Andrewwhyte

IF I CHOP ..............................RENTAL..............MINE Pay for the repack......YES...................YES Pay for rigger's bottle..YES...................YES Pay for lost parts........YES...................YES IF I KEEP IT Land safely if I fix it........................YES...................YES Land safely if I fuck up.....................NO......................NO I don't see a basis for treating it any differently.

Fixed gear. It gets used much more than most aircraft and is a major money sucker on King Airs etc.

Yah, I was surprised by the interpretations. I was originally thinking 'home is where your hat is,' but clearly most people are thinking 'home is where your heart is.' I should have included that option.

What are you talking about?Quote I was referring to the ex-Otay/ now Brown Field jumpers sounding off in Training and Safety: Landing Out- Drop Zone Procedures. Sorry, no make clicky.

The shit we witnessed from San Diego area jumpers this week is not unique. I jump and work where I learned.

They want to catch the wind. Very cool.

Quote>We dont have the option of renting/demo'ing many different sized > canopies here.......its usually ask/beg to borrow gear to downsize > into the "sport" canopy thing(I really hate to borrow others shit). PD has a great demo program that lets you put a bunch of jumps on a canopy, usually over 2 weeks or so. reply] Actually PD has stopped shipping demos to Canada due to border problems. Once again we see that solutions that work at SDC or Deland or Perris are simply not available in less densely populated parts of the continent. DeNReN, when Billvon says something is unsafe he means it is less safe than something else. Sitting on the ground is safe; all else is less so. I don't know where you jump but both Nova Scotia DZs have been training jumpers for more than a dozen years with good safety records. The fact that your DZ doesn't have transition rigs available doesn't mean you cannot ever step down. It does mean it will be more dangerous. That's life at a cessna DZ. One thing to think about: the sooner you do transition, the sooner you can jump with a square reserve. Do not let anyone sell you a rig with a round reserve! Perhaps a road trip to Lebanon ME is indicated.

If you come to Vancouver we have medium sized turbines here. What's wrong with snow? We put it all over the mountains so we can play in it. Why you people spread it all over the drop zone and even put it on the roads is beyond me. Isn't that kind of dangerous?

I hate packing! I also hate doing the dishes, taking out the trash, changing the oil,....

Dan, I take it you are addressing those remarks and best wishes to dluv16, not me. I am not a pilot. Tim, I seems apparent that you have always jumped at SDC or another large facility. The fellow looking to start his career is not going to be flying a twin otter or King Air; he wants to fly a Cessna 182. Now some DZs have pilots who fly many planes including a 182, but those places hire and pay based on the hardest aircraft in the fleet. There are still many DZs out there that only have a 182. Keeping in mind that there are a maximum of four paying passengers on board, how much money is there to pay the pilot? Not much. Here in Pitt Meadows we hire a full time Cessna pilot for the summer. Usually that person is in the 300-400hr range. We have on one occasion had our pilot get her commercial license with 200hrs days before she started work. (For those of you who know her, Annie Lagieux recently was promoted to captain and is flying King Air for Ken Borak Air in the Canadian arctic.) They get paid about the same as a Starbucks employee on a salary and then are worked dawn to dusk. For that privilege there are hundreds of applications; there are exactly zero applications with 2000hrs on them. Why do they do it? Because we offer gold! 400 to 500 hrs of pilot in command time, and that more than anything else is what a junior pilot needs. Pilots need a first job. Cessna jump pilots fly in exclusively VFR weather, in the daytime very close to a runway. This is as straightforward as a flying job gets.

Easy for you to say now that you have your ATP. Were you born to a wealthy family or did you have to struggle for your hours? Do you think it's maybe tougher in today's environment? We just found out one of our Cessna pilots would not be back. He is moving on and has a job flying Multi-IFR. He took a cut in pay,... from a drop zone,... he gets less than a drop zone Cessna pilot! Man, thats tough. I think for you to extol the virtues of holding the line to a 300hr pilot is not realistic.

