Orange1

... and i discovered my husband had never heard of DB Cooper!!! So we hit Google and... Skydiving: wasting fossil fuels just for fun.

Excellent answer Brian! I think this gets added to the DZ.com quotable quotes list: Skydiving: wasting fossil fuels just for fun.

hmm. i partly understand this "internal clock" stuff but what happens when you jump at different DZs with different jump altitudes, or just at high altitudes AMSL where you fall faster? surely you should be double-checking?? Skydiving: wasting fossil fuels just for fun.

my 2c worth with about the same level of experience as you and after a recent 3-way (jumping with 2 people with 1600-1800 jumps each) comment was "you're hyper altitude aware"!! we discussed and what i am basically doing is carrying over what i 'learnt' on my coach jumps which is check alti after every dock - but i should think this will start sorting itself out as more and more points get turned , and visual awareness gets more fine-tuned... btw, did your friend say what was considered "normal" as opposed to your "excessive"? Skydiving: wasting fossil fuels just for fun.

There's a bit on this on Kallend's site - see http://www.iit.edu/~kallend/skydive/ and click on the "physics of skydiving" ppt Skydiving: wasting fossil fuels just for fun.

btw does anyone know if the Parachutist article on DB Cooper from a couple (?) of years ago is available online? Skydiving: wasting fossil fuels just for fun.

fwiw .. (reviving this thread because of something else recently about DB Cooper and came searching here) - appears it wasn't the Utah guy as his fingerprints didn't match any of those lifted off the hijacked plane, plus none of the money was ever discovered in circulation (only the bits in the river). But this...!!!: One of the more peculiar Cooper stories involved Elsie Rodgers, a grandmother from Cozad, Nebraska. She enjoyed telling her grandchildren about the day in the 1970s when she found a human head near the Columbia River in Washington. The kids thought she was crazy—until she died in 2000 and they found a skull in a hatbox in her attic. The FBI conducted DNA tests but reported it was unable to prove that the skull was Cooper's. Quite a bit of interesting stuff about DB Cooper and the various theories on http://www.crimelibrary.com/criminal_mind/scams/DB_Cooper/ (um, remember to go to "next" page to continue ) [so what else is there to do sitting on wind hold on a weekend?] Skydiving: wasting fossil fuels just for fun.

you test your visual alti awareness out the window of a commercial jet (and confuse yourself because it ascends/descends just a tiny bit faster than the cessna you're used to) no plans are made for weekends until they're there and you know what the weather's doing! Skydiving: wasting fossil fuels just for fun.

lol.. conway, fwiw i usually enjoy your posts (do you have pms at the moment though?) and anyway you are one of the rare posters with fewer posts than jumps (just) now firstly azureriders I am confused, are you 2 people as one poster? and if so why? as for me i never really fucked up seriously as a student but i did battle with exits at first (and exits are all that matter really on a SL jump ) and I spent a lot of time wondering if i really should be doing this and sitting in planes swearing that that one would be my last jump, ever, but somehow i just kept coming back. now it's just all cool i jump (when the stoopid wind here will allow me) and it's fun (it took a long time for it to be FUN!!! or at least for the fun part to be more than 50%!) and now my stresses are about different things (like not messing up the exit on a FS skydive) and easier to handle! Skydiving: wasting fossil fuels just for fun.

This thread is quite amusing (even if no-one seems to have answered the original question, which was... um...well ) however, i rather suspect a mod might think it doesn't really fit under "general skydiving discussions"? Skydiving: wasting fossil fuels just for fun.

and you get your gear check after tightening them, or is it different for students and A licences? CI at SCT cr@pped someone out a while ago: "when you have a D then maybe you can walk out to the plane with loose legstraps"... mouth, thanks for that - makes sense to me. Skydiving: wasting fossil fuels just for fun.

In relation to a different incident talking to experienced jumpers and also with a mod here (can't remember which, PM conversation close to a year ago... billvon?) I have been told that it is indeed possible to fall stable while unconscious. This leads to another potential problem, that even with an AAD there is a possibility of the reserve PC getting caught in the jumper's burble leading to PC hesitation that is not cleared. Skydiving: wasting fossil fuels just for fun.

plus the effect of heat on density altitude... which affects planes as well as skydivers. one DZ i jump at gets very hot (well over 40 deg C) in summer, last time i was there a couple of weeks ago they shut down for a few hours during the worst of the heat. Skydiving: wasting fossil fuels just for fun.

Reminds me of a car advert I saw from the 1920s, where headlamps, windscreen wipers and indicators were optional extras... Skydiving: wasting fossil fuels just for fun.

