pilotdave

Upsizing would be a good choice. I went from jumping a 230 to a 150 when I had around 40 jumps or so I think. That's a big drop, but I only load the 150 at about .8:1. I also went with an F-111 canopy, mostly because the price was right. I don't have any regrets for not going smaller. I'd have to jump a sub 110 to reach a loading of 1.2. No thanks. I'm having PLENTY of fun and enough challenge jumping my 150. My only reasons I would consider downsizing are wind penetration and a 135 would fit in my container a lot more easily. But I have little interest in jumping anything smaller any time soon. My reserve is a 120. I am reasonably confident that I'll be able to land it safely when I have to. But right now I don't think I'd demo it if I had the chance. The odds are pretty good that by the time I need it, I'll have a bunch more jumps and possibly be jumping a smaller main. But the idea of jumping a canopy loaded at just under 1.1 doesn't sound particularly appealing to me at the moment. Dave

or best offer. Why not try?

Before the thread gets locked... I have a 28" ZP kill line PC that I'm no longer using. Black, black hackey handle. Replaced it after I had a PC in tow with it, but it happened again with a brand new PC so I am not sure there's anything wrong with the old one. May possibly have a shrunken kill line. Fabric is in good shape according to a rigger that looked at it (and tried to breathe through it). $300 or best offer.

Different topic, but do you realize Saddam Hussein would have nuclear weapons right now if the Israelis hadn't destroyed his french/italian made nuclear power plant (which was supposedly built so the 2nd most oil rich country in the world could research alternative energy sources) in 1981 using american provided planes? The power plant was built by france and italy in exchange for oil, by the way, and they knew it could produce the plutonium needed for about one nuclear weapon per year. I'm not worried about this war becoming WW3. If Iraq had finished their nuclear plant, I'd be really worried. Thank goodness the US supplied them with F-16s. Dave

I can't believe the pilot had him do that. The only people I've let out of a plane I'm in control of with the engine running is skydivers (on the ground that is), and even with them I always tell them to walk BEHIND the plane when they get out. I would never let anyone go anywhere near the nose with the engine running. My guess is they were the pilot's own chocks and he wanted them back because it's really easy to jump them. My instructor taught me that trick once when I forgot to remove the nose chocks. He learned it on his commercial checkride when he had made the same mistake. Since it seems so obvious and yet it happens so often to people that should know better, it really is something we should think about. It's easy to call the guy a dumbass, but maybe he was calling the last guy to do it a dumbass last week too. Dave

My aircraft design textbook gives this equation for best rate of climb... vertical velocity = {(550)(brake horsepower)(propeller efficiency factor) - (drag)(velocity)} / W Thats the power available minus the power required, divided by weight. Decreasing drag helps, but increasing brake horsepower helps more. Dave

The canard will probably do a lot more for climb angle than climb rate. STOL kits (engine aside) are for decreasing ground run, which has little to do with climb rate. They probably add a bit of drag at high angles of attack which would not be good for climb rate. I still like the JATO bottle idea.

I don't know... but I think most of those are really for improving low speed characteristics, not climb rate. I've never seen a 182 with VGs, but I've heard great things about them on other types. Leading edge cuffs (at least on other types... again, i don't know what's out there for 182s) can dramatically improve low speed/stall flight characteristics, but I bet they add drag. Drooped wingtips are pretty common for shortening takeoffs, but I've never seen any evidence that they work. I agree with everyone else. Horsepower is the only way to go. Dave

Hehe sim time may actually be doable... I dunno. The full motion sim is located at the main sikorsky plant, not too far from where I'll be working. Real flight time, hehe, no chance. There's only one of them currently flying (a/c #1 is retired from flying) and it's only flown by test pilots in west palm beach. My job will have me doing teleconferences with the test pilots though. The comanche program has been going on for something like 15 years or more. It's slow, but it's moving. 2 prototypes have been made, #3 is scheduled to fly in 2004 or 2005 i think, and that will be the first production model. It's gotta be the most advanced helicopter ever, so there's a lot of details to work out. When I did my internship there last summer, they were in the process of selecting subcontractors to build a lot of the components. At the same time they're doing a bunch of flight testing on the #2 prototype and finding all the bugs in the sensor systems, night vision, etc. It's amazing how different the production version will be from the prototypes even though they'll look identical. I think the program is funded to 2011 and thats just when full production will be starting I think, so the program will be around for a while. Dave

hehehe. blackhawk jumps, anyone?