This happened to me last year on a mal and it scared the shit out of me. I had just had a two handed cutaway so I was a bit jacked anyway and I knew I was down and dirty. When My ripcord 'jammed' My initial reaction was disbelief. I remember deliberately looking at it to be sure I had the right handle (like there was any other handle) when it occurred to me through the adrenaline haze that there was a parachute opening over my head. My RSL had been disconnected by me. My response was to ask myself why? I have since reattatched it.

I had surgery last week and had to sign a release of liability so why not?

People sometimes get confused at this point in their lives. You may be thinking, 'Am I sure I really want to do this?' when you should be thinking, 'Damn, this is why I NEVER want to be uncurrent again.

I have not heard of a Cobalt tandem canopy. Who's rigs are they approved for?

A junior who is in a hurry should always look for unfamiliar gear, especially at sunset. What could go wrong?

I taught a British Para last summer who came to Pitt Meadows basically straight from the war. He and his 'mate' were a bit unsure how they would be welcomed since we didn't participate in the war. They were thrilled to find out that their money was no good at the local cowboy bar once people found out they had participated in the liberation of Tikrit. Airbourne soldiers have some advantages learning to skydive, and some disadvantages. They have gotten out so they are unlikely to be overwhelmed by the adrenaline. This IMHO is the main advantage of the Tandem first jump. If the DZ where he is going uses tandem primarily as a weeder I would suggest he skip it. The biggest disadvantage he will have is that paratroopers are usually taught to 'stiffen up' for exit, opening and landing due to the inherent violence of each in their experience. Getting them to relax is usually a big chore. As far as your friend's canopy control experiences go, it is important to remember that airbourne not only use rounds, they use unmodified rounds. That means they are non-steerable. Unless your friend took some advanced training his canopy control skills are zero. This could mean a tandem would be useful. Just because a man is a soldier doesn't mean all stereotypes apply to him. That said, most soldiers are used to taking care of themselves. The tandem experience may contain a bit more 'reliance on others' for his taste. On balance I would think AFF would be fine right away. Would doing a tandem end up costing him more money in the end? It doesn't sound like it would at Aggiedave's or Skymonkey's DZs, but it would at other places. Find out how involved the tandem would be where you are going to take him and let him know the pros and cons.

Can you sell blueberries for $300/oz? Shit I'll get a government grant.

Well I for one am in favour of whatever it takes to get those dope growing bastards down there out of business. If they keep growing dope who the hell are all our BC BUD farmers going to export their product to? If they can't sell it in the US they will end up despoiling our youth right here at home or worse, going out of business. Damn yankees already don't want are lumber.

This may come as a shock to you but there are whole countries out here who exist without even 'the very limited protection of FAR 105.' government regulation of skydiving does nothing but make the industry unresponsive to change. The fifteen year or so delay in making the Tandem exemption permanent is a good example. The BPA's insistence on putting static line students out on rounds is another. (Is that still in place?) If the industry has dropped the ball, how can you explain the brilliant reduction in fatalities for first time jumpers experienced over the last twenty years or so?

Great thread! Let me join the throngs of participants who don't know anything about the subject.

Hope you have a blast. Make sure you have some carbs in your system before you go. One hypothesis I've heard is that adrenaline stimulates insulin production and, if there is not much sugar in your blood you get a mild insulin shock until your body can produce some.

When I was seven we moved and we got a phone with a dial on it. Before that we had to crank the bell to get the operator; our phone number was 3. The down side of the move was that we couldn't get the second TV station any more.

I have seen this happen to a couple of tandems. The scary ones were the three times it happened to IAD students. One guy passed out after he had turned onto final, one guy just after opening, and one woman I'm not sure when it happened. Nobody was hurt fortunately, but it is disconcerting. The dude who passed out right after opening told me he was doing his flight control check when all of a sudden the radio was saying "FIND A PLACE TO LAND! FIND A PLACE TO LAND! If this happened to you then you should definitely make your next jump another tandem. I wouldn't write off the whole sport based on one experience

America has the best dropzones.