pilotdave

I have to agree with ya... I've had great experiences ordering from square1 before, but I've had a lot of trouble since they put up this new site and they have lost business from me. I was searching for something I knew they sold, but the search failed (database error), and wasn't able to find it in any category. I also generally don't like the look or functionality of the site when it is working properly, but that's just my opinion. Just as an example, I wanted a particular type of goggles but didn't know what they were called. I had to click on each brand of goggles until I found the ones I was looking for. But in that case, I did buy from them... twice actually! Dave

Depends how safe a backup you want. If your house burns down, all the hard drives in it are toast. Online storage, backed up at multiple locations, prevents that possibility. The data also becomes accessible from anywhere. Dave

I use SmugMug... it's about $150/year for a Pro account. Unlimited storage (I have over 30 gigs uploaded including backups of ALL my pictures). You set your own prices. Then they take 15% of the profit. So each picture has a default price, like 19 cents for a 4x6. If I sold a 4x6 for $1, the total profit is 81 cents. They then take 12 cents (15%), and I get the remaining 69 cents. But you can charge $10 for a 4x6 if you want and your profit (if you sell any) would be $8.34. To me, that's a small price to pay to let someone else deal with the printing and shipping. But I'm also not trying to make money or even break even (and I'm not coming close!). If you sold nothing but 8x10s for $15, you'd start making a profit after selling 15 of em ($10.21 each). Dave

It's very common to print pictures backwards in publications to keep the readers' eyes flowing into the page. I haven't seen the parachutist or website you're talking about, but magazines hate showing something moving to the left if it's along the left edge of the page... it tends to look distracting. You see them flip pictures all the time in aviation magazines, often forgetting that the registration is now backwards, making it completely obvious. But that has nothing to do with skyride... Skyride is very tricky making their scam websites look real. Before the SkydivingArizona.com is transferred to SDA, take a look at their list of local hotels: http://www.skydivingarizona.com/restaurants.html. Nice generic list of hotels that could be anywhere! Dave

I recommend reading the Rebel XTi and D80 reviews here: http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/canoneos400d/ http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/nikond80/ They compare both cameras with the XT too. XTi vs D80: "As we commented in our Nikon D80 review both of these cameras produce very similar levels of detail, the only difference being down to the different image processing choices made by Canon and Nikon. Canon clearly apply slightly more sharpening which produces an image which looks crisper, that said you would struggle to be able to see a difference between these two images, even in a large print." XTi vs XT: "There's really no advantage in moving from eight to ten megapixels, the additional 432 horizontal pixels and 288 vertical pixels produce no more detail that can be seen. Indeed if anything the eight megapixel (EOS 350D) image looks slightly sharper 'per pixel' than the ten megapixel image from the EOS 400D." So even if for cropping, 10mp isn't necessarily better than 8, even with the same lens on such similar cameras. Dave

The sport existed before those safety devices, and it wasn't any safer. The sport exists with those safety devices, and it doesn't seem to be any safer either. I do think the sport is safer now than it used to be for those people that don't add the risk of high performance landings. If you don't include high performance landing accidents in the fatality rate, I'll bet it's improved over time... (I haven't looked at any numbers). Dave

Ok, so what is the safe direction to fly after a high/premature deployment with a load behind you? Toward the landing area? I just think telling people to pull lower isn't the ideal solution to the problem. People will pull high or have premature deployments. Lots of swoopers like to pull at 4500 or higher these days. Were mistakes made other than one jumper pulling higher than you expected (or higher than the local rules allow)? Or, are there other solutions to the same problem that don't require people to pull lower than they're comfortable with? Dave

Isn't that more of a problem of loads dumping on top of each other than just pulling high? What if someone had a premature deployment on the previous load? You'd run into the same thing... which is why we always talk about the importance of horizontal separation vs. vertical separation after breakoff. Running two jumpruns over the same spot 5 minutes apart seems to rely on vertical separation, doesn't it? Dave

