just keep up an acceptable kill ratio over the course of your career. You have to keep up a zero kill ratio over the course of your career. I don't know many, if any, who could continue teaching after having anything to do with the death of a student. And that death need not come on the first jump to be devastating. It could come on the fifth, or the seventh, or the nineteenth. But some Instructors don't see or accept that depth of responsibility. Put that together with an Instructor without the talent to teach and you, we, all of us, have a big problem. I see Instructors who look daily at the results they are getting from one class to the next and they constantly refine their techniques to produce better students. After all what are students when they walk out of the classroom? They are little versions of you. For good or bad - it's all they can be. But then there's others who've been doing the same crummy job of teaching FJCs for years and years and they never try to make it better. These are ones who believe there is such a thing as a bad student. But there is no such thing - there are only bad Instructors. These are the ones who are the quickest to pull out the bowling speech when a student isn’t learning, and these are the ones who most often resort to yelling and frustration when beginners act like beginners. Sometimes I wish all Instructors had to face not teaching instruction but some type of mandatory and periodic peer review. I've listened to a lot of Instructors I wish I could walk up to and hang a gold star on, and I've listened to some Instructors I wish I could walk up to, ask to see their Instructor rating card, and then whip out my lighter and burn it. But we'll never see peer review, or anything along those lines, because USPA doesn't take skydiving instruction that seriously. Let me say that again – it's skydiving with students – and USPA doesn't take it that seriously. Fortunately, I believe, overall, the state of our Instructor Corps is pretty damn good. But the small percentage of bad apples does need plucking. So we have to be self policing. And by that I don't mean we have to police each other I mean you have to police yourself. If you can teach a FJC knowing when to be over the top funny and when to be deadly serious, if you know how to teach to the level of the slowest student without boring the others to tears, if you never miss anything even if you have to use a checklist, if you tweak every class to make it better than the last, and if your students consistently land happy and eager for more, than good god please don't ever give up teaching skydiving. If that's not how your classes generally go, and you think it's not your fault, here, you can use my lighter . . . NickD

I think there should be a post cap and then you're outta here in order to keep some new blood flowing. But 40,000 is way too many. The cap should be set @ 21166 . . . NickD

Never heard of anything like this in the past in the USA. In wondering what may have prompted it I'd say it's either the increase in aircraft incidents and crashes, or possibly all the swoop deaths, we chose to accept, and they might say we ignore, coming home to roost . . . (Note to Nervous Guy: Take heart, the government is on the job.) NickD

Charlie might as well asked her who won 4-way at the Nationals instead of about the Bush Doctrine. She would have been clueless either way. What a joke. And that's coming from neither left or right, that's coming from me. NickD

>>I want to track under my instructor and then go into this funny 180/ barrel roll then come back.

No worries . . .

>>the investigators w ill have a heckofa time trying to figure out how the one body got so far from everything else

Well, I was leaner and meaner in 1986. And I would've killed 'em in that Pirate movie . . . NickD

>>Peej and NickDG your messages are not arrived please try again

Big Picture . . . When I come home after sunset and get asked where I've been I say, "Jumping." When I come at four in the morning and get asked where I've been I say, "Jumping." "It's all the same thing, man." - Janis Joplin, 1969 NickD

Thanks, jamiem . . . It's starting to sound much better now. NickD

I was there in the early 90s and still have a lot of kiwi friends. They are a great people. Friendly, outgoing, and fun loving. When I was there the crime rate was so low there was a rape case that stayed on the front pages of the newspapers for weeks because that sort of thing was so rare. It's also a beautiful county with every kind of topography there is. Mountains, some desert, beaches and everything in between. It's really two large islands (North and South) and each is unique. And driving down the coasts is like the California coast but 40 years ago before it was all developed. Since the US dollar has tanked you won't do that well now but when I was there it was about two New Zealand dollars to one U.S. dollar. Also they loved "Yanks" back then but since our worldwide reps have also tanked the one place you probably won't get personally tagged for our governments idiocy will be New Zealand. There's a kind of funny story about young people there. They are so remote in relationship to the rest of the world the young ones like to travel to see what the rest of the world looks like. When they return they always say they never realized what a beautiful place they lived in as they always took New Zealand for granted. And they call those folks "born again" Kiwis! And once you go, you'll always be a little bit Kiwi in your heart . . . NickD

