tdog

Punky, I think everyone gets a door fear episode every once in a while, including the ones with 10,000 jumps... Once we get on the plane, if my mind freaks out some, I take deep breaths, do a gear check, and do more deep breaths... Either with my eyes closed or, even looking out the door... I try to zone out everyone else and just make it a "me moment". Believe it or not, I am much better when I am the first out and sitting by the door. That is me, I don't know about you. There was a very specific point in my progression where my confidence went up and my door fear went down, and that point was after being first out and spotting on a few loads... I love being near the door now, and I love the door open now because it is familiar and routine for me, because I have operated the door so much. I have had a couple jumps out of my (small, measly) 110 jumps where I was real nervous... Just hit me on that jump for no reason... Deep breaths and visualizing the whole jump is all it takes for me to keep it cool... If I am still "over the line" - a second into freefall, just like you described, I am a-ok... So, while I don't have a lot of advice, I can say, you are not alone...

See the attached... I flipped it back over... Do you think the marketing people would put something like that on their web site??? Wuffos would say, "it is upside down!"

You are 100% right... That is why we did land as planned and did not land on hole 13...

Once you talk to enough instructors and people around the DZ - you will "know" the answer to this question...... Have you read up on skydiving/canopies yet... Brian Germain's book is pretty good... You can find a lot by searching this site, but don't believe what you read, always double check everything with sources you trust. Some terms you should learn, if you don't know them already: Wing loading. Elliptical. Square. 7Cell. 9Cell. If you don't want to "upgrade" in six months, like you said, plan on renting or using the DZs gear for the first 50 jumps or so... You will make the biggest progression (or at least I did) in the first 50 jumps... My wing loading went from .7 as a AFF 1 student to 1.1 to 1 by 50 jumps (with the blessing of people who I trusted), and I plan on staying there for a while.

Hell ya! We've all been there That's why the tunnel is the first thing up and running after a hurricane. The rest of the state was a mess but the tunnel was running

Bill I know you take your work seriously but damn… On some rainy day I am gonna just search and read all on Bill's posts in the order in which they were posted... As of this moment, it will be 515 posts... Call it a "Booth day". I bet I will learn a lot... Gotta fly tomorrow for work. Perhaps I will print them out for the plane ride...

And why was it the best millisecond?

For a dork, I am kind of progressive... I was the first person I knew wakeboarding - just saw one at the store and "had" to buy it... Since no one else was doing it, I had to teach myself how to do it, no one to learn from.... (Did the same thing with snowboards, about 20 years ago) But, my favorite thing to do is use a very short rope and wakeboard behind a jet ski... Get someone who can whip a turn, and you are going for a ride...

Ya... I did my pre-second hot air balloon jump reciently... I SO wanted to land on the golf course we were over, talk about nice "runways"... The more experienced guys could have swooped the water traps on the course... But we opted for the nice farm land next to it... Learned that landing "out" when there is no "in" is kind of fun...

1. To put 60 skydives worth of wear on my jumpsuit in just one hour. 2. To have hundreds of bugs splat all over my helmet face shield. 3. To fall out the door while doing four way, and being proud that I landed on my feet. 4. To get free ear plugs for every session. 5. To consume more electricity in one hour than my house burns all month long. ------ 6. Because it is almost as good as sex, better than sex with some.

My grandfather was a WWII vet... He never fought overseas, but paid his time as a scientist making a certain bomb, if ya know what I mean... So I never thought of him as an Army man, so the Army being there was out of place to me at first. He died when I was 12. (I just turned 30, so that is a while back.) I will remember a few things for the rest of my life - with picture perfect memory. 1) The folding of the flag and being handed to my grandmother. 2) The sound of the guns. 3) He had a long struggle with death, so I was almost happy it finally came. I did not cry at first, because, well, it was time... Or so I thought... Then, one of the flag folding officers (forgive me for not knowing their official name) shed a tear and could not wipe it for the whole service while holding the flag. I lost it seeing the tear. How could a guy who never knew my grandfather shed a tear, so I thought? I can't say I know what you are going thru, but I can say I have been there. I wish you and your family well, and I am sure the experience will be as positive as it can be, perhaps, you will even have fond memories like I do many years after.

Tiger, Ask Jason about this issue next time you are at the DZ... We just covered this issue in the last weekend's canopy class... This question seems to be canopy dependent, both in make/model and wingloading - so a hop-n-pop where you try different methods might be of order. I have had good luck with spreading my rears a few inches before on my canopy. I am still trying to understand my canopy too... Back in the day when I learned Paragliding - my paraglider had two "settings" you could fly in to combat this issue... "Best Glide" and "Min Sink"... If a good wind is behind ya, you want "Min Sink" - so you get the longest push from mother nature... If you are pushing into the wind and still have some penetration, "Best Glide (ratio)" would take you the farthest distance for every foot of downward motion. I still am trying to learn these little tricks on my canopy, but as someone else said, it is better to land out using no "tricks" than crash almost in because a "trick failed." Good luck with learning... I will be doing hop-n-pops Sunday just to play with my canopy to fine tune these skills too...

