NickDG

Abbie - Got it . . . Sorry, Bro! Nick

Okay - What's "Direct Supervision?" If I'm in the Ghetto sliding my salami into some tandem chick and my guys phone up asking about a worn main loop, or a scuff on a harness, or a hole in a canopy, that does it as far as I'm concerned. If I trust them, I trust them! You can throw all the FAA BS at me all you want. When I went to take my rigger's test in the early 80s the "clerk" behind the counter at the GADO asked, "Do we give that test?" NickD

Yup, that's what I meant, not Swifts. Good catch . . . NickD

That "supervision" thing has been thrashed over for years. It's an ambiguity caused more by FAA legal speak than by good practice. In the case of Riglets or any non-rated people doing something like packing reserves or even tandem mains under my supervision - and because it's my signature in the end - it doesn't really matter who actually does the work. If I could train a monkey to pack a reserve (lot's of shocks to the feet and banana pellets) it's still my responsibility and signature on the card. We had a big go around about this in 1990s. The feds were saying I had to be physically present to oversee the people packing tandem mains at Perris and my argument was once I was comfortable with the job they were doing I could be across the street in the Perris Ghetto getting laid as long as I was available by phone if needed. And at the same time - the real breech of the rules was anyone was being allowed (and still is) to pack mains for money without being a rigger, or being under any rigger's supervision. So in reality I could open a loft and never touch a parachute as long as I, as the guy who signed the cards, felt the people I hired off the street could do the job. The USPA and FAA are stuck in the stone age . . . NickD

If you mean the ones used for the Crw part they were Para-Flite Swifts. They were purpose made for Crw and what made them different was the use of span-wise construction. This was instead of one cell attached to another in linear fashion. The leading and trailing edges were also re-enforced with tape somewhat. They also had continuous "A" lines so when you came down the lines of the canopy below you, you didn't have to jink around the cascades. Para-Flite left the sport market many years ago and a Swift in air-worthy condition is surely jumpable but you'd need a really big container (by today's standards) to put in it in. And spanwise construction was more a marketing gimmick than anything else. Edit: And I just saw the above posts - Cruiselites weren't spanwise constructed . . . NickD

We all know Riggers who just live for opening other people's reserve pack jobs and finding things "not according to the manual" but wtf, a manual that was written 25 years ago? When square reserves first appeared riggers had to have something to hang their hats on, so following the "manual" was it. But we know so much more about how ram-air canopies behave now. Older riggers will remember Para-Flites earliest square reserves like the Safety Star and how convoluted that pack job was. In light of what we know today it was a joke. So, yes, you can get away with holding up a 25 year old manual and walk away from a law suit. But your job as a rigger is making sure your customers walk away from their jumps. And if the previous poster got hauled into a lawsuit I, and I'm sure many more, could be rounded up to be expert witnesses in his defense. The fact so many of us are willing to say we pack our own reserves one way and our customers another shows the depth of the problem. It's 2008 not 1978 . . . NickD

