SkydiveMO

I recently made several jumps on an Aerodyne Pilot and was very impressed with the canopies performance and controllability. It is a great starter canopy and is very well priced in the market. While talking about how impressed I was with the Pilot I heard from many jumpers that the Sabre2 has a far greater performance range than the Pilot and is a far better canopy for progressing to higher performance landings. So, I got my hands on a Sabre2 and took it for a spin. It is in no way an overstatement for me to say I was quite simply blown away with the canopies performance range. Opening: The openings were consistently smooth and on heading. I found the opening sequence to be a little quicker then what I prefer as a videographer but it was by no means uncomfortable. After several jumps I wore my camera helmet with both video and stills and felt no strain during the opening sequence. I did see the occasional end cell closure but experience tells me that it is the product of a nice slow opening. A tug on the rear risers or a pump of the brakes and things open right up. All in all I give the Sabre2 an A- for opening. Normal flight: The Sabre2 has a nice flat glide path and was very responsive to toggle and input. I was able to go into deep brakes to get plenty of separation from other jumpers or make it back from a long spot. Turn rates were just right in my opinion, the canopy was very controllable and I didn’t note any oversteer in either toggle or riser turns. I give an A for flight characteristics. Front riser turns: Front riser pressure was what surprised me most, for a canopy aimed for the new skydiver I expected high pressure. Instead I found the Sabre2 had perfectly stable medium pressure in front riser turns. The pressure built as you continued in a dive but was manageable. I found it easier to maintain a front riser dive with the Sabre2 than I do with a Stiletto. If you plan to progress into higher performance landings a Sabre2 could easily cover all your landing needs for a long time. Front riser pressure gets an A++. Rear riser control: The canopy felt less responsive in rear riser input to me, but I’m comparing it with fully elliptical canopies I’ve jumped. If needed it could be landed with rear risers but I didn’t feel comfortable using them when I was performing higher performance landings. I experimented with the risers up high and found it stalled rather easily with rear riser input. I give rear riser control a grade of B. Landings: The Sabre2 had a strong flare and was very easy to land both in normal and fast approaches. For high performance landings the canopy would dive very nicely and had a long recovery arc. With a little toggle input the canopy would plane out quickly and glide very nicely to a long swoop. At the end of the swoop there was plenty of flare left for either a soft landing or for a showy pop-up landing. In the straight in approach I could easily use brakes for accuracy and still have plenty of flare to stand up the landing. Definitely a grade of A for flaring ability. I believe the Sabre2 is currently the perfect starter canopy on the market. It can either be flown conservatively or aggressively. As you progress in abilities the canopy is still able to meet all of your needs. In all honesty, other than downsizing with experience and a need for more speed I don’t see the average jumper ever needing another canopy other than a Sabre2. Admittedly the Sabre2 is priced higher then comparable canopies on the market but it is well worth it. For the more experienced jumper I would suggest giving the Sabre2 a test flight sometime, you may be pleasantly surprised if you do... I know I was.

I was thinking the same thing, but the compression and quality are much higher with the H.264 codec. I figure it is worth using and pulling people over to QT7. Hopefully the full version will be released shortly. Until then it will give people something to complain about

I thought I had the most recent version as their link to Quicktime for Windows takes you to Version 6.5. On closer inspection I see there is a separate link to the preview Version 7. With version 7 for Windows I can open my file, thanks for the help. Now I can work on tweeking the settings and posting my video. Blue Skies

Yeah I think that is the problem also, but when I change to MPEG-4 format the file size really increases. Would any of the other available formats work better?

Anyone out there using Final Cut Express HD to convert skydiving footage to Quicktime formats for the internet? I've been using the original version of Final Cut Express for a couple years now but recently upgraded to the new HD version. I'm attempting to convert one of my sequences to quicktime for posting on skydivingmovies.com. When I do the conversion it works great on my Mac but my Windows machine says it doesn't have the proper compressor to view the movie. I never had this problem with the old version. If you use Final Cut Express HD what settings are you using to save your files for the internet? Thanks

High and Dry - Radiohead

In most cases the seller is just as concerned about getting ripped off as you are. As the others have said riggers make good middlemen (or women) for any sale. I also find I’m far more confident sending and receiving gear directly through the drop zones. If you can, have gear shipped to the DZ for inspection. Also, if you plan on test jumping any equipment it is common courtesy to ask the seller if it’s OK before doing so. It can be a pain in the butt arranging everything with a seller but there is a lot of great used equipment sitting around looking for a new home. Just last year I put together a CRW rig with a main canopy that had never been jumped, a reserve that was only used for a year and an old student harness for $900. It took time and a whole lot of shopping around to do but was well worth the savings over new gear.

