dorbie

You should pursue a career in marketing

Some estimate that rounds are safer by an order of magnitude, the malfunction rate on a round with an anti-inversion skirt is something like 1 in 10,000, the malfunction rate with ram-air parachutes is 10-20 times that rate. Other things can go wrong on a skydive for example higher descent rates on rounds mandate a good PLF, and ram-airs give you better control of where you land if you have the right skills within a larger envelope of distance & conditions. You do the math, it really depends what you mean by safer. It's not a decision you have to make, every sports jumper jumps ram-air designs, with a very rare jump of a round and those tend not to have the anti-inversion skirt the military use which probably levels the safety playing field anyway. Toggles = brakes, call them brake toggles if you want to be pedantic. A square canopy is a type of ram air canopy. Ram-air refers to a self inflating parafoil with holes in the nose to facilitate inflation into a functioning wing through the movement of air into the inlets, driven by the motion of the canopy through the air. Square canopies are ram-air designs which tend to be rectangular in planform with four right angled corners.

It is the same in that you are foot launching a canopy, the equipment and objectives are very different. Put simply, paragliding is about getting high, going far and maybe doing acro moves (depending on taste). Ground launching is about staying low, going fast and skimming the terrain. "Speed Flying" is a paragliding discipline that encompasses staying low, going fast and skimming the terrain. It is not a sport to be taken lightly and is not for inxperienced paragliding pilots or skydivers. http://www.speed-flying.com/ This has come full-circle since the early days of PG.

Sled ride was just a euphamism for a downhill run with no flying ascent, no actual sleds involved, (yea I know ski's are popular for speed-flying etc.). I assume you don't actually mean parasail. I love the deployable PG idea but AFAIK it's already been tried for military HAHO applications (G-9 for example). I'd guess it's sub terminal static line direct bag but I don't know. As an aside I was looking for a link on Atair's site and I found this: http://www.atairaerospace.com/parachutes/7up/ Which I'm pretty sure was developed by the Independence guys as a PG rescue system: http://www.independence-world.com/internet/nav/d9d/d9d18a44-1130-701b-e592-67b482058468.htm

Yup, early parapente canopies weren't much different from parachutes, and a sled run was about all you could hope for, until they improved the glide ratios dramatically over the course of a few decades.

You should decide what you want to do in the sport, then decide how to approach it. Do you want the thrill of flying a canopy downhill or do you want to soar & try to catch thermals & stay up. If it's he latter you need to get paragliding training. For the former you still need some kind of training / mentoring but you should understand the risk you're taking going in. If your jump numbers are accurate you may want to wait a while but there's nothing stopping you practicing kiting in safe conditions. You can ground launch most canopies so I guess you're looking at your first canopy and making sure you don't rule out ground launching. If you are getting a skydiving canopy for dual use then docile would be good IMHO, even more so than normal. I would encourage anyone doing this to get paragliding training and a paraglider then you can always decide to speed fly later on whatever gear your experience & training then informs you is appropriate.

Rubbish. PGs are extremely refined come in all sorts of varieties and have evolved to maximize things like glide ratio and/or minimum sink while maintaining recoverability in a high aspect ratio wing. More recently they have moved into designs specifically for "speed flying" which the PG community generally calls blade running etc. There is no such thing as a ground launched skydive, and the USPA understandably washes it's hands of this situation effectively ignoring those in the skydiving community who ground launch. This leaves the issue of unregulated, inadequately trained, uninsured skydivers showing up at sites that have been flown for years by experienced paragliders and burning them. If Jim (femur is not a verb) Slaton invented ground launching or even turned it into a sport then I invented the wheel. He did bridge the gap for the skydiving community and gave it some prominence, maybe even developing it in unique directions, but the job isn't near done yet IMHO.

I find it deplorable that too many Americans are willing to undermine the war against real terrorists and undermine the support for that war by turning it into a war against their fellow citizens.