Oh boy, this one is going to be fun . . . Early (1980s) B.A.S.E. jumpers packed for jumping the Flat Iron Building the same way they did for jumping at the drop zone. It was just a modified Flat Pack. Basically the canopy was laid out on its side and then accordion folded. The modified part was not using a deployment bag, or slider, and coiling the lines in the bottom of the container. Generically this was called a Free Pack. And even this wasn't entirely new as skydivers were already doing something similar (except for using a slider) way back in the late 1970s and they called it a Trash Pack. By the mid to late 1980s some skydiving reserves were first being PRO Packed, and this is long before most skydivers were doing their mains that way at the DZ. At that time we were still jumping F111 7-cell canopies as mains and flat packing was working fine. It worked fine because off heading openings after a good track on a slow as hell 7-cell didn't cause many collisions on skydives. However, down on the Flat Iron Building an off heading opening was bad news. And all through this time B.A.S.E. jumpers were smacking the objects they had just jumped from left and right. By about 1988 it became clear, if you can imagine the configuration in your mind's eye, how much better a PRO pack is over a Flat Pack for getting symmetrical (and on-heading) deployments. And it was around this time that B.A.S.E. jumper, Master Rigger, and B.A.S.E. rig manufacturer, Moe Viletto started using and teaching the rest of us the "on the ground PRO pack clamp method" for B.A.S.E. jumping. Why, you might ask, on the ground instead of over your shoulder? It was mainly because that was how most skydiving reserves were (and still are) packed and unless you were really tall it was difficult to flake out a huge 7-cell over your shoulder. And it wasn't until the early 1990s when the smaller 9-cell mains became popular that people started packing over their shoulders at the DZ. When you look at the photo Abbey posted in the first message you are basically looking at the standard skydiving reserve pack job that dates back to the 1980s. However, over the years the tail, and what you do with it, has migrated all over the place. At first it was generally wrapped around the nose of the canopy. Then it was folded under itself but behind the nose of the canopy. And now it's being folding completely the other way. And the 45 degree folds, a throwback to round parachute packing, was sometimes used, or not, in all three of these methods. And I'm not so sure this latest method isn’t just newer B.A.S.E. jumpers trying to be new rather than refining something outright. But like all things in B.A.S.E. only time will tell. The funny part is how we've come full circle. And I think it was Abbey himself who wrote recently that sometimes he doesn't bother with the clamps and the traditional BASE pack job at the Perrine Bridge. He just flat packs and goes. And that's fine because that pack job works, it's a bridge so an off heading opening isn't the end of the world, and the landing area there is big and forgiving. As to Terry's comment about following the manufacturer's instructions, well, that's fine when you're in court, but it means little when you're doing a 100 mph at three hundred feet. And on the high speed issue and lack of data, there have been more than enough terminal B.A.S.E. jumps made this way to prove it works fine no matter what you do with the tail. And as a Rigger myself I'll tell you this. If you ever table open your skydiving reserve and once out of the freebag find something similar to Abbey's picture then hang on to your Rigger with both hands. A Rigger who is also an experienced B.A.S.E. jumper is gold. Over the years I've opened enough skydiving rigger's work on a table with a shudder. And I'll tell you if for some reason they didn't use a slider to straighten things out we'd be in big trouble. Of course, there are many nuances in all the above that are difficult to explain in writing. But skydivers use two canopies and so can get away with each being half-assed packed because parachutes are so inherently reliable it's rare to have two canopies on the same person that don't work right. Since B.A.S.E. jumpers forgo a main, and basically launch with only a reserve, it pays, for them, to put a bit more thought and effort into it . . . Edited to add: I mean Abbey's picture without the clamps of course, LOL. NickD

>>for those that don't subscribe its not like we'll be able to subsribe and get that issue

>>I don't know what it was - it was 1978 somewhere around Boulder Colorado up in the hills and these guys were jumping off the cliffs

Blue Skies Silly Tit #82! NickD Silly Tit #207 Airtrash Forever

The Mod down in Historyville really screwed the pooch on that one . . . NickD

>> So here I am working on my rigger's ticket....

Cooper's Parachute Found? Is this old, or new, info? http://www.koin.com/content/news/topstories/story.aspx?content_id=c8cdd7ec-23d8-4c3d-8dfd-b3d4851101a4 NickD

Unless you come across a Reflex that went into storage prior to James Martin's death in the year 2000 I'd say they've probably all been checked for grommet issues by now. They were fairly new on the market when James went in. However the real lesson here, and one most people miss, is it wasn't so much a badly set grommet that killed James. It was that the grommet was set into a thin flap, like in a lot of other rigs of the time, and it snagged the new super thin Vectran suspension lines, that had just become available, and that James had on his main. Up until then there were plenty of different rigs without perfectly seated (or truly flush) grommets that didn't catch lines because the only available suspension lines were either too fat, or their individual fibers too weak, to get caught on or under a grommet. So the lesson here is wanting the latest and greatest gear, like James certainly did, may not always be the best strategy. Sometimes it takes time for something brand new in the field to reveal unconsidered incompatibility issues. I was at James' impact site and while it was obvious he'd had a main/reserve entanglement, it wasn't until someone gently moved some of the lines aside that we saw the Vectran line caught under the grommet. What we didn't know was there was going to be a second victim in this tragedy. And it was the rigger who inspected the rig and packed the reserve in that Reflex. In my opinion the drag of the two malfunctioning canopies put enough force on the grommet to even further deform it. In its original state I think a lot of riggers, including myself, would have passed it. But the rigger in question went through a hell on earth ordeal both emotionally and financially as a consequence. And it wasn't lost on all the local riggers that there by the grace of god . . . The true fix wasn't so much to just further pound down on the grommets like some people did right after the accident. It was manufacturers adding some foam into the flaps so the grommets gained a countersunk appearance. If you are now jumping any type of older rig without countersunk grommets and you have super thin suspension lines you are at risk. This was a very sad affair all around. And the only way it could be any worse is if the lesson - we don't know it all, and we never will - is lost on us . . . NickD