Jumping a reserve should be no different than jumping any other new canopy. After opening first determine if you need to quickly plan your landing, as may be the case in a low deployment. Then if time and altitude allows make sure it can go right, left and flares properly. After a simple control check put the canopy through a series of landing flares to see how it will behave. Becoming familiar with the canopy up high will avoid any surprises down low. To truly maximize your chance of avoiding injury go ahead and perform a good parachute landing fall no matter how good the flare may feel on landing. A first reserve ride can be very stressful for a jumper, especially if they have never had experience with a 7-cell F111 canopy. Making a few jumps on a demo reserve can really help reduce this stress level and give jumpers valuable experience on something other then a modern ZP 9-cell. I still jump an Interceptor 225 CRW canopy from time to time so my Temp 170 felt pretty high performance… heck I even got a little swoop out of it

I've dislocated both of my ankles and bruised a knee jumping... OK make that crash landing . Had a hard opening once that chipped a tooth and really tweaked my back. Believe it or not, I find jogging two to three times a week helps keep me limber and pretty much pain free. Keeping in shape will help your body heal faster and stretching will help avoid tears and pulls.

This very unfortunate event made us all sit up and take note of our DZ’s preparedness regarding aircraft accidents. Think about it, do you have a plan in place if there is an aircraft accident at your airport? We have a plan outlined for dealing with injured skydivers that allows our staff to respond quickly and efficiently, luckily this plan also worked very well for handling the aircraft accident. We are now considering how this incident was handled and how we can better act in the future. Just like we regularly review our skydiving emergency procedures it is important for skydivers to review medical and aircraft emergency procedures. As an active skydiver I found this to be a very sobering experience. Luckily the crash only involved a single person who we were able to quickly help. Had this been our Cessna 182 it would have been five people or worse had it been the Caravan up to sixteen people. I can tell you many resources were used to help rescue the pilot. Had there been multiple individuals injured it would have taken a great deal more effort for every one to have acted as effectively. Please learn from our experience and review the procedures at your airport. In the end it could make all the difference in saving the life of an injured pilot or skydiver. Keep the skies safe.

There have been several threads for everyone’s favorite music picks for skydiving videos. These have come in very handy for expanding my collection for dubbing. Now I’d like to know what new music everyone is using. Try and limit your suggestions to only the newest releases. Let’s say released in the last two years only.

The annual Archway Skydiving Memorial Day Boogie is May 28-30th. Come Celebrate Jason and Anita's 6th year of owning Archway. Free organizing all weekend. Join us for the Bon fire, BBQ and great party. Jumps will be $18 all three days and registration is FREE. http://www.archwayskydiving.com

The only thing about using freefly video helmets for shooting tandems is the angle of the camera platform is very flat. When freeflying you are looking directly at the subject you are filming so the camera and stills are on level with your eyes. With other camera helmets there is more of a slope on the camera platform. When you are belly flying in front of a slow flying tandem with a freefly helmet you have to really crank your head back to keep everything in frame and get that nice tandem student money face shot. Not the most comfortable thing to do but not the end of the world. I use an Optik and several of the videographers at the DZ use Rawa’s to shoot tandem video and stills with no problems other then the occasional sore neck jumping with the real slow falling tandem master with the real light tandem passanger.

Those will come in handy, thanks for posting

Nope, I did the same when I had my TRV-27 in a case. I didn't want to chop the case up just to hook and unhook the video cable. So I drilled a hole and routed the whole cable inside the helmet coiling it behind the pads. Not as clean as what you're getting ready to make but same effect.

