jheadley

Hi Dave. I see no person so far has addressed this so i will give my two cents. Assuming you mean that by positive recovery arc it climbs back up after you level out from a high performance landing. If your samurai has a positive recovery arc (Brian germain canopies tend to have different flying charecteristics within the same design ive found) then increasing the rotation and speed is going to make it climb more as you will increase the lift. I have had the same problem on some prototypes i have jumped. if you are looking to step up then you will need a canopy with a steeper trim also. try Sabre2 mamba katana etc. Also if you do like the samurai, Brian can change the line trim for you so it will dive more.

I find the spectre's flare and landing to be a little more "swoopy", more of a plane out across the ground, like a Sabre 2. The triathlon just seems to go slow, slower, stop.

I've never jumped a new sabre 2 but I've put over 300 jumps on several in the 200-500 jump range and they all have the issue with the slider not coming down. It's just part of the opening characteristics. I just pull on the rear risers a little after opening and it comes down, it's never gotten "stuck" for more than a second or two. It starts out annoying but then you just get used to it and forget it even happens.

like this

I was in 11th grade english class. We had a phone in the classroom and it rang and the teacher picked it up. "Hello?" .... "Ok Thanks..." (Hangs up) Announces to the class "A plane hit the world trade center"

Bull fighting has a very interesting history. I can't say I completely understand it either, but I just spent some time in Spain and learned some about it, and watched one. It's actually pretty complicated. The Spanish actually don't consider it a sport, they consider it an art, like a play.

See Attachment. Hey thanks, those are interesting results. But those results make it sort of seem like either way, with the big rings or small, it's not that big a deal. Say I weigh 250 pounds and I have a spinning mal at 3Gs, which I imagine would be pretty quick, that'd make my weight 750 pounds right? So it'd be a difference of 5 pounds pull force with the mini rings versus 2.2 with the large. I guess less force is always better but with the reserve ripcord pull force being allowed to be up to 22 pounds, 5 pounds doesn't really seem that significant. Maybe the hard pulls more likely come from the twisted risers trapping the cutaway cable if hard housings are not used, or people not peeling before pulling the cutaway handle?

Double digits is easy, here is how you do it. Quit your job, sell everything you own, move to a DZ and get on a team. Eat Raman noodles and consider McDonalds to be "eating out". Put all of our money into jumps and training. so what you're saying is it's easy as long as your priorities are straight The key to winning is to cut away everything else in life. Only then can you be a #8.

I've been wondering this myself. I *think* the reason 2 rings weren't used would be because the mechanical advantage would be too little, and more than 3 were not necessary, because when the 3 ring release was designed, people were jumping very large canopies that wouldn't spin very fast, which made the cutaway force low. In today's times, with very fast spinning canopies and high cutaway forces, I've often thought that a "4 ring release" may help. However with everyone using mini-risers, there'd really be no way to fit another ring onto the system unless you make all the rings bigger, which is not cool looking, so skydivers won't do it. Going back to just the large 3 rings would probably give you the same mechanical advantage. Does anyone know, or know a way for me to calculate the true mechanical advantage (through a mathematical formula or a hands on test) of the 3 ring release? I read in the Poynter's manual that each ring is a 10:1 ratio, and then the white loop is 2:1, so a 200:1 total, but I'm assuming that's only true for the original large 3 rings. Also apparently the Advance Tandem by Basik does use 4 rings.

So skydivers can get it, but does it cover skydiving accidents?

Just leave the slider at the top of the risers for now. Collapsing it is good, and very quick and easy, but pulling it down over the risers takes time and it takes your focus away from what's important, looking for other canopies, and where you are relative to the ground, making sure your canopy is controllable, etc.. It doesn't help much with parachute performance until you get to higher wing loadings, anyway.

Can you describe them in detail? Yes please.

Read page 56 of The parachute and it's pilot, and the Downwind Glide diagram. Brakes and rear risers both flatten the true glide of the parachute, but if you've got a strong tailwind, what you want is minimum sink, not maximum glide. In deep brakes, the idea is to lose as little altitude as possible, and have the wind carry you back, giving you a very high relative glide. For a specific example, lets say you are on a long spot on a light to no wind day. Rear risers would probably benefit you the best, because they would flatten your true glide while keeping the drag and forward speed almost the same, although this does depend on the canopy. Now lets say you're on a long spot, and the winds at 3000 feet are blowing at 30mph. You are upwind of the dropzone, so when you fly towards the dropzone, the wind is at your back. By going into 99% brakes and trying to slow your vertical descent speed as much as you can, you just float in the sky, and let the strong wind push you back to the dropzone like you're a hot-air balloon. This is how I understand it anyway. I hope this is right.