Just got hired by Sikorsky Aircraft. Starting June 2, I'll be a System Safety Engineer on the Comanche helicopter program. YAY! Dave

There is at least one video of this on skydivingmovies.com. That Pink skyvan in germany has done it. Really weird to see... the video looks like a perfectly normal exit until you notice the sky is brown and the ground is blue....then the planes goes down, not up. /misc/episode22.mov Dave

Any idea how the left side became the standard side for the RSL? Most people are right handed and wearing an altimeter on their left hand. Those both seem like reasons to put it on the right. Dave

Oh one thing I forgot about... When I was buying my suit I had around 15 jumps or so. My gear dealer refused to let me order a suit with booties at my experience level. Instead, he put a note on the order form that booties would be added later. Apparently Bev can stitch the legs on differently so that the lower legs can be removed and replaced with booties. Honestly I have no clue if anything like that was actually done, but it's something to consider. (I later found out the dealer I bought mine from has a bit of a lying problem. I never know which bits and pieces of what he told me to trust). Dave

The classic airfoil shape with a curved upper surface and flat bottom surface (yes, i realize thats not what canopies look like) is not the main factor in achieving the faster, lower pressure airflow over the top. Symmetric airfoils work due to the angle of attack. The leading edge needs to be curved to be able to move the stagnation point (the very very front edge) down when the wing is at a positive angle of attack. That effectively moves the chord line down at the leading edge giving the wing an effective camber. The more aerodynamics I study, the more I realize this stuff is much more complicated than it seems. There are no exact solutions for solving for the lift a wing will produce. Boeing and PD use computational fluid dynamics to figure this stuff out. But the lift IS caused by the pressure distribution around the wing, which is caused by variations in the speed of the flow around the wing. Dave

Get it made of the materials you want and with the useful options, but don't waste your money on fancy grippers. The standard ones work just fine for the kind of jumps you'll be doing. I have 2 options on my Bev suit... leg zippers (no booties) to tighten up the legs for a faster fall rate and stripes on the grippers for some extra color. There is an inside pocket standard which works just fine for most things. I held a mini mag light in there when I did a night jump. I'm sure it's no problem where you jump, but make sure you get someone experienced to measure you for the suit. They'll know where to keep it tight and where to keep it loose to get the fall rate you want and make it comfortable. Inseam grips and fat grips are for the people you jump with, not you, right? Screw them. If they want fat grips, let them pay for em!

1 (time i fell asleep at the wheel driving home from the DZ):2:0 Woke up in the right shoulder as my LEFT wheels hit the rumble strip. That kept me awake for the rest of the ride home! Dave

Sangiro needs to add a "verify on snopes" button right next to spell check. Dave

Hmmm, what kind of computer do you have? Dave

Are you watching the movie directly off the server, or downloading it? If you've downloaded it and it plays like that, it's probably a codec problem. You might want to install the ace mega codecs pack available in the /codecs/ folder. Lemme know if that works for you. Dave

Could probably be done pretty easily with the door on. With a little slip the door will open enough to get out pretty easily. Not that I would do it (as either the pilot or jumper), but it could be done. I'll stick with jumping out of twin otters into DZs. Dave

Well, I put fun-01.mov ("The most hardcore skydive movie ever... 100% fun, 0% jumps") in the cutaways folder, so I guess those could go there too. Probably don't belong but what the hell.

Yep, not only was it safety day but also the season grand reopening and a beautiful day. I strolled in nice and late...12:30 or so, and manifested for load 1 which was on a 15 minute call. We ended up getting a whopping 3 loads (twin otter) up, and i got on 2 of them. It was fun and it was great to get back in the air for the first time since january, but a 2 hour drive out and another 2 hour drive back is pretty rough for 2 solo jumps. Any DZs do anything particularly interesting for safety day? Dave

Lift is due to the pressure distribution around the airfoil. Where the air is moving faster, it has lower pressure, just as Bernoulli says. What causes the pressure distribution is more complicated than just the curved upper surface and flat bottom, but the fact is that when the forces caused by the pressure distribution are integrated around the airfoil, a net upward force is produced. Upwash and downwash are really results of this. Circulation and lifting line theory are more mathematical ways of estimating lift. Newton's laws apply too, but they, at least his second law, really deals with the change in momentum the wing causes in the air. The change in momentum of the air will equal the lift. No single theory EXPLAINS lift. It's really complicated. But each individual theory applies in it's own way. Dave

best skydiving game ever: http://wannaplaygames.com/skyball/ Dave