When you meet the father of a friend you B.A.S.E. jump with, and you're old enough to be his father . . . When you start a new job in a hospital as an Emergency Room Tech/EMT and the patients call you Doctor . . . When you start losing the ability to actually remember what Jacques Istel looked like . . . When you can finally spend a weekend at the beach, instead of the drop zone, and not feel like you're missing something . . . And finally, you know you're old when you know people who you taught to be skydiving instructors who have offspring that are now skydiving instructors. This, of course, makes you a Grand Instructor . . . NickD

Go to http://www.tatuagemdaboa.com.br/ Type in your first and last name. Click on Visualize . . . NickD

>>It's all good, when you run a DZ, you will see it different

It was a bit easier when all students were using hip mounted plastic ripcords. You could suggest they follow a leg strap up to the handle if they had a problem. You can't really do that with a pud in a BOC. Another problem stems from the fact all ground practice, either standing, or prone, involves the student unconsciously using leverage not available in free fall. But students have always had initial pull problems no matter where we mount their handles. And its always been the job of Instructors to overcome these issues with good training and back-up procedures. Everything is always some kind of trade off. It's now better for a student's freefall control that we got away from the "Look" part of Arch, Look, Reach, Pull. However, I've always thought the transition problems later, the stated reason for the change in the first place, were a bit overstated. The real reason is more to save the DZO the bucks it cost to replace lost handles and preserve some resale value on student rigs. And one downside is we now have a generation of jumpers who when they go to pull a real honest to goodness handle in the air for the very first time it will be a cutaway or reserve handle. Oh, and nothing is a student's fault, ever . . . NickD

You can trace the very beginnings of modern AFF (which began in earnest in the early 1980s) all the way back to Bob Sinclair in the 1960s who was "experimenting" with what he called Harness Hold Jumps. These were first jump students doing freefalls with a single jumpmaster. For back-up Bob used a lanyard from himself to the student's main ripcord just in case the student got away. You could say Bob Sinclair was ahead of the times and his initial ideas would indeed eventually all but sink the more traditional static line training methods. However, in the early 1980s while skydiving was progressing in amazing ways with the advent of big-way RW, canopy RW, square reserves, etc, the USPA, and most Instructors, took a very conservative approach to student training. And there was always a bit of an uproar when any of the "accepted" student training methods were tampered with. Most here won't recall this, but there was a time when every experienced jumper on the DZ was wearing a piggyback rig (reserve on the back) while all the students were still in conventional gear (reserve on the front). When some DZs began going with piggybacks for students there was a hue and cry in many quarters. "It's dangerous!" Some said. The same thing happened when instead of rounds we started putting our first jump students under squares, and the first time we stopped making students wear actual jump boots, and when we did away with real water jumps, and so on and so on. The fact is while historically we've been very accepting of almost anything goes for experienced jumpers we've been very old school with our students. Those people who raised their voices against student training changing too radically, and who now seem quaint in hindsight, did serve a valuable purpose. They were saying, "Don't experiment on students!" It was through this wall of concern that new student practices had to prove themselves before they were accepted broadly in the field. A good example of this was when Roger Nelson started putting his first jump students on smaller (than the student standard) canopies. Some called it progressive, some called it outrageous. And at the time I knew Roger well enough to know it was only Roger (Hey everyone, look at me) being Roger. The idea of using standard humongous F-111 squares on students was to allow them to do the things that students inevitably do and still live. Like landing downwind, flaring too high or too low, hitting barns and other obstacles, or they even, corkscrew them into the ground with a low panic turn and get up only bruised rather than dead. However, we are losing those voices of restraint. There are so many various ways of training students nowadays it's almost not possible for us to know what every individual DZ is doing. (The proof of that is in this thread where people can't even figure out what this particular DZ is doing). My fear is while years ago a non-conforming student program stood out like a sore thumb they have now disappeared into a sea of sore thumbs. So it's become okay to base your student program, not on accepted practices, not on conservatism, but on economics. Don't have a large enough staff to do straight ahead AFF, okay, let's invent something else. Don't want to spend money on student canopies that have zero resale value, okay, let's put them on canopies that will have some resale value. Any DZO will tell you that besides aircraft related expenses the largest cash drain is their staff. The largest and most successful DZs can afford two AFF JMs, and a camera person per each student. The problem is when smaller or newer DZs can not. I've done every AFF hybrid out there. Tandem to AFF, Static Line to AFF, as well as traditional AFF. In the earliest days of these hybrid programs we were presented with fresh tandem students with 3 to 5 tandems, we then gave them a full blown AFF first jump course and took them up with one AFF jumpmaster. Since not many, if any at all, in this thread seems to hold an AFF rating I'm here to tell you these jumps are high workload and high stress. This was a time when tandem masters had no other rating other than a tandem certification from a tandem equipment manufacturer. In a traditional sense they weren't Instructors at all. They were trained to carry super-cargo and that was about it. At the time I would have rather taught first jump students from scratch. While tandem satisfies the 'requirements" for advancement to solo freefall, it doesn't translate to reality all that well. I mean face it, except for the PRCPs - a dead man could ride as passenger. Then as tandem itself progressed it never really reached Ted and Bill's original ideal of being like the dual instruction a novice pilot receives. It merely became a ride and a revenue producer for the DZ. Stong & RWS's mistake came in the very beginning when instead of only Instructors being tandem certified they were handing out tandem ratings to just about anyone with a few hundred jumps. When you see old Bill from Strong Enterprises (who I adore, btw) stand up at a USPA meeting complaining about how USPA is running the tandem program it's really just him paying the price for that early mistake. I know how easy it is for someone new to the sport, to disagree with all I said above. That's fine, in fact its how things are supposed to work. We must have progress so you go ahead and push the boundaries while us old guys push back. From that symbiosis comes safe progress without going too fast. My main issue is I've seen every advancement made in AFF since it started, and they were always in the vein of making it better, easier, and safer for the student. Now it's moving toward the point (it’s really already there) of only making it cheaper for the DZO to operate. Its the very reason some marginal operations even exist. And the pool of experienced AFF Instructors will eventually shrink away to nothing. Someone upboard justified single JM AFF by mentioning the rule concerning a student being alone in freefall, and the answer of "just pull." It's a very short and slippery slope from that emergency procedure becoming a normal part of AFF. So why use AFF JMs at all? With the very reliable gear and AADs we now have why not just put all students out completely alone. Just tell them, "Okay kid, if you're stable and altitude aware go ahead and smoke it on down to your pull altitude. If anything else happens - just pull." Don’t laugh, that's a DZO wet dream, and you're kidding yourself if you don't think there are DZOs out there looking for every way possible to downsize their staffs. So what keeps the largest most established DZs in line? What keeps most of them using the more traditional methods of student training? It's because they have a lot to lose. They don't want to wind up in a courtroom with Dan Poynter as an expert witness (or even worse, me, LOL) against them. The smaller or newer DZ have less to lose, and may be operating on the boom or bust theory, as in what the hell - we make it or we don't. So you must ask yourself, if your sister wants to start skydiving, what are you going to suggest? Do you even know enough about student training to make a safe and logical suggestion? And finally, yeah I know this is a big rant on a Saturday morning when I should be on my way out the door, but one more paragraph, I promise. There used to be a time when once you received a USPA "C" license you were automatically considered a Jumpmaster. You may have had nothing at all to do with handling students, but it made you responsible for others. If something weird happened on a plane load of experienced jumpers it was you, the senior jumper, who got hung out to dry. Now it's every man for themselves and being the senior jumper on any particular load means absolutely nothing. Stuff like that trickles down over time and when we get to point where every DZO starts doing whatever they want with their student program somebody is going to pay the price. And (on the basis of this thread even existing) we may already be there and already paying that price . . . NickD

