mdrejhon

When I sell something on eBay, I usually sell to Canada or US, so I give fixed flat rate shipping fees. Sometimes I end up paying a few cents/dollars more and sometimes I end up paying a few cenets/dollars less, but at least I don't get email questions from Americans and Canadians asking about shipping prices. When I quote to international customers, I sometimes give them a slightly fluffed estimate (saves me and their time) and then give them the discount if it ends up cheaper after more carefully doing research and shipping calculations only after the auction is done.

Probably -- without knowing it. I probably gave at least one grasshopper a free skydive from 3000 feet pull altitude.

This is the response I got... (I sent an email inquiry around the same time I started this thread)

Keep up the good work

Interesting observation. One needs to be trained for something to be "relatively safe" compared to no training. If you just deathcamp someone (give them a parachute and push them out of a plane with NO instruction), it is definitely extremely dangerous. Instant death easily possible too. The AAD and reserve won't always help. Same goes if you put a first-time-driver teenager in the driver's seat of SUV and put him on the 8-lane freeway with NO driver's education at all, it is definitely also extremely dangerous too. Instant death easily possible too. The airbag and seatbelt won't always help. But to a properly trained skydiver or to a properly trained driver, they are "relatively" safe, in a "manner" of speaking.

Just want to be clear... Yes, it did scare me for a moment. And yes, that's what we had too about "first one down", but two non-swoopers (me included) landed nearly simultaneously somewhere in the non-swooper field in opposite directions. This was a one-time thing affecting just one plane load on one dropzone visit. It happens to pretty much all dropzones occasionally, it appears (even if it's just once a year), even if there are no near-collisions imment, just opposing landing directions somewhere in the same landing field -- be ready for it, simply... Never have been any perfect dropzone, ever... The swoopers have their own separate ramair runway grass strip adjacent to the main landing area (At that time, they were landing crosswind relative to the windsock direction I decided on, and another jumper decided 180 degrees). There was no other problems earlier in the day or later in the day -- just for that one specific planeload when the windsock started going beserk. There were two of us that kind of chased the windsock (myself included). It wasn't exactly clear who was the first non-swooper down, and that may have been my fault as well. But nobody placed a fault on a specific person, and the matter was solved immediately for the next load by switching to compass landing mode as it was near zero wind anyway. It only happened once for me but it was a learning experience for myself (and probably at least one or two others.) The first-one-down rule was reminded to me too, but they recognized the special circumstance of a confusion of two simultaneous landings (And simultaneously distinguishing swoopers from non-swoopers), and a windsock going beserk so I wasn't "singled out" But it's my real life use of a slight flat turn (just 10 degrees or so). I knew how to flat turn and it gave me "more space" which was important to me after I found myself in that situation. I stress, no collision was imminent, but with a minor 10 degree flat turn, I turned it from something "too close for a newbie's comfort" into something with a lot more safety margin than there otherwise was. It was removal of only ONE windsock only -- as an indicator that the main field is in compass landing mode. Declared compass landing mode is quite safe (safer than a randomly dancing windsock) on weak/zero wind days. For the rest of the day, the other windsock was pointing straight down (zerowind). I simply doublechecked that other windsock to make sure landing on the compass was still safe to me. I could land in any direction I want if I wanted to land in an alternate fields, all a healthy distance away (lots of landing areas and adjacent outs, more grass landing fields than there are individual jumpers!) so I am not necessarily forced to do an unsafe compass landing if it suddenly became strong wind later in the day while we were still in compass landing mode ... One lesson I learned is that if I ever become confused again about landing direction (dancing windsock and the first-ones-down is not clear) -- simply land in a separate landing field away from traffic. P.S. This is just my experiences. This varies from dropzone to dropzone. I'm still a 100-plus jump newbie with less than double the jumps you have. Your/instructor rules may be different... (disclaimer, disclaimer...)

