jheadley

One thing I've always found funny about packing methods is one person will say "doing xxxx will be sure to give you a malfunction", and then you'll find people who do just that who have thousands of jumps and have never had a malfunction, and then they'll say "doing yyyy will help prevent a malfunction, and then you'll find another guy saying, "no, that's actually MORE likely to give you a malfunction". There are lots of little tricks that people have that are suppose to help with packing but I'm not convinced they actually do much. Like riggerrob said, as long as you do a couple simple things and make it a clean pack job, it'll work. I've talked to a lot of senior and master riggers, and even rigger examiners about packing, and even they will say different, sometimes even opposite, things.

Is there such a thing as a SCUBA god, like a skygod? I haven't met any, I've talked to some divers who like to tell a whole lot of "no shit there I was stories", and they like to brag about all the exotic locations they went to, but I've never really met a cocky asshole SCUBA diver. I guess SCUBA diving is more about just having fun rather than trying to look cool. (I have about 60 dives, but actually don't like it that much. I think skydiving is more exciting, and also more relaxing too.)

11. City Hall. 12. Less air traffic 13. Better packing area 14. Sally Hathaway

One thing I've noticed... An inexperienced skydiver thinks that skydiving is safe, and tells other people it's safe, trying to get them to jump too. An experienced skydiver knows that it's not safe, because he's seen his friends get hurt and killed, and may have even gotten hurt or almost killed himself, but a lot of time he still tells people it's safe, because he wants them to jump. The inexperienced skydiver just doesn't know any better, but is it irresponsible of the experienced skydiver to tell a whuffo that skydiving is safe if he's trying to convince him to jump?

My home is 1000 feet above my dz and I always left my cypres on after jumping because i always heard that it takes more energy to turn it off than to leave it on. I just had to have my batteries replaced after 1 year.

The tattoo that i have and the many tattoos that i will have, have absolutely nothing to do with trends, nor do i consider myself a trend whore. While I do think your tatoo design is pretty cool, I would say it is trendy to this era. The "tribal" design, which you said it resembles is a definite tattoo trend right now. Just type the word "tribal" into google and see how many tattoo sites come up. And a skydiver getting closing pins tattooed on him is definitely not original. Also, you're wife's chinese symbol tattoo (or is it a japanese symbol? I know she can never remember), is a definite tattoo trend also. From Wikipedia : "Chinese character tattoos are tattoos consisting of Chinese characters (hanzi or kanji) otherwise known as kanji tattoos. Despite allegedly being based on the Chinese or Japanese writing system, these tattoos are almost unheard of in China and Japan, instead being a relatively recent phenomenon originating in Western countries which do not use Chinese characters. Many kanji tattoos are unreadable or nonsense in the original language, and the forms of the Chinese characters are also often mistaken. The online blog Hanzi Smatter gives many examples of the mistaken use of Chinese characters in tattoos." This is funny. (but it's a joke website)http://www.soufoaklin.com/tattooartist.html Red Versus Blue did a funny public service announcement on how to pick out a tattoo a couple years ago. Here's the link http://www.machinima.com/films.php?id=328. I do sort of in a way admire people, like you, that feel so strongly about something that they permanantly change themselves, but I also know people who got tattoos with that attitude who now regret getting them. My uncle was in the navy and got the classic anchor tattoo because he said he wanted to remember that part of his life forever, but later in life he regretted getting it. My high school physics teacher got his college fraternity's letters tattooed on his ankle and regets it, I can go on and on... I also see a lot of people who get tattos for stupid reasons. My sister got a butterfly tattooed on her lower back, that's about as trend-whorish as you get, just because she wanted to rebel against my parents. She regrets it already. If you want to do something rebellious, get some kind of piercing, at least you can take those out when you grow up. Then you've got the people who get tattoos as jokes, e.g. someone who gets a tattoo of a bear paw on his foot so he can tell people he's "bear-foot", or someone who gets a cartoon drawing of himself tattooed onto his back. (Yes these are real people whom vtamb81 and I know). I think they're going to regret getting those later in life, or maybe not. Anyway it's not for me.