What he said... The change in wind scares me (and those with 40 years more experience than me) more than wind itself... Rode the plane down last weekend when it went from 13 to 22 in three seconds. So did 13 other people, including the guy with decades of experience.

Wow... What a discussion... If ya want to see them, goto bme.freeq.com...

I once offered all our top managers (three), each, $1000 if they quit, payable the second they say the were quitting... They would have to pay me back if they started again... It lasted about 20 minutes before I was paid back... That is addiction.

Got it... Different terms at different DZs... We would just use the "went to shit" line... So, now that this thread has momentum, what is your best zoo dive story?

How appropriate... My 4way team name is Caged Animals... Ok, so it is not like lurking a dive where you are watching whatever is going on, but, it could be like a 4way gone bad or a freefly gone bad where the sky is full of random unplanned shit...????

So, this is so-not-worth postin' in the skydiving forums, so I thought I would ask the people hangn' out at the fire, what does a "zoo dive" mean and where does the term come from... I searched and found little clear cut results.

lol, I thought you were just afraid of freefall Keith... That is what I thought... I have never seen him not-hop-n-pop. Anyone here ever seen Keith freefall? I will pay a few bucks to the first person who posts a picture of him doing freefly or RW or something other than hop-n-pops.

Based upon my real life experience, I did it, so can you... Find people to practice RW skills with, and you will be doing 10+ jumps a weekend. You will learn a lot too...

Here is a fun one I did one day when I was doing a solo sunset jump... I put my hands in the "pull" position, one behind my back, the other out front... Then I tried turning with my legs and stopping on a dime... I kept finding new places to put my hands (on my head, behind my back, crossed out front) - and then turned with legs... Kindof makes sure you are isolating your turns only to your legs, as your upperbody is not anywhere near normal flying position... My fear was I was pulling AFF style turns out of my bag of tricks while thinking my legs were doing the work. This helped me isolate my turns to my legs... Not that I am an expert or anything.

I think that because you are asking this poll in the windtunnel fourms, it is gonna have a bias. I currently have 2.5 times more tunnel time than freefall...

Dude, at first I thought you were 100% sick... Then I read all the posts and came back to your post... I don’t know if you are trying to stir the pot or are just trying to make a point ask a question, that in order to be a seasoned veteran in skydiving seeing a fatality is a must. If you actually want it to happen, so you can be a veteran, please, please, please stay far away from me… I personally want to live my whole life without having a friend go in, so my goals would be 100% opposite of you. (Before anyone flames me, I understand that my desires likely will be burst, and a good friend did die paragliding the same day I flew, so I know what it is like.) I will tell ya, after seeing death first hand in front of me on the highway (a motorcyclist go down) - it is not fun, even if you don’t know the guy. Having co-workers die is not fun either… And, truly not fun is being the haz-mat cleanup guy at an office building after a natural causes death or suicide… If you want to know what it is like to clean out someone’s desk of their worldly possessions to give to their family and remove their blood from the carpet floor before their coworkers come back the next day, e-mail me… As a company owner with a lot of maintenance employees serving our office-building customers, there is only one job I don’t let my employees do, and that is cleanup death. I pay them enough to pump sewage floods; I don’t have enough to pay them for death. Just last week, my dog and I were going to work as we usually do... As we were walking in, he found a dead cat behind a bush, clearly a pet, clearly natural causes. He sat down and whimpered, his tail stopped wagging, and he no longer was having fun running around... This was the first dead animal that he had ever saw, and he clearly understood mortality... What a wakeup call for me… Does he understand he will die too??? People in skydiving talk all the time about knowing people that die: "If you are in this sport long enough, you will know..." Life is just like that too... My last living grandparent goes to more funerals than birthdays, and often comments that everyone she was a friend with is now dead. I guess this is like the theme of the movie "Green Mile"... It is life's little punishment for living a long time – everyone you know will die… So, my only comment is, wait as long as possible until the inevitable will happen, because if you are lucky to live a long time, everyone of your same age that you know will die – skydivers, friends, family, pets, sometimes children, etc.

Thanks for posting that link to the Aerodyne PDF... It is titled, "'The Planform Factor' How elliptical is elliptical?" - so it really answers a lot of the questions I had.

That is kind of where I was going with this post when I first posted it... How does one know how a canopy will perform when “elliptical” often is used to describe high performance canopies while many elliptically shaped canopies are not high performance??? The example of how to draw an ellipse was a great reminder of my high school geometry... In the computer age I am so used to drawing ellipses on CAD software programs, ah technology… So what factors on the ellipse makes it more aggressive or sporty when on a canopy, I wonder??? In other words, if you see a canopy flying thru the air that, say is a prototype that has no marketing hype or name yet, and you look at it carefully – what things do you see that are tell tale signs to how it will perform – other than size? How do you tell how it will behave in, say, a stall or line twists (I.E. spin up on ya). Without flying it to see, how would you know where to put it on that chart that Dragon2 posted? I hope Brian Germain does not mind me quoting page 101 of his book, "the Canopy and it's Pilot": So, the words I currently am pondering are in bold above. I know this is very open ended, just thinking and learning out loud here about the science of canopy shapes and performance characteristics…