Did you read anything I wrote, or just maybe pick out a few words and decide to reply? Let me paraphrase what I said. I doubt there is a design flaw based on the fact that most mamba owners don't seem to have this problem. But if the design of the mamba does cause modern, average-sized audibles to break, then the product is flawed. I was debating the idea that the customer may have screwed up by putting a neptune in the audible pocket of a modern skydiving helmet. Dave

The neptune is almost exactly the same dimensions as the protrack and pro dytter, which I'm sure were the most common audibles when it was designed. If theres some problem with the mamba that causes it to damage audibles of that size, it has a design flaw. I think you're probably right that there's something different going on here and the mamba doesnt generally have this design flaw because others aren't reporting problems in big numbers. But regardless, if the design flaw exists, i'd blame bonehead too. I think its a ridiculous argument to make that the mamba might just not be compatible with the neptune. That would be something bonehead would be responsible to tell their customers. Dave

Just did some searching on here... first "i got my neptune" thread was august of 2003. You posted that the mamba was being tested in the perris tunnel in october of 2004. I have no idea if there's some issue with audibles in the mamba, but the neptune had been out for over a year when the mamba was still in testing. Yeah, really odd to try to stick an audible in an audible pocket. He shoulda thought twice about that! Dave

I don't know about the mamba, but can you just turn the neptune around so the screen isn't facing the nut? Might still be able to crack the case I guess... My neptune is so loud in my Z1 I have to put it that way so the speaker doesn't face my ear. Dave

FYI, I don't think there's any proof that Da Vinci ever said/wrote that quote. It's a nice quote, but I'm pretty sure the "experts" don't believe it came from him. Don't remember where I read that... it was a while ago, but I think I was trying to find the exact wording (which is different depending on where you look). Dave

Here's an example: http://www.skydivingmovies.com/ver2/pafiledb.php?action=file&id=2341 Dave

http://www.skydivingmovies.com/ver2/pafiledb.php?action=file&id=5494 Dave

It's an internet forum. That's what it's here for.

Not being the owner of a Caravan, I doubt I'd have much luck getting any information out of them. I think the FAA/NTSB would have an easier time after a landing gear failure. I work for an aircraft manufacturer in the product safety department. Requests for information like that from operators are common, but usually after something breaks. Dave

Generally speaking, I would consider it to be a poor choice to cut away just because of a broken steering line. That doesn't mean the landing is necessarily going to be pretty, but probably one you will walk away from. I'd just add that rear riser landings are something to treat with a lot of respect. It's very easy to stall suddenly on rear risers (the point of this thread) and slam into the ground before you even see it coming. Our DZ had an experienced jumper (500+ jumps) break his back on a "routine" rear riser landing after a steering line broke. My only skydiving injury was a twisted knee (minor injury, never went to a doctor or anything) on a rear riser landing off the DZ when I had a stuck toggle. I had ~200 jumps. Not sure what happened, but I either stalled it and slammed in or flared too late. I wasn't expecting such a hard landing, so I wasn't ready for it. Prepare to PLF! Dave

Might not be a popular answer on a photography forum, but set that thing on sports mode and autofocus and go have fun. Then go back, look at your pictures, and see what settings the camera chose. Find pictures that came out great, and figure out why they came out great. Find pictures that came out sucky, and figure out why they came out sucky. Then go try picking your own settings and see how they come out. Dave

True that you can't sharpen each size (I almost never sharpen anything anyway), but smugmug doesn't use "auto-browser-rendering" to resize pictures. When you upload, they create about 4 copies of the original and resize them (in a server background process) to each size they use on the site. They apply your custom watermark to the small, medium, and large copies, and to the thumbnail if you want. They don't watermark the original, so when someone orders a print it isn't ruined. But yes, I definitely give up a lot of control in exchange for a lot of time saving. Dave