If you do this, how long does it take for the reserve to get into normal flight? I realise this will be canopy-dependent to an extent, but would it be almost immediate or would you lose a couple/few hundred feet? (obviously assuming a clean cutaway) Skydiving: wasting fossil fuels just for fun.

hmmm... answers kinda tally with what i had thought ( i don't "feel" an adrenaline rush anymore but get some of the symptoms, like thirst, so i know it's there) [ asked because i have an allergy (which adrenaline is used to treat in extreme circumstances) and i seem to have been getting less of a reaction since i started jumping... so i was wondering if the adrenaline release from jumping had something to do with it, but it seems more likely it's just coincidence. Skydiving: wasting fossil fuels just for fun.

I don't know much about adrenaline other than the obvious. Perhaps a medical professional can answer this question: are adrenaline surges always short-lived, or if you do skydiving reasonably regularly (say weekly or every second week, not daily) can you end up with some permanently higher level of adrenaline in your body? (There is a good reason I'm asking this but I don't want to move the discussion off a "skydiving related" issue) Skydiving: wasting fossil fuels just for fun.

just answering as I trained SL in SA. We weren't taught different procedures for different situations - probably because overloading first jumpers with all these things is asking for trouble. we were taught in any emergency to do full EPs (arch, look, grasp handles, peel and pull right, pull left, arch). incidentally at least some of the SL rigs at the DZ i trained at have AADs, certainly the ones i jumped do, but I don't know whether all of them do or not. NelKel: Agree with the first point. On the second... not sure. She was spinning, & assuming she was conscious she must have noticed that, and we were taught to cut away from a spin. Skydiving: wasting fossil fuels just for fun.

I use contacts, but haven't worn glasses for years. Wouldn't want to change to glasses for jumping because: - my eyesight is very bad, if i lose a pair of glasses i'm stuffed. if i lose a contact hopefully it'll only be one and i can time the flare ok - hitting something hard with my face would hurt, but it would probably hurt a lot more with glasses on. Skydiving: wasting fossil fuels just for fun.

I voted "other". My answer is yes, but not to the extent that I can answer as certainly as the "yes" in your option. The risk is only worth the reward to the extent that you as an individual are prepared to minimise that risk as much as possible. For example.... someone jumping a highly loaded canopy at 100 jumps who rushes a pack job and doesn't bother to get a gear check is loading the "risk" part of the equation. I haven't been around long, but I've learnt some very sobering things - like people can kill or seriously injure themselves even under large student canopies, and that you can't be complacent about planes "because you can jump out if something goes wrong", and that people can fall out of harnesses, and... you get my drift. I love this sport, but I can't discount the fact that one day I may decide the risks are not worth it. Skydiving: wasting fossil fuels just for fun.

Hmmm... not sure. Breakaway and Fly like a Pro are worth watching a number of times for newbies, Ground Rush once or twice. The packing ones will lose their usefulness after you've learnt to pack. But I didn't have the option of borrowing one, maybe you can check out as NWFlyer suggests and see if you can do that. (Or maybe you can get your DZ to buy it ) Skydiving: wasting fossil fuels just for fun.

It does, but I have only found it in DVD as part of "Skydiving Survival Series"... I think I got my copy from paragear.com. other stuff on there includes canopy control and packing videos and some interviews with some of the "names" in the industry, mainly on safety issues. Skydiving: wasting fossil fuels just for fun.

Hi Leeanne, I would bet that the lack of confidence you're feeling is because you haven't jumped in a while, and the suggested cure is jumping out a plane Books... the usual suspects i.e. Skydivers Handbook by Dan Poynter and Parachute and its Pilot by Brian Germain. (haven't read "transcending fear" by Germain yet but you may want to have a look at the sample, here: http://www.bigairsportz.com/pdf/sample-trans_fear.pdf ) Skydiving: wasting fossil fuels just for fun.

There are often questions about this, maybe a sticky with a link to USPA etc guidelines on the issue and ideally a list of the different airlines' policies might be useful? I realise this would entail some slog from someone but a number of posters must already have the policies of different airlines, so maybe they could contribute? Skydiving: wasting fossil fuels just for fun.

I would think those who have never battled fear are by far the minority! fwiw, I agree with the posts above - currency does a lot to reduce fear, and deep breathing on jump run fools your body. Sample of the new Brian Germain book called "transcending fear at http://www.bigairsportz.com/pdf/sample-trans_fear.pdf Skydiving: wasting fossil fuels just for fun.