mdrejhon

You have more jumps than I do, but I read many dropzone.com threads that clearly explained why. I also talked to others at my dropzone. Standard training procedure is just go ahead and do EP. The whole ball of wax (click). Made me dizzy. From these, considerations included: - Muscle memory for EP. It's safer to follow your muscle memory quickly, regardless. - You don't want to be hesistant pulling silver - Just do something NOW, it's a high speed malfunction. You're less than 20 seconds from splat. - etc. Crapshoot Consideration: - One of the greenies said this. - 2-out may be safer than trying to fix a malfunctioning PC. People have been killed. - Trying to fix a malfunctioning PC can be safer than having 2-out. People have been killed. I'm going to just go by muscle memory and go EP without wasting time worrying about 2-out. Maybe one attempt to fix (bridle grab) if I'm doing 4K/5K pulls (which I do fairly frequently, since I enjoy the canopy flight). If two out happens, I'll deal it with my existing two out training. I know it does not answer your question. I'll let search and others attack this question, but I've historically seen this become a pretty heated discussion.

This is the "dropzone.com of cellphones": www.howardforums.com (really massive cellphone forums)

QuoteAfter having 10 super soft landingsAsk me about my experiences after my brake lines got replaced (about jump 70ish) - nothing as bad as you, but a few scary landings. It wasn't until I learned about monitoring something called "tail deflection" when familiarizing myself with a new flare band. I kept my hands all the way up to the stops, and when I flared, I had no flare until I pulled about 7 inches. It threw off my flare timing, leading to some exciting landings, and my first tarmac landing (nearly lost my balance on that one). It made me pretty frustrated until I figured out I needed to start my flare just before tail deflection, not all the way to the stops -- because the new brake lines (PD specs) were much more loose than my old brake lines.

Actually, NTSC uses 60 fields per second at two distinct images per frame (interlaced). So while it is 30 frames per second, the temporal resolution to the human eye is is 60 images per second and for PAL is 50 images per second. Fields (which are full individual images) are half frames (either even or odd scanlines) displayed alternatingly every 1/60th of a second (1/50th for PAL). If the bulletcam is 15fps, then it is likely capturing at a rate of 1:4 (1/4th of 60), for 15 frames per second. So it's actually only one-quarter the fluidity of video as a regular camera. (FYI -- I used to work in the Home Theater industry). The smoothness difference between 15fps versus 30fps versus 60fps is very clear to the human eye, during fast motion.

True. The promised IMAX camcorder that's the size of a grain of sand -- but end up taking only VHS quality images from a device the size of a washing machine. I figure, they'll have this sorted out by the time I'm experienced enough to fly camera.

Hi, I am not a vidiot, and don't plan to be anytime soon, but you skydivers must be drooling over this. It's probably only freeflyer quality, but at HDTV and 5.1 megapixels (simultaneous video and photography in only 8.3 ounces), it probably would look stunning on a projector in the debrief room - depending on how good or terrible its compression codec and anti-shake technology is. http://news.google.ca/nwshp?tab=wn&ned=ca&ncl=http://gear.ign.com/articles/678/678900p1.html&hl=en It's a mere half-pound memory card camcorder (21 minutes of HDTV on a 1GB SD card). From the photos of the camcorder, the lens seem to be be big enough to work okay for light gathering capacity, but I guess the proof will be in the electronics quality. I know that the codecs for memory card camcorders are gradually getting better and starting to get better than DV-quality (at least for video with little motion compared to DV through a lens of similiar quality), but if the codec isn't going to keep up with fast images, this camcorder would be worthless for skydiving. Guess some freeflyer here will have to give this camcorder a skydive test. Nontheless, the future looks exciting -- ultra lightweight HDTV camcorders!

Geography: It's Libya, and they are called Libyans.

I heard Orlando had a major upgrade of the windtunnel motors recently -- so it might be more similiar to the other newer SV tunnels. Was your experience before or after the upgrade? I don't have the windtunnel experience you do. Someone else will shed more light about this, but this bears worth mentioning.

I know, I was just doing some lame humor

FYI -- I had absolutely no problems with Orlando airport. It was one of these places where the rig just breezed through the X-Ray. I think this airport were very familiar with rigs.

Dual unstowed toggles once. Under Manta. As a student. I didn't pack it myself. Did not cut away, good parachute right away -- but they were just dangling there.