Sometime ago at a dropzone I was jumping at, for a very brief moment, one planeload landed in 3 different directions when the windsock started randomly flying in all directions (zero wind with minor intermittent gusts). Two landing directions apparently happened near the pea gravel, and a separate direction for the swoopers 100 feet away. I flat turned at about 150 feet altitude to a parallel ramair runway 100 feet away from another guy landing in the opposite direction. I wondered if I did something wrong... Had I not flat turned at about 150 feet, our ramair parallel runways would have been only about 30-40 feet apart, a bit too close for comfort for opposite-direction landers... so it wasn't a head-on collision course originally but I wanted more space for myself. It was definitely a tense "air traffic" moment for a newbie like me. Full recovery and still had 100% flare with a great soft landing otherwise. Needless to say, DZO took down the spare pea-gravel windsock (there were backup windsocks elsewhere), this is the indicator to tell everyone to land in a specific compass direction, usually east-to-west. That solved the problem. Some of us, myself included, got some reminders about the dangers of chasing the windsock (an important lesson).

A.F.F. on April 1? It flashed across my mind as "April Fool's Freefall"! Nevermind...congratulations for starting AFF.

Usually it's the other way around. But there are cases of vice-versa as well. Including the occasional newbie posting that they know skydiving is safer than driving as an example.

Maybe this should temporarily be added to "Links" on skydivingmovies -- as a "Link to Video - Faster Mirror" (The skydivingmovies.com infrastructure could be upgraded to support video mirrors... i.e. "Alternate Dowloads" links.... to offload a little bandwidth for popular videos) Edit: I found the SkydivingMovies.com DONATE button in the News Page ... Also click "Support SkydivingMovies.com" underneath the banner.

I almost packed a grasshopper once. Knowing that some insect bodies are acidic, is that a possibility? Especially wasps, bees, red ants, etc, squashed during packing and left to rot on the canopy for weeks between skydive weekends... Newbie speculation of course, but is it possible?

I think it's an interesting topic to cover... Some people already think it's safer than they think, while others think it's more dangerous than it really is. It's not a death sport where 1 in 100 jumps result in death, but comparable to a lot of the other 'dangerous' extreme sports. Let's turn this around, and turn it into a "risk analysis" paper that covers arguments from both sides, the "dangerous" camp and the "safe" camp, and some comparisions. Although statistics can be thrown about, I particularly like the frequently quoted "While skydiving is a dangerous activity, doing 17 skydives is roughly equal in risk in terms of death rates to driving a car for 10,000 miles" .... Even the U.S. army has quoted something similiar. (Not the same wording, but the number 17 in jumps and the number 10,000 for miles). I believe it was based on 2004 death statistics (or was it 1999?). There's a "but", though... Even though I like to use this quote with whuffo friends (And this is a more proper and balanced one-sentence quote than "skydiving is safer than driving"), even this is still overly simplistic, as when one learns skydiving, there are dangers like broken legs or paralysis caused by a bad swoop or whatever... And death rates are likely very different among different classes of skydivers -- swoopers versus accuracy landers, etc. And even all the above isn't still yet enough on its own. One needs to educate the whuffo about the dangers of skydiving AND how skydiving is made safer than it would otherwise be. And write it in Plain whuffo-friendly English. Let the reader make their own educated decision. Edcuate the essay reader with good points from both sides, researched carefully. It is true that not everyone wants to be helpful and skydiving IS dangerous (and there are still yet going to be moments that scare me shitless -- like my upcoming first reserve ride -- I know it'll happen eventually...and I know I'm in the danger zone of the "complacent" 100-to-500 jump range.) And don't even listen to me or quote me. I'm too newbie to be authoritative, but this is a worthy school paper topic if the paper goals are tweaked slightly... It an interesting subject, however, it should be spun into more of a kind of a "risk analysis" paper rather than a "safety persuasion" paper, while still passing a "persuasion" criteria required of a classroom assignment. Let's be helpful here. Better a school student gets proper information than misinformation. Or the media (inaccurate information).