Most of my skydiver friends have tatoos and I think that is one of the stupidest things a person can do to themself. I've talked to way too many people in their 40s and older who got tatoos when they were young and wish they never did. I've actually talked to a few people in their 20s who felt the same way. I will never be getting a tatoo, no matter how trendy they are. I am not a trend whore.

Carol Clay has over 15000 jumps and still logs every one, even doing little drawings. Not only do I log all my jumps, I have a big ass spreadsheet on my computer with all sorts of data on it, every exit altitude, deployment altitude, what canopy, what plane, what dz, etc. People tell me I should be a statician.

I would suggest getting a semi-eliptical 190, like a Sabre 2. It will feel a lot more fun to fly but it would still have the same speed for landing. I was loaded at 1.0 on my Sabre 2 until I had 250 jumps, and I didn't get bored. Definitely don't go straight to a 150. That is a BIG jump.

I was at teh wind tunnel the other day watching a 4-way team and overheard some whuffos saying they thought they were astronauts because of their matching black jumpsuits and full face helmets.

QuoteTell us about your senior year in high school... if you can remember that far back! Year : 2002-2003 2. What sports did you play? Track and Cross Country 3. What kind of car did you drive? 1985 BMW 635csi 4. It's Friday night, where were you? Under the hood of my car 5. Were you a party animal? no 6. Were you in the "In Crowd"? Nope 7. Ever skip school? Skipping 3 classes gets you expelled. 8. Ever smoke? A few cigars. 9. Were you a nerd? Nope. I was a loser. 10. Did you get suspended/expelled? Nope 11. Can you sing the Alma Mater? school song? Hajellula praise the Bishops, we the mighty we the strong... 12. Who was your favorite teacher? Mrs. Anderson, my Spanish teacher all 4 years, because she was really hot. 13. Favorite class? Calculus (the teacher was crazy) 14. What was your schools full name? Virginia Episcopal School 15. School mascot? A Fighting Bishop 16. Did you go to Prom? No, I went to see the Lord of the Rings instead. 17. If you could go back and do it over, would you? Hell no 19. Favorite memories of your Senior Year? Finding hidden cameras in the lounge and exposing it, causing a mass hysteria. 23. Where did you go most often for lunch? Texas Tavern, aka T-Room. Best Cheesy Westerns on the earth for $1.80 24. Have you gained weight since then? No 25. What did you do after graduation? Went to Beach Week, then Alaska.

Wow

Here's a reason for a hook knife. An AFF instructor put his radio in his jumpsuit pocket and then the zipper broke so he couldn't get it out. He had to borrow my hook knife to cut open his pocket.

In my college skydiving club the classic excuse for someone not to jump (either whuffo or experienced club member) is that they don't have the money. However you see these people spending 50+ dollars a week on buying beer, going to bars, and eating out. It's just what you care about. Even some licensed jumpers don't really care about skydiving that much and are happy to make only 20 or so jumps a year. My roomate (skydiver) told me once that he wanted to get his B license just so he could jump even less than he already did, and still stay "current" (at least to the USPA).

I think it's when a TV show does something really stupid, and you know that the series will suck after that. Sort of like that episode where The Fonz waterskied over the shark in that episode of Happy Days. Edit : I was a little off... But still that episode sucked!

Do you know what the price of avgas is in your area? My dropzone used to be 16 dollars for 10,000 feet, then they went to 17 dollars, then when fuel prices spiked in September 05 they went to 20 . I know the price of avgas in that area has since come down to about 3.60 a gallon but the jumps are still 20 dollars.

It's called credit card debt.