I've seen this happen with a new Racer, too. Even when it was packed correctly. It stopped doing it when it was broken in though.

There are lots of website like that, but it may be this one. http://www.hanzismatter.com/

That is what I have been teaching... But - I have been worried that if the person pulled like hell on the PC that it could be out enough still to cause problems... So, I have thought about clarifying - that if you made any progress with the PC or can't find the PC once you started pulling on it, then cutaway and pull reserve... Perhaps that is too much for a FJC, so I have been keeping it simple stupid and have been following your example for them... I saw just that happen in Feburary or March. A woman at Z hills had a hard pull that partially extracted the pilot chute, she cutaway and pulled silver, and it was a good thing since the main container opened immediately from the shock and the main released cleanly, still in the d-bag. It landed practically right next to me as I was walking down skydive lane.

Why is it ok for a CASA to have it's door open on takeoff? I guess since it's a tailgate, it wouldn't have much effect on drag, but there are still the other issues mentioned.

It's almost impossible to fail a coach course. I know a person with the rating who literally flies worse than some real students I've taught. I could write for hours about him. The evaluation jumps (and evaluation of the on ground lesson and debrief) should be much much harder and more thorough IMO. There are only two evaluation jumps, both from Category G of the ISP, but coaches also teach Category F and H. They receive no training on that in the course. Their in air skills would be better than normal, but still, you can have all the tunnel time in the world and it wouldn't make you any better at teaching first jump courses, how to deal with malfunctions, gear familiarity, spotting, understanding exit order and separation, altitude awareness, tracking, canopy control, etc. A coach doesn't just teach how to move forward, change fall rate, and dock. I just think that a person with 100 jumps, no matter how well they fly, just hasn't experienced enough skydiving to teach others. I say that at someone who got their coach rating at 100 jumps, and then looking back at it, realize how little I knew.

Thanks, I enjoy these comics very much. Great work.

This saves list from Chuting Star rigging loft may sort of be what you're looking for. http://www.chutingstar.com/saves.php

Do you think swooping will ever get to a point where one actually is going 90+ during a swoop? To me it seems like the speed CYPRES doesn't really solve the problem, it just gets rid of it for a little while. People used to think that nobody would ever get close enough to the activation speed of an AAD during a swoop, but eventually they did. With the progression of swooping and super high-performance canopies, won't the swoops just get faster and faster until even a speed CYPRES will fire during a swoop?

So I guess this would be Samuel L. Jackson fighting snakes?

That's a pretty good analogy except if you get into a car wreck and you don't have an airbag, there's no guarantee of certain death. When you don't or can't pull and don't have an AAD, that's pretty much guaranteed death.

Honestly everything you said is actually pretty normal, except the landing 4 miles off... Were you spotting? I did pretty much all those things as a student, except fall off the step, however I do know a few people with hundreds of jumps, and in one case, someone with almost 5,000 jumps who fell off the step of a cessna. So don't fret about the little things.

Packing is not paid on an hourly rate, it's paid on a per job rate. I pay my barber 14 dollars to shave my head, which is 5 minutes of work. Does that mean barbers make 168 dollars an hour? Forgive me if I'm incorrect in this assumption, but if you're like most skydivers, you only come to the dropzone on a good weather weekend. So you really only see what packers do when it's actually busy. Yes, on a busy day a packer can average 40 dollars an hour, or even more, but you don't see what they do when the weather is bad, or there is no work, because they do NOTHING and make no money. For every day that's actually busy, there are another 3 or 4 or sometimes even 5 or 6 that are a waste. When I was a packer at a full time turbine dz, my average income was 270 dollars a week. It's really hard to say "average" though, since most of the time it's more like 150-200 dollars a week, and then a few boogie weekends throw off the numbers. That's not much better than what I could make at McDonalds. I wouldn't really say I was "underpaid" but consider on the few busy days I made 200-300 dollars packing, the vidiots were making 800+, and they actually get to skydive. So it does seem like that to some people. I can go on and on but I won't here, if you're curious about what being a packer is actually like, you can PM me, or you could even try it yourself, that is unless you're like most people and think it's below you.