By "fuck around" you're referring to doing something perfectly legal that some politician makes a fuss about later, and by consequences you mean get arrested on trumped up charges that are clearly not applicable to anyone with a sense of integrity, and by whine like a little girl you mean defend yourself against aforementioned trumped up charges. Yes, yes I see it now, "You don't do something legal like this then get to defend yourself when the trumped up charges hit". I don't like your America very much can we have the original one back please?

The change in circumstances does not meen it's OK to randomly criminalize legal activities and abuse due process by trumping up charges. Play the 9-11 card all you like, it doesn't give jack booted peckerheads carte blance to do what the heck thek like no matter how irrational or assinine. People in public office have many responsibilities they need to ballance, if they can't they should quit or be booted out. The bozos running Boston have demonstrated that they lack the required sense of proportion and ballance.

Wow. That actually made sense Well, of course, it's spaghetti string theory.

Oh very good, everyone who doesn't like the boot stomping on their face must be high because it's so obviously good for them. The hallucinations and paranoia are all from your camp on this issue. A small board with flashing lights as a means of concealing an attack? GET SMART. If anyone did get hurt you can be sure of one thing, lots of finger pointing by the same bozos baying for blood now. You can't legitimately charge these guys with anything beyond perhaps litering. This was not a HOAX, you have to redefine that word to trump up these charges, I don't care how pissed off you or the asshole prosecutors are in Boston, phoney charges is an abuse of the law and due process. Now get your jackboot off our necks!

From a steady glide the total lift will be equal to the weight of the load on the wing, regardless of wing size or wing loading. The total load spread between the risers in this scenario will be equal to the weight suspended by them.

Stupid and dishonest, they're charged with placing "hoax devices", so according to the mental gymnastics of the local prosecutors it's a hoax if the authorities react to it as such, even when it's clearly not a hoax.

I'm looking into a novel approach for unifying general relativity and quantum theory. Naturally this research consists entirely of reading crackpot blogs and posting to online discussion forums for your opinion. Please help as I'm sure having just read a blog on an exciting new perpetual motion machine that I can crack this problem with your valuable input on grand grand grand unification.

This is brilliant, now you don't worry about your car being stolen, instead you worry about the police capriciously taking it on a fucking whim. Judge Dredd has finally arrived. Does anyone in Britain have a spine left or do they wander around in a stupor thinking this shit will never happen to them?

P.S. you've obviously never heard of the ATHF "dickesode" have you? There's a new word for you to google.

The whole show airs during the "Adult Swim" on cartoon network. Not during the day. Besides, it's a pixelated space invader character, and flipping the pixels is one of the things they do to show how they're "badass " mooninite losers. If your nieces know what that pixel is doing then it's too late, "for the children" anyway.

It sounds bad but it'd take more than that to bring down a PG. I know a guy who landed a tandem PG with paying passenger on half a wing, the other half had been sliced off by an RC airplane and was flopping off to the side having offered slightly less lift that the flying portion.

The way I see it, the jackasses running Boston are painting a big target on thei city with this crap. They're announcing to the world: "Look at how scared shitless we acted over nothing, just imagine what a bunch of jelly spined fucktards we'd become over the real thing?" Jefferson would have frog-marched the lot of them to the guillotine.

The screwed up part is almost nobody was scared by the devices themselves. The whole thing is a pantomime. Once the ball starts rolling all rational judgement goes out the window, instead the "procedures" must be followed or the same pecker heads that want to charge some ad exec over this will be asking some "very serious questions" of you. The media are absolutely complicit in this. Instead of calling bullshit the join the pile-on. It's about time we developed some zero tollerance for zero tollerance. Thomas Menino and Deval Patrick are a pair of asses and just demonstrated it to the world. This was not a "hoax", (get a dictionary you idiots) it was an hysterical overrreaction but the hysteria isn't over yet despite the facts surfacing.

I think you're confusing "brain storm" with "shit storm".

P.S. that guy owes me a cutter.

So that's what went wrong on my last jump! 92122 . . 92122 . 92122 92122 *92122* **92122** Why isn't this working? Thank heaven for AADs

A similar thing happened in Italy a while back. The agents were exposed and linked to the crime using records of their cell phone locations.