Some years ago I hurt myself B.A,S,E jumping and by the time the plaster came off my AFF rating had gone stale. Instead of the sure thing at my home DZ I jumped in my car and traveled up to Nor Cal where I wasn't so well known. I hooked up with an AFF evaluator and proceeded with a stand in student to do the ground prep for a level 4. I noticed the evaluator was writing a lot so I figured I was going down the drain. Instead he later told me he'd never heard a better ground prep and was writing down the good parts. Then I went and totally screwed up the dive we went on together, and don't let anyone tell you knowledge is a substitute for currency. When we landed and he told me I passed I ripped into him with a vengeance. I left without his signature but not before I told him he wasn't getting the $50 bucks either. I drove down to Lake Elsinore where Rich Hiatt held my feet to the fire and I walked away knowing I was again ready to handle students. And I even learned a couple of things. That guy from from up north is now a big shot in AFF. The truth is out there . . . NickD

The main issue is nobody will ask who taught Sony Bono how to ski . . . NickD

Dirt bag Instructor always worked for me. Besides eating Romen Noodles ever night, living in a drafty and leaking old trailer, and getting laid a lot, the real payoff comes every April 15th. That's when I get to write "professional skydiver, on my 1040 form - while the rest of you lie to yourselves . . . NickD

>>Well done on the first baton pass; but it was actually at Abbotsford, BC.

I've never understood, after all this time, why there isn't a loft in London called, "Jack the Rigger" . . . NickD

I think it's the jumper. http://gizmodo.com/368026/cat-jumps-off-a-plane-lands-on-its-legs NickD