Orange1

Congrats! Now the fun starts!

Welcome to the sport and the forums!! I agree that it is an obsession, but there's nothing "unhealthy" about it . When your whuffo friends get sick and tired of you talking about skydiving, there's plenty people here to indulge you, and once you start jumping regularly you'll meet enough people happy to talk about jumping all day every day! Skydiving: wasting fossil fuels just for fun.

There have been discussions both about the width and also about positioning (hint: under is not good in the event of a hard opening...) Skydiving: wasting fossil fuels just for fun.

Just a thought - our exit commands on SL are "climb out, look up, go" - so you are already looking up as you leave the plane (which will definitely help you arch) because looking up is part of the command - how do yours go? Any chance you can get your JM to add it in (I know some would be reluctant to change the usual command)? Skydiving: wasting fossil fuels just for fun.

And following on from that, would visiting jumpers from other countries potentially be forced to upsize to jump in the US? (not that I'm planning on going over recs... just hypothetically...) Skydiving: wasting fossil fuels just for fun.

I'm not a JM but I did both SL and AFF so... maybe a comment. But first I admit to being a little surprised at this Our SL FJC took almost a whole day... I suspect we spent at least 2 hours practising arch & exit count, and EPs! You say you had a good arch on jump 8 - was that consistent with your previous jumps? Here, you need 5 good consecutive PRCPs before you can freefall - still see some people tumbling on first FF after that which i suspect is pyschological. Still remember you did the right thing - remember priorities of freefall (1) pull (2) pull at the right altitude (3) preferably pull stable - no point hitting the ground while you're still trying to get stable (or lose precious altitude and not give yourself space to cope with a possible malfunction). - I assume this because you didn't pull your left arm in as you reached with your right? The importance of this to keep stable was explained to you? I switched to AFF after my first freefall mainly out of impatience to get off progression... ground class for AFF = hand signals as well as there are more tasks than just jump, get stable and pull. Whether it will be better for you... I don't know, but I do know a few people who moved to AFF after getting "stuck" somewhere on SL and found it helped. It sounds to me all you are getting stuck with is getting and keeping an arch. On SL our JMs always told us to try keep eye contact with them i.e look at plane. My gut feel (unlike a lot of people here as you will see if you do a SL vs AFF search) is to say just keep practising the arch, all the time, on the ground too, until it's automatic. I also can't figure out from your post if you are thinking one AFF and then back to SL progression, or continue with AFF... I'm not sure that one AFF jump in the middle will help, but maybe that's where some instructors can come in and give their opinions. ps on the hook knife question... different DZs seem to have different policies for students, some give them, some don't, figuring a student may be slashing around not knowing what they're actually meant to cut... Skydiving: wasting fossil fuels just for fun.

In SA it has to be naked. A bit condescending to newbies don't you think? Didn't you feel like you achieved anything on your 100th? Skydiving: wasting fossil fuels just for fun.

i do this sometimes, hangover from the days of hanging around paragliding pilots too much Skydiving: wasting fossil fuels just for fun.

Some kind of wind tunnel equivalent for practising canopy control. You know, something that could maybe keep you at say 500' so you could see how much altitude you lose in turns etc... or maybe a beam where the ground would be so you could practice "landing" a new canopy, swoops etc without the prospect of femuring or worse at the end... where you could change wind speed and variability to see how your canopy reacts and practise what to do... Skydiving: wasting fossil fuels just for fun.

Katie, I'm 37 and my dad worries that I skydive. (He worries more now after all this.) The age of your child doesn't have much to do with parental worry. My point about the jumping with trust that everything would work perfectly was that it is obvious that things go wrong. You've never done a first jump course, but if you had you would realise that a lot of it is spent teaching you what can go wrong (i.e: you KNOW things can go wrong, you KNOW things don't always happen perfectly). And there are warning labels, really big and bright, on each rig. That is why I was surprised at the statement that she jumped believing nothing could go wrong. I just don't understand how someone could have that belief after having gone through the training and before this have jumped bnfore so seen those big bright orange warning labels... that's all. Skydiving: wasting fossil fuels just for fun.

my bad - and entirely my fault for believing the media "It was her first AFF solo jump" Here an "AFF solo" is the last 3 jumps on AFF progression, when you are cleared for solo jumping. [And (um) you weren't answering my question "again"?? I didn't ask it before] Still, I do think that having a few tandems and especially the IADs does take her beyond a normal "first jumper".. but that is purely my opinion. btw i made no comment about how i thought she should have handled the media. Skydiving: wasting fossil fuels just for fun.

Do you know this for a fact? How could anyone have such blind trust when so much of a FJC is spent dealing with malfunctions? (and anyway an unstowed toggle is not even a malfunction) It is made very clear to prospective jumpers that things can and do go wrong. Have you ever seen those big orange warning labels on the rigs? They say things like: Sport parachuting is a hazardous activity that can result in injury or death. Parachutes sometimes malfunction, even when they are properly designed, built, assembled, packed, maintained and used. Skydiving: wasting fossil fuels just for fun.