Good last minute idea . . . Tie a medium sized sauce pot around your neck with a dildo in it and go as Peter Pan . . . NickD

Or the woman with 300 jumps who asked her rigger what the faint round outline in her reserve container was. NickD

Yes those lower ones were B.A.S.E. jumps. The other was indeed a test flight but not parachute related. It was when I was working as an A&P mechanic. We'd just installed new turbochargers on a Helio Courier (it's an airplane, not a helicopter) that belonged to Art Linkletter's son. Art was a famous older radio/TV personality. I checked the O2 bottles and masks and grabbed the two pilot's rigs for my boss and I and we took off. The plan was to pop up to 20,000-feet to check that the new turbochargers would maintain their near sea level pressure. The flight up was uneventful and we were at altitude and checking things out when an oil line on one of the turbos blew. We got a bit of oil on the windscreen but not too badly. So we shut down the engine and got everything secured. We were directly over the airport so we weren't worried about anything. But looking down I realized here's a chance you don't get everyday so I said into my mic, "Hey, this is sort of an emergency, isn't it?" And my boss said, "Yeah, I guess it is." So I said, "You mind if I jump?" He knew me as a jumper and we'd done demos and parachute movie work together so he said. "Sure, go ahead." It was still early morning so I knew the winds were light, but I had no alti or any goggles. I had my sunglasses but nothing to tie them on with. I'd just inspected and repacked the rigs a week earlier so I knew they were okay. But I turned sideways and asked my boss to make sure the three ripcord pins were deeply seated as I didn't want a preemie leaving me hanging at this altitude. We slowed down and I shoved the door open and being careful not to hook myself on anything I got out. About six seconds later I was freezing my ass off. When I got lower I tracked for the upwind side of the airport and somewhere around 1500-feet I pulled and got a fast but not too hard a deployment. I landed in the grass close by our hangar only to see our pain in the ass airport manager running toward me. Admittedly, he had caught me making bandit jumps here before. But before, he could open his mouth I said, "Calm down, this time it really was an emergency!" My boss landed without issue and we fixed the oil line while of course blaming each other for screwing it up in the first place. The reason I mentioned Art Linkletter was some may recall that long ago, and sadly, his daughter during an acid trip jumped out a window in a high rise building and was killed. And a few weeks later Art's son was landing the airplane, which is a rather large tail dragger, and he ran it off the runway in a cross wind. And although he wasn't seriously injured he pretty much turned the airplane into junk. So the joke around the shop for a awhile was poor Art Linkletter, nether one of his children could fly worth a damn. . . NickD

Message of support sent from California . . . NickD

They are plug doors and so are the exit row hatches. They only open "in" so they can't somehow blow out at altitude. But the cabin is only pressurized to around 5 to 6 thousand feet and not sea level. So once that pressure equalizes the doors can be opened in flight. It's one of the reasons that at those low altitudes they keep you seated and belted in. It's to keep some wacko from popping open a door, not over worries of explosive decompression that would suck someone out. NickD

The main problem is if you did manage to jump, (I'd say you could pop one the emergency exit row hatches below 5000-feet or so). And you lived and everyone else died (which per your example they were all going to do anyway) they would, I guarantee, blame everyone's death on you . . . NickD

Not the highest here but 20,000-feet in shorts, t-shirt, and a pilots's emergency rig (round) and no altimeter. It was free too. Lowest was 130-feet over hard ground. I also did one at 120-feet but it put me in the hospital so I don't count that one . . . NickD