Very interesting! I also noticed there is a February 22 blog entry about the digging going on, at Westcoaster: http://www.westcoaster.net/updates.php?updateCD=022206&page=1 Pesky building permit delays and such, I guess?

You all know this, but... I believe the only good reason to push or kick a person out is when they have a premaure opening at the exit that can't be stopped by other means.

I just use the good old standard boilerplate. "Why the hell not? It's fun!" But, I love this other answer too: "There is no such thing as a perfectly good airplane!" It's funny. I have witnessed two airplane crashes in my life. One of them resulting in death. (Witnessed that from 2km away - vertical crash to ground behind a hangar, and I saw the near-immediate smoke aftermath. At a local airshow sometime last decade).

From Discovery Channel... I saw a special on Discovery TV that showed how spontaneous combustion works. It's not exactly spontaneous actually. What happens is that your clothes got lit or something, and now the clothes act like a candlewick burning your body/bodyfat.... (works best if clothes are very flammable and the body burns, temperature too low to burn down the house but hot enough to burn away the body. The result is that the person becomes a pile of ashes. Scientists did a test with a fully clothed dead pig, and the pig burned away for hours without setting the rest of the mockup house alight, it was burning like a big candle under control with the clothing cover like a candlewick burning off the body and slowly turning the body to ashes... Some things melted in the room (plastic TV casing, etc) but the room wasn't hot enough to ignite. In the past, spontaneous combustion looked spontaneous because nobody understood it, but now there are some accurate theories of how it happened. Someone knocks out or dies, carrying some oil lamp or cigarette, get lit on fire by the little oil lamp as they collapse in the middle of a room, and then the person slowly burns away without lighting the rest of the room.... then later people looking for the person discover just a pile of ashes in the residence. (Many other scenarios exist, but this is one realistic scenario of a spontaneous combustion) If the whole place burns down, it does not have the "appearance" of spontaneous combustion. The appearance of spontaneous combustion is usually referred to cases where the whole place didn't burn down....

Perhaps only capitallized I-c-o-n should become "Icon", and only lowercase i-c-o-n should be left alone as "icon"? P.S. a found a trick to override this feature. Just add an empty italics word in the middle of the word icon. Type "ic", then hit the italics button twice, then "on" whenever you're typing about another meaning of icon than the Icon rig.

I checked the rules and I believe my signature is within boundaries (Rainbow Boogie is legitimate because it is, indeed, my own website), except I am wondering if linking to the Canadian 80-way constitute a violation of any kind because it is not my site. I don't want the mafia to give me a free BASE jump. (A bridge jump with concrete shoes.)

That's impossible. The best I've done is 26.437 seconds. (really.)

Oh, oh, the mafia's here! But the good pink kind that live in wind tunnels

No... I think that's the mafia's job.

Thanks, billyvon. This reminds me. I need to practice these again. I've done a few crosswind and flare turn landings as practice last year, but now I'm feeling uncurrent on these. I can't wait for the skydiving season to start up here in Canada... A high hop-n-pop is warranted.

I'd take them if others reneges.

Oh - that was a student jumpsuit. (BLUSH!) My Bev custom jumpsuit was not purchased until after my 100th jump. I had the rig, I had the altimeter, but not my own jumpsuit yet! I'm the red helmet in the center of the 9-way formation skydive. Edit: I'm wondering how to get Skydiving Magazine to add me to their boogie event listing. They list Russia and Spain, so we should be listed too. I tried to submit to them a couple of times, including a month ago for listing on their website. Any suggestions on how I should best contact them?

True, true.... But better here than myspace. This site is obviously more interesting to a 15-jump skydiver. Even if they don't post, they can still read other articles on this site. Better yet, heed the advice to listen to instructor....there are way many scary moments in skydiving and dumb mistakes to make (myself included).