pilotdave

You can learn more about it in MikeMullinsHollyFulton.mov at http://www.skydivingmovies.com/movies.php?mode=2&dir=from_TV. (47 megs) Strange story but I don't care. Dave

Maryland will be bringing a vanfull or two. We'll try not to set the place on fire this time! Dave

My company has a FREE A&P school. Gotta be a factory worker to get in though. I'm an engineer but I'd love to learn the other end of the helicopter bidness and do something other than sit behind a desk all day. Dave

Hmm. I'm pretty sure there is software that will convert it (I think Adobe Distiller will do it), but chances are you don't have access to it. You might be able to find some free OCR (optical character recognition) that could convert it to text but thats a serious pain in the ass. What did it do when you tried copying and pasting? Wouldn't highlight at all? Dave

Well, it's not perfect, but if its a simple file you might just be able to highlight the text and copy and paste it. Just click on the "T" button at the top to be able to highlight. You might need to do a significant amount of reformatting with that method though. Dave

I'm 23. And while we're on the subject of young'ns, anyone going to the University of Florida Collegiate Boogie in Jan? Dave

All metal has some amount of springiness. No, a crumpled piece of foil wont return to a flat sheet when you let go, but if you took a strip of it, oiled it up, and bent it into a ring, overlapping a little bit onto itself, I guarantee the diameter would change when you let go. I don't believe that ZP fabric has any special property that causes it to return to the previous shape it was in. Just like phreezone said, it's all about the slipperiness of it. You're relying on friction to hold the canopy into the cacoon shape when you're packing. ZP has less, therefore if there's any air in it, it'll slip and move. Even in a vacuum I'm sure it would move because of the forces on the material giving way as the material slides over itself. Dave

As a helicopter system safety engineer, I'm offended by that! Dave

It didn't seem to make teh news, but Julius Caesar got stabbed a few years before I was born. Dave

If you can afford it, I can assure you it's for rent!

But look at the bright side. Drop your USPA membership and ya won't die! Dave

Don't gotta bring newton in! He just tells me how much I weigh but I don't really care if I'm sweating in freefall and losing mass cause the fat guy is prolly sweating even more! Dave

I don't have a racer, I think they look ugly (some are actually very nice looking), but they're VERY popular where I jump. People that own them LOVE them. They go back to jumpshack for every rig. I don't see what makes it so great myself, but there's something. Dave

Just for future reference, people are prolly nice to you because you're female. It doesn't work like that for guys. I'm only friendly to the ones that have a plane I want a ride in...like that sweet RV-8 last weekend... drool...

If you people would use a unit of weight instead of mass, you wouldn't have to deal with F=ma. Dave

Momentum has nothing to do with it. Force, well, sorta. Forget body shape for a minute. Just think of 2 identical people but one ate a bunch of lead for breakfast and weighs more without having a different shape. Gravity exerts a force on each body. The one with more weight will have more pull from gravity. Thats by definition of weight actually. Anyway, both people, at a given fallrate, will generate the same amount of drag. At the lighter person's terminal velocity, the drag on him will exactly match his weight. That's why he stops accelerating and holds that speed. The heavier person will have the same amount of drag at that speed but he'll still have more weight than drag. He won't stop accelerating until his drag matches his weight. Drag increases with velocity. The faster you fall, the more drag you produce. Technically drag is related to velocity squared but that doesn't matter. Body size and shape really complicates the issue. It's VERY difficult to estimate how body shape will affect fallrate. Now, we know a guy with a big belly is going to be heavy so it's pretty obvious he's going to fall faster than a skinny person, but it's very much not obvious what the exact affect the shape his stomach will have on his fallrate. Aerodynamics are a lot more complicated than it sometimes looks. Hope this helps. Dave

So you're saying F111 doesn't have "memory" but ZP does? You'd agree that if it was an F111 canopy, it would open in the same time no matter how long it was packed for? Eh, I just don't believe it. Any material has a certain amount of stiffness, but memory is a very odd property of some materials. I saw a demonstration a few months ago of something called a shape memory alloy. It's a metal that can be deformed but will return to its original shape when heat is applied. THATs memory. I simply don't believe the fact that ZP seems to grow when you let it sit is anything other than air moving around in it. Then again, I could be wrong. Dave

I wasn't a fan of the second one. Figured the 3rd would only get worse. I just didn't get it. If he could fly, why didnt he just fly all the freaking time? He waited till he was about to die every time. What an idiot. And if I could fly in the matrix, do you really think I'd be trying to shut the damn thing down? I'd never leave! Dave

Does it make a difference if it was packed sloppy 5 minutes ago or 5 weeks ago? If it's too sloppy to jump (is there such a thing??), it's too sloppy to jump. Time shouldn't really matter. I'm also very much a non-believer that the amount of time it will take to open will be noticeably different. Maybe I'm wrong but I'd like to see proof. Dave

Yeah, repack it. Just jump it to air it out first. Dave

I designed the t-shirts for the club I was president of. Same idea, single color to save money. Here are the designs I made for a shirt. We ended up going with the middle one. It was the most universal, so we figured the first timers could relate best to it. Let me know if you want any of these in very high res. edit: These are traced from stolen pictures. Sue me. Dave

Just remember you have plenty of time to get stable. How high you jumping from the first time? I think they usually do the first hop n' pop from 5000 or 5500. If you go unstable, you have a good 15 seconds to play with if you have to. Even from 3000 you have plenty of time. Expect to be nervous. It's the scariest jump since your first (or at least it seems like it will be). Once you're out the door, there's nothing to it. Step out, watch the plane fly away, pull. Don't rush it. Take your time. I mean the idea isnt to freefall for 10 seconds, but you don't want to pull unstable either. Dave

Did you watch Joe Schmo on Spike TV? Now THAT was hilarious. It was just like any other reality show. Bunch of people live in a mansion, vote each other off each week... Last one standing wins $100K. Except for one thing. Everyone was an actor playing a role except one guy who thought it was all real. Funniest thing I've seen in so long. Dave

Hard at first. Gets less hard pretty quickly. Some tell me it gets easy later.

All depends where you plan to put them. I used to design 2 types of flyers to advertise my school's club. One was for places where I might have a captive audience, like dorm bathroom doors, and the others were for high traffic areas where people wouldn't likely stop to read. The bathroom door types had lots of info with a big bold headline that just said SKYDIVE. The sidewalk flyers had as little info as possible. I made the word "skydive" as big as I could, then put the date, time, and room number of the next "info session" I was holding. I'd also print out the more informative flyers 4 per page and print up hundreds of quarter page handouts. I attached the last flyer I designed. It was meant to be a generic flyer we could print in bulk without any dated info. Keep flyers as bold as possible. Get the print as big as can fit. And post them everywhere. Good luck!