My local rigger ran into the speedbag a little while ago when a local jumper just got a new Racer. He also found that he could put a lot of weight on the bag and it would stay locked. He called Jump Shack and they basically told him that the guarantee the locking stows will come out if it is jerked hard (like in a high speed malfunction). So that has me worried about what would happen if you had to use one with a slow speed malfunction. I bet it wouldn't work at all if you had to deploy your reserve without cutting away your main first, like if you were under 1000 feet. (I just spent the last two hours reading this thread, very informative, I'm continually amazed by the amount of information I can find on this website, I just wish we could come up with a definite answer.)

Yea I've too noticed that a lot of times using puppets and stuff like that actually looks better than CGI. The wolves/hyenas or whatever they were in Exorcist : The Beginning I remember to be especially terrible looking. Gollum in Lord of the Rings was pretty good though.

I always thought being an armadillo would be cool.

Cutaway

When I made that jump several months ago, the guy (actually a family of 4, mother, father, and 2 sons), had just gone through AFF all in one weekend. Then they came back 29 days later, so currency was definitely an issue too. The mother and son came back (the other son was banned from the dropzone for having an arrogant punk attitude, and the father broke his ankle rock climbing), made one coach jump each, I took the son, another coach took the mother (she performed about as well as he did). This was the first load of the day so we had to guess on the spot, I made it back to the landing area fine, and my student made it back but JUST BARELY, he should have definitely landed off. The other coach and the mother landed off. The mother and son said they were both so "shaken up" by their off landing, that the didn't want to make another jump. We never saw them again. The funniest part is that they said they wanted to get into skydiving so they could BASE jump. In my still limited experience, I don't really agree with that. I got my coach rating at 120 jumps ( don't even start, I know), and since then I've learned that even the easiest real coach jump I've done was harder than the two eval jumps for the course. I really think the coach course should be much harder, more realistic to what a student will actually do, and have at least 4 eval jumps, not 2.

I heard Scott Miller once say that experience is not jump numbers, or freefall time, or years in the sport, but how much stuff have you lived through when shit went wrong. While I certainly do agree that there are things you can't learn without a lot of jumps, and there are things you can't learn without a lot of time in the sport, I also think what scott said is true too. You may have x number of thousands of jumps but if nothing has ever gone wrong then I don't consider that experienced, or at least AS experienced as someone with x number of jumps who has lived through problems. How one handles off-dz landings, malfunctions, aircraft emergencies, etc. makes them experienced. I got to taste this a little for myself today. Today was the first time I had to really flat turn to save myself. Now I don't mean a "ohhh I'm 100 feet too low on my base leg and I need to turn onto final" flat turn, but a "Some asshole cut me off at 50 feet and if I don't turn I'm going to have a canopy collision" flat turn. Yes that actually happened, I flew a normal 1000-600-300 box pattern following everyone else down like I always do and at about 50 feet, some guy flies right in front of me, flying completely perpendicular to me and the landing direction. I had to flat turn about 100 degrees, leveled the wing off, and landed in deep brakes with a PLF. When I walked back to the packing tent, a girl came up to me and said "Wow you handled that great, I thought you were going to go in." So the moral of the story is that while I still certainly don't consider myself experienced, I now think I'm a little more experienced than I was before, and it's not because of the extra number in my log book. (I had my camera on this jump but I actually turned it off after the freefall. Shit, that would have made good video. )

Here's a good example of what can happen when you stall and do not recover properly. So if you do it, do it above your decision altitude and let the toggles back up slowly and evenly. http://www.skydivingmovies.com/ver2/pafiledb.php?action=file&id=3454

2 problems with that statement. 1:he wasn't skydiving , and 2: it wasn't a landing problem, it was a canopy collision. I had a feeling someone would say that. While he didn't jump out of a plane, he did get hurt under a skydiving parachute. The Femur Is Not A Verb campaign is specifically about safety under a parachute. It's not really about safety in making group freefall skydives or aircraft safety or anything like that- just about safety under canopy, so I think his injury is relevant.