If I really wanted to know what taxiing 20 miles per day will do to a Caravan, I'd call Cessna. Airplanes are designed around requirements. I can't imagine that Cessna ever dreamed up a scenario where a Caravan would taxi 20 miles per day. I can't think of an operator that would do that on a regular basis. So if it wasn't designed to do that, it might cause problems. Not saying it WILL, just saying it could. It did happen to a japanese helicopter fleet I mentioned above (but helicopter wheels are not designed to roll nearly as much as plane wheels). And for that particular helicopter, a nose gear failure at taxi speeds is a catastrophic event because the rotor will bounce down and slice through the tail, sending debris everywhere. Just another example from the helicopter world... helicopter logging. They use helicopters to pick up trees that have been cut down and bring them to a road to get carried away. They use helicopters designed to carry external loads, and they don't overload them. But a logging helicopter can do 20-30 lifts per hour. The original requirements for a particular helicopter were 5 lifts per hour. Guess what? The life of a critical main rotor component drops from 20,000 hours to 2,000 hours when the aircraft is used for logging. Who woulda thunk it? Dave

Your site is very nice... I'm just curious what work you need to do every time you want to add more pictures though. Do you have to edit html each time, or is there automation to format the pages when new pictures/galleries get added? I thought about building my own photo gallery site when I bought a still camera, but once I took a look at the professional services available, I never looked back. I'm not shooting pictures to make money, so I both don't care about them keeping some of my profit but I do care about keeping costs low. But mostly I wanted an easy way for people to find pictures of themselves and order prints, which I'm not interested in doing myself (though I did buy me a fancy Epson R1800 printer). I ended up getting a pro account at Smugmug because it just makes dealing with LOTS of pictures really easy. I choose the pics I like, crop them and add captions in Picasa, then upload them to smugmug and add keywords (the name of each person in the pic and other info). I can have a whole new complete photo gallery online on sunday night. Smugmug also automatically watermarks the pictures as they upload. I can add right click protection to prevent people from downloading them really easily (you can still take a screen shot of course), and I can choose whether or not people can download full-res versions for free. I think the best part is that I have unlimited storage on smugmug, so I upload ALL my pictures to a private backup gallery. I have over 10,000 pictures (over 30 gigs) uploaded already, and I've only been taking pictures since last summer. Smugmug also let me use a custom domain name, which I bought separately, and customize the look of my site. I personally wouldn't mind even more control over the look and functionality of the site, but I sure as hell couldn't program a site like that on my own. So for me, it's more than worth the yearly cost and 15% of the profit on pictures sold (but I can set my own prices). But I can understand why someone would want to build their own site, if they have the time to maintain it. My photo gallery is at http://www.SkydivingStills.com if anyone wants to see what SmugMug is like... They also have a fully functional 14 day free trial. You don't even need to give a credit card number or anything... just an email address (and they don't spam at all). Dave

While I agree that using all available runway is generally a good idea and does increase safety (assuming all that extra taxiing doesn't degrade safety), I also believe that requiring a caravan to use 10,000 feet of runway is unnecessary. Our DZ operates a grand caravan off of an 1800 foot runway. Intersection departures are standard, accepted practice. 5000 feet of runway is more than double an adequate runway for a caravan (near sea level). Yes, it leaves 5000 feet of wasted runway behind, but I don't believe there's really a valid argument for why 5000 feet of runway is inadequate or unsafe or particularly risking the trees at the end of the runway. More noisy to the airport neighbors? Maybe... Dave

Well, that's not really true... at least not necessarily. You can be in level flight at any angle of attack. Take a parachute as an example... angle of incidence is always going to be negative (the nose is lower than the tail), but the angle of attack is always going to be positive (otherwise it'd collapse). Pitch is a function of angle of attack and angle of incidence... could be anything. Dave

I wouldn't bother to tell them that you don't want to have to wait so long to jump... they won't care. Give them reasons why the proposed rule either decreases safety or fails to increase safety. Find out why the rule is being proposed (if there are more reasons than mentioned here) and tell them why it's not necessary or why it will have other negative consequences. Dave