Well that’s a whole ‘nother story, goes something like this... I was stationed with an Airborne support unit to the Special Forces Command in Germany at the time. The unit didn’t jump much so I took up skydiving for fun. Many of the skydivers I jumped with were HALO qualified and would talk about their military training. Quite literally the day before my malfunction one of the guys had explained that with all their gear on HALO jumpers create a huge burble in freefall. Often when the pilot chute deploys it will get caught in this burble. Unlike a normal skydiver who can turn and let a little air spill over and clear the pilot chute a HALO jumper can’t easily turn with all the gear. Instead they are taught to do a steep track putting the full force of the wind onto their back and into the pilot chute. As he put it “this will pretty much rip anything off your back that’s got stuck”. Little did I know at the time his “there I was no Sh$*” story would save my life. I remember the malfunction quite vividly as it’s burned into my memory. I had a side of leg deployment system at the time on a Vector II. I pulled the pilot chute out to full arm extension, let go and watched as it flew down the burble on my arm right onto my back. I remember thinking “that didn’t look right!” I have no clue where the pilot chute went. As I was taught to in AFF I started looking hard over my shoulder for the pilot chute to help put clean air onto my back to clear the pilot chute. This didn’t work, in hindsight I may have been able to go much more unstable or steep tracked to clear the pilot chute at this point. Knowing I was burning precious altitude I pulled the reserve handle and threw it thinking “man I hope that’s not expensive” as I watched it float away (I did not cut away, again in hindsight I really should have). I went back into a good arch unconcerned and waited for the reserve to deploy. After a second I realized nothing was coming off my back so I took a look over my shoulder to check once again for a pilot chute. This time I was able to locate the reserve pilot chute easily as it was spinning itself around the main pilot chute and bridle which appeared to be in tow. Oddly I still wasn’t concerned I just thought what could I do next. I remembered what the HALO jumper had said about clearing pilot chutes and went into a steep dive. As I started my dive I looked down at the ground and saw a group of pine trees. One of those trees went from being small to big real fast... I realized I was breaking through 1,000ft. Now I got very concerned, as I didn’t have anything left that I knew to do to save my life. As I thought “I’m DEAD” the reserve deployed whipping me forward and slamming my head into my chest. With the reserve out the main pack tray went loose and the main fell out. The lines started unstowing from the bag as it fell so I grabbed it real quick and put it between my legs so the main wouldn’t deploy. I reached up cleared the toggles on the reserve, made a left turn to avoid hitting the hangar, flared and slid to a stop two feet from the pea pit (great spot). Edited to add: What should be learned from my experience is that high-speed malfunctions leave little time to think about what to do next. Review emergency procedures often, use the hanging harness a couple times a year and never give up. Reviewing emergency procedures often will make them second nature and time won’t be wasted wondering what to do next.

Don’t know if this counts but I had a reserve pilot chute entanglement with a main pilot chute in tow on jump number 32. It took a head down dive to clear the entanglement and allow the reserve to deploy. I threw out at 5,000ft, deployed the reserve at approximately 3,000ft and didn’t have a canopy over my head until 500ft. Yeah, I had nightmares about that jump for about a month. I often wonder if I hadn’t been doing a solo jump with the intention of pulling high if the outcome would have been much different. I lost my free bag in a tree so I had to rent gear for jump number 33. Not wanting to push my luck I pulled at 5,000ft again. Wouldn’t you know the rental gear had an old Sentinal in it that fired the reserve out right as the main was deploying. Had I not just spent a thousand plus dollars getting through AFF and several thousand more buying gear I probably would have quit jumping. I did make it 8 years and 1,400 plus jumps before having reserve ride number three.

Yeah that could be a problem, I'm guessing at the price you paid for the helmet you're not to keen on loosing it. In that case, I use a Z1 to freefly and it works great.

Why not just keep using the FreeZR to freefly in? I use my Z1 for both RW and freefly jumps. I do occasionaly get the "you freefly in a fullface?" question. To which I respond "why not?" I've never been too cool for a little extra face protection... well I've probably never been that cool My mug ain't much to look at but I like to keep it the way it is.

