pilotdave

Well, I won't disagree with ya. Wings had been my top choice until I discovered that vectors are better.

I don't know the 737, but I think in any modern "high tech" aircraft, it would be nearly impossible. I remember reading an "I learned about flying from that" article about a Cessna Cardinal pilot that bumped the gear handle by mistake on the ground and didnt notice. Nothing happens until weight comes off the wheels, so it was easy to miss. Problem was his takeoff wasn't too graceful, and after lifting off, he settled back down right away. The gear had only moved a little bit, but it was enough that it jammed when the weight came down. To make a long story short, he had a back seat passenger open the panel in the floor and eventually got the gear to release and go down, and landed safely. On a modern fly by wire aircraft, weight on wheels indication is very important because it gets fed as a parameter to the flight control computer (and weapons systems on military aircraft). The aircraft I've spent my whole career working on (all 9 or so months of it) uses 3 independent weight-on-wheels switches per landing gear. And the gear isn't physically capable of retracting when the aircraft is sitting on them. Now a typical retractable might only use one wieght on wheels switch, but the probability of a failure and the pilot knocking the switch on the same flight would probably be very low. Landing gear handles on modern aircraft are designed so that 2 motions are requied... ie pull out and then up. That way there's much less chance it'll be moved by mistake. So is it possible? Yeah, anything is possible. But probable? No. Has it happened? I'm sure! Dave

Mirages are the 2nd ugliest rig, right behind voodoos. Dave

Just picked it up from UPS a few minutes ago. Looks AWESOME. Still empty so not very lively looking in the pics, but here it is! Thanks Arlo!!!! Dave

It's no different than calculating the wing loading of a plane. Since most planes store their fuel in the wings, they're a very significant percentage of the weight of the plane. Wouldn't make any sense to leave them out of the calculation. Dave

Yep, 3 hours of university funded tunnel time, plus 2 coaches. That's the stuff that gets club members active! When I was president at maryland we started doing a bunch of stuff to try to keep people involved. Club jackets ($170 each, but only charged members $40), club t-shirts, some free jumps for helping the club out (putting up fliers and stuff), and the free trips to florida including tunnel time. Also got the members to show up to our monthly "info sessions" by offering free pizza. Dave

Going to work doing nothing till 10:30 going to a meeting at another location eating lunch (they have sushi on wednesdays in the cafeteria!) going back to my building to do nothing for the rest of the day going home grabbing the UPS slip that says they tried to deliver a package calling UPS and asking for a same day will-call hopefully driving to UPS and picking up my new vector3!!!!!!! going home and spending the rest of the night drooling on my new container Dave

Ok, posted my thoughts to the feedback forum: HERE. Dave

Threads are being moved out of general skydiving and into talkback like crazy lately. A lot of people are unsure of what topics ARE allowed in that forum. While it is a "topical forum," it has always been used as a place where skydivers can talk about anything skydiving related. Talkback has been used for everything non-skydiving related. I'd like to see the rules for that forum relaxed. We're all skydivers here, and some of us would actually like to be able to talk about skydiving without having to compete with political or religious debates. I can understand the "no jokes" rule in safety and training or gear and rigging, but I see no problem with that sort of thing in general skydiving. I'd prefer it to be a little bit light hearted and, dare I say, FUN! There are serious forums for serious questions. There is a forum for pure noise. Now can we please have something in between? Dave

Oh, the most important part of our rocket... see attached.

I did AFF basically over a year. Only had to repeat one level, but that's definitely not the way to do it. Save up! Dave

Actually when we started the project we had a long talk with our advisor about "extracurricular use" of the whippits. They were well aware of what they could be used for. It was pretty funny though because originally the university was going to fund our whippit purchase, but we looked for the best price we could find anyway. They were pretty expensive at kitchen supply stores (they're used for making whipped cream), but they were cheap as hell at a drug paraphanelia website so thats where I ordered them from. In the end we decided to eat the cost ourselves since we had already spent more money than we really should have, but I woulda loved to hand that receipt in to the university. Dave

Awesome. I was curious because I worked on a hybrid rocket project in college. We built a tiny one that used a "whippit" nitrous cartridge for the oxydizer. We tried a few different fuels...acrylic, paper, and rubber. We eventually mixed our own rubber (HTPB rubber or something like that), adding some stuff to make it burn hotter (carbon black and powdered aluminum). We started work on a larger version that would produce 100 lbs of thrust for a minute I think, using medical grade nitrous. But we never ended up building the thing. Edit: A couple videos of our test firings of the little one: Paper fuel test HTPB Rubber fuel test Dave

What type of rocket is that? Liquid fueled? What's it burn? Dave

Hey, I don't think I like you looking at my mother earth that way! Dave

Around 4 or 5 years ago I had the email address pilotdave@email.com (they eventually started charging for their service so I got rid of it). I used it only as an address I'd give out to strangers instead of giving them my "real" email address. Well, when I started the skydiving videos FTP server (now skydivingmovies.com), I put that email address on the welcome message, and used that address when I posted to rec.skydiving. Well, eventually people started referring to me as "pilotdave," and it just stuck. Found dz.com when I started getting a bunch of hits from a thread about the site, and registered this name cause that's what people were arlready calling me. Damn that was boring. Hope you didn't actually read that! Dave

That is a good idea, but I'd like to know if I'm alone in my thinking before I actually suggest a policy change. But seriously I just never read that forum so the idea didn't even cross my mind. Thanks! Dave

Yeah, get windows media encoder and convert it to wmv. Dave

Yeah, everything here is nice and relatively new (building only opened 18 months ago or something). But at some point I'll be moving to a different building with all dark yellow and brown file cabinets and old desks. Not looking forward to it. Damn Comanche cancellation... Dave

What the heck would anyone want the CD for? All you get is that stoopit song. What good is it without skydiving babies?? Dave

Mine looks similar to yours. No cameras allowed in here though. But I've got about the same color scheme, corner desk, but fewer pictures and a lot more clutter. Dave

Not gonna tell you you're stupid or anything. Just curious why you bought a canopy you don't think you're ready for. Did you get advice to buy it? Dave

The lift a canopy generates has nothing to do with the wind (unless you have an updraft). Your descent rate will be the same in no wind, a huge tailwind, or a huge headwind. I think that's what Andy was getting at. Dave

Ever been dragged by a canopy? When I was a student jumping 230s loaded at 0.56, it happened a few times. Never disconnected my RSL or cut away, but I could definitely see where someone might need to. I was once backing up on final and ended up landing in the middle of a road when a car was coming (still plenty far away so he could have stopped...i woulda turned otherwise). I fell and got dragged off the road about 15 feet, reeling in one brake line the whole time as fast as I could. If I had landed short of the road and got dragged onto it, things coulda been ugly if that car wasn't paying attention. Dave

So you're the guy that burned out all those hard drives on the server! j/k Yeah, borrowed bandwidth must be limited. I opened the site to the (non-dz.com) public today. 900 downloads later, I'm thinking some "anti-leech" code might be necessary.