Seems so I think it's partly because of what's been mentioned - it's all over the news, everywhere, and we're all inundated with worried family members and co-workers thinking we're crazy. ...And maybe it's because we tend to underplay the risks to try assure family members that we'll be OK, and then something like this reminds us all that it is dangerous... and we can all go on about most incidents being due to human error, but in the back of our minds we know we all make mistakes and we're just hoping like hell that our own don't happen in the air. But all that said it really gets my goat to hear someone say "I didn't know what to do"!!! By jump 10... you've been hanging around a DZ, you've been reading things, talking to people, etc. Especially with an instructor bf! By jump 10 you know there's no-one up there holding your hand and even if some of what was taught in FJC went in one ear and out the other, you are well past 1st jump and should realise that you are responsible for your own safety. (Am I right that this was a solo jump? Solo means being cleared to be able to look after yourself in the air?) By jump 10 you should be able to look up and recognise an unstowed toggle. No? Skydiving: wasting fossil fuels just for fun.

I don't. She made many mistakes that seem to indicate the sport isn't for her. This isn't all fun and games, you can die if you don't react properly and quickly. I tend to agree with pollster. "I didn't know what to do" isn't something one wants to hear from a skydiver. Hmmm... if you were a DZO and this girl came to jump at your DZ after all this, would you let her? Skydiving: wasting fossil fuels just for fun.

Y'know, some countries don't even have ANY. No "novelty" aspect to wear thin. Our teams travel far to use them. Skydiving: wasting fossil fuels just for fun.

Low jump numbers but I would have chopped. I seem to recall being told that a slider too high up could possibly slide back up again, with disastrous results - maybe someone with more experience can comment on this? Skydiving: wasting fossil fuels just for fun.

I had 10 jumps when i made my first post earlier this year. Since then I have managed another 44 (I thought about waiting till Monday to answer so that would be higher, but what the heck) during which I: did my first freefall, converted from static line progression to AFF, got my A after what seemed like a long hard slog, learnt to consider a door opening in mid-flight as normal, learnt to hate commercial plane flights because landing with a plane doesn't seem natural, decided RW is where I want to be, and have decided that skydiving is one thing where i follow all the rules religiously And like Kathleen says, "This sport has transformed me into someone I never imagined I could be." Next year I am making a pilgrimage to DeLand to get in a bunch of coach jumps and tunnel time (no tunnels here). I plan to have 100 jumps by March(partly courtesy DeLand, would be unlikely with our cessna DZ) and get my B soon after I get back (we have a 75 jump min for that here), then get into either a 2-way or 4-way team (or both) and head for Nationals 2007 Skydiving: wasting fossil fuels just for fun.

Most of my jumps have been on pilots. a couple of wierd openings (noticeably asymmetric inflation and dives on opening) caused by packing - but most of them very smooth, can take a while to full deployment. But certainly never a hard opening. Skydiving: wasting fossil fuels just for fun.

Congrats Kathleen, well done for sticking it out! Skydiving: wasting fossil fuels just for fun.

Then why did you do it? like i said.. because the program raised some interesting issues that i thought might be worth a bit of discussion. maybe someone reads this thread and then has a bootie-in-tow situation before they manage to track down the video... (ok, unlikely but, so is a double mal and we discuss those...). because until i saw this program (i'm new remember, but so are a lot of people who read here) it never even occurred to me you could get hung up by your booties (lesson: look before you leap) or that in the event you land under a plane, you twist to let the rig take the impact. hey, you post in a public forum, you're not gonna control every reply you get!!! Skydiving: wasting fossil fuels just for fun.

I saw this on Discovery not too long ago (for some reason billed as a weather program, go figure). Not wanting to be a "spoiler" but I thought the program raised some interesting issues- pilot tried to dislodge him, eventually had to land with him under the plane because of fuel, took the landing in really really slowly (something like 30 or 40mph if i recall correctly), the guy let his rig take the brunt of the impact and survived. What interested me too about this incident was that the pilot wasn't a jumper, and was too scared to lean too far over the side of the plane to try dislodge him. A skydiver will know that you can actually lean quite far over without falling out and it made me think that we are quite lucky perhaps then that a number of our pilots jump as well. Mentioning this to some locals, i was told a story of a similar incident at a nearby DZ where the pilot did in fact lean halfway out the plane and cut the guy free (our planes all carry knives because they're set up for static line). Skydiving: wasting fossil fuels just for fun.

Right, and I recall you were asking about packing... ok, i'm not around this weekend anyway even if the wind does miraculously die down, but i'll say hi next time... hopefully next weekend, a long weekend all for jumping ... if the wind plays ball Skydiving: wasting fossil fuels just for fun.

were you there a couple of weeks ago with some family members? wind forecast doesn't look good for tomorrow Skydiving: wasting fossil fuels just for fun.

Hey, welcome to the forums and the sport! Fill in your profile so I know who you are when I'm next at the DZ - are you at SCT or Citrusdal? Skydiving: wasting fossil fuels just for fun.

I put a couple of jumps on a rental rig with a predator as a main a while ago. It looked very square vs the pilot i usually jump, but opened nicely, flew nicely and landed easily. Of course, I don't have very many jumps and none on a 7-cell to compare it with. Skydiving: wasting fossil fuels just for fun.