It may speed reserve deployment but it can’t improve my reaction time. I’d keep my decision altitudes the same with the higher margin of safety. If I can’t decide immediately whether a canopy is savable or not then it probably isn’t. Why burn up valuable time and altitude just because theoretically I can? Like everyone else has said it would have me feeling a little more comfortable in an extreme case like canopy collision at a low altitude though.

I had three 70+ tandem students last season, two ladies and one gentleman. All were great fun to talk with and each had a real blast. I know for a fact that I was way more nervous then they were about the jump. Of course when Grandma or Grandpa goes skydiving the whole family is going to be there to see it. It’s bad enough that I am very concerned about injuring an older student it only gets worse when I realize it could happen with the family watching. I (knock on wood) haven’t had a student injured on a jump yet but as any instructor will tell you it isn’t for a lack of trying on their part. On a side note, I would say that the more mature ladies are the most fun students you could have. I think the proper term is Dirty Ol’ Lady

When I was looking to move into the world of ellipticals I had my heart set on an air locked canopy. I liked the idea of a canopy that resisted collapse in turbulence and retained its shape at slower speeds of flight. The choice was between Performance Design’s Vengeance and Big Air Sports’ Samurai. I test jumped the Samurai 136 first and found it very responsive to control inputs and fast in flight and landing. The recover arc was much longer then a Stiletto but I believe slightly shorter then the Vengeance. The Samurai was a little too responsive for my abilities at the time so I tried the Vengeance next. The Vengeance 135 was more subdued in toggle and riser response and tamer in its flight characteristics. Toggle turns are slow initially but after a couple rotations can match or exceed a Stiletto’s turn rate. The big difference that sets both the Samurai and Vengeance apart though is the glide. On a long spot all I have to do is unstow the breaks and pull slightly on the rear risers to flatten out the canopies glide angle and it will cover some real distance. The only canopy I’ve found that can out glide my Vengeance is the new Katana, which if it were available in a 135 yet I would highly consider. Another characteristic of the Vengeance is a long recovery arc, much longer then a Stiletto and nearly as long as my cross-braced canopy. I have had the most difficulty getting the timing right for front riser carves with my Vengeance. It dives a great deal before it starts to plain out. After a great deal of practice and some not so pretty landings I’ve started to become consistent swooping. Whether making a conservative straight in approach or cranking a 270 front riser turn the Vengeance blew away the Stiletto 135 and 150s I have jumped in both distance and flare power at the end of the swoop. After touching down if there is just a little wind the canopy will remain inflated and flying begging me to squeeze out that last bit of distance on the next jump. My only complaints about my Vengeance are that the openings are just plain awkward and that on windy days canopy collection can be a chore. With the airlocks the cells do not inflate in a consistent order and the canopy does a lot of seeking before finally opening off heading. The openings are slow and comfortable and thanks to a long line set the off heading opening simply means a quick 90 or 180 turn that is easily stopped with rear riser input. Another characteristic caused by the long line set used on the Vengeance is over steer. I find often that coming out of a turn I have to counter steer as I am consistently overshooting my target. Like the dive this is all about the timing. My other complaint is that collecting the canopy on a windy day can be a chore. The airlocks are a dream in the air but a real pain on the ground. Following Brian Germain’s tips on collecting an air locked canopy really helps though. I have made about 200 jumps on my Vengeance and am very happy with it as a progression canopy. Now that I’m more skilled as a canopy pilot and am confident in my abilities I think I’d prefer the higher performance of the Samurai. I would have no problem suggesting the Vengeance as an Intermediate level canopy to any jumper. It has a wide performance range and works great as an all-around canopy with a little pep in its step.

I'd like to suggest the addition of couching/instruction to the choice of disciplines in the jumpers profile section. More then a quarter of my total jumps have been made as a tandem or static-line instructor. I have put more effort into instruction then I have any of the many other skydiving disciplines I enjoy. Thanks again for the great web site and forum.

Now that you mention it, it does look like maybe the tail got pushed into the lines and maybe caught temporarily before the slider came down fully allowing the lines to spread thus releasing the tail. Not really a step through but more like ??tension canopy??

It is hard to tell, I wouldn't rule out a tension knot. Did you check to see if there were any burn marks on the canopy from a lineover?