Oops. Sorry about posting in the wrong forum -- thanks for moving this thread to the correct forum

It's not THAT bad. Just make sure to follow all the reasonable guidelines that PD recommends (many original Sabre's shipped with a smaller slider than what PD recommends now -- you can reduce quite a few hard openings by upsizing the slider to the current PD recommended size). Don't let the brake lines shrink too much; my openings did become somewhat softer after the old shrunk brake lines were replaced. (Earlier, the brake lines started the flare band right at the stops -- now the flare band starts approx 6 inches down) Contact PD for today's recommended specs for your current Sabre and you can make a Sabre much safer. During the last 50 jumps my Sabre has been predictably 'brisk' -- not uncomfortable, but brisk. Oftentimes sloppy (off-heading). People have gotten badly hurt under a Sabre opening - BUT as I later learned also can happen under other brands of canopy too (broken bone under, what was it -- a Safire -- I'll have to do a search, just found it was not unique to Sabre). Any canopy can misbehave. Sabre 2 also has a reputation too, although less than Sabre. Just saying it's not THAT bad if you can only afford used... You might be a rigger and I am not, and you might be concerned about sloppy paid packers packing a killer opening due to Sabres' sensitivity to bite. So I might recommend to always self-pack that Sabre though, just in case

One of my friends just told me all about Aerodium in Quebec in the old days -- supposedly the first VWT in North America in the late 1970's or something like that (or early 80's?). He told me it cost him the 'expensive' cost of $25 per hour. And the big batsuits that were needed in order to fly in the airstream. Small airstream. And not all that stable. More of an amusement-park-style ride. He and his school buddies would split an hour of for $25 and share the fun of the tunnel. He's a non-skydiver, just FYI. Needlessly to say, he was surprised that doesn't even get him 2 minutes of tunnel time today. Mind you, today's windtunnels are much bigger, more stable, comfortable, skydiving realistic, and you can now fly in a birthday suit instead of a balloon suit.

N/A

Who are the rabid fans you speak of? Any famous tunnel flyers I should be aware of? I thought the tunnel wasn't supposed to be operating till approximately April Oh. It's just the metal fans, not the human fans. Hurry up, will ya!

Toilet also would make cheap low-density media too -- use of invisible ink, pattern imprinting, or similiar, to make a toilet paper tape reader/player. A fun university engineering project could be to make a VCR that uses rolls of toilet paper as the media for the video. Tired of the video? Then you know what gotta be done. Lots of crazy things can now be done with rolls of toilet paper with today's technology.

That's a good idea about the chest strap -- it's very hard to forget the chest strap. Safer than a twist tie or string, because I can't forget to untie the cutaway -- because I need the chest strap anyway. I do use a gym bag, but this is a good point -- try tieing down the handles with some other part of the rig so that it is impossible to forget to make the rig safe for jumping. Thanks for the tip in case I am forced to transport the rig without a bag for any reason... Not at the airport, but if my gear bag got locked away or the gear bag forgotten in somebody's car trunk and they left early (this sort of thing actually happened to me, and I had to go home with the rig barebones)

Does air-popping preserve more nutritional value over microwaving? I think I heard something to do with this -- although I don't think that many people air-pop popcorn these days.

I saw that article too. That's why I decided to carryon. I went through security 4 times in my trip. - 2 didn't even get a second look. (quick pass through X-ray) - 1 took a double take. (looked at X-ray carefully) - 1 wanted to open the rig and started tugging at it but I pointed at the TSA paper. Whew! They decided to just wave it on rather than go through the trouble of me opening it for them as the TSA paper requires. This may be a representative sampling of various diferent airports. You won't have much problems most of the time, and you won't be delayed most of the time, but sometimes you get hit by an unexpected annoying-but-understandable delay by cautious security people... Best thing to do is be prepared. If you check in, I am sure most of the time nothing will happen, but I am scared of the occasional disaster by the inexperienced inspector. It's much easier to have a ruined rig than to win the lottery! So, even tape the TSA security advisory to the rig, if you have a second rig -- that way they have to rip the TSA advisory off to even look at it, and they are forced to read the TSA advisory... In fact, I'd rather have them leave the rig behind than to open the thing. I'd rather rent than to see my rig ruined... So they better READ the genuine TSA advisory which does suggest the rig to be held back instead of being "force-inspected-and-hurried-along"...

In Canada, earlier, we had a south-park style puppet show that at times, had some simulated sex scenes (ala south park style humor). Are you telling me construction paper has no sex drive?

In fact, 20% is an underestimation if you take a poll in say, Montreal's gay-village or New York's gay-village -- it can easily spike well past 20%. Although many cities, the gay villages are thinning out (San Francisco is one notable example with straights diluting the gay population) so gay density goes down in the village while the rest of the city goes up. But true, there are those maily-straight people who have had that one or two "experiments" (which they may not have enjoyed as much as with a woman). That can spike the figure to past 10%. In my opinion, nationally, I believe in a middling 4-5% figure (nearly squarely in the middle between the extremes). This also includes people like those in the Brokeback Mountain movie -- same-sex adultery from opposite-sex couples is actually surprisingly common. People in gay communities see it happen all the time (online dating profiles, phone, Personals -- the term is "MWM" which is Married White Male claiming to be bisexual), and it happens a lot more often covertly that don't get advertised at all. A lot of the more morally-minded gays hate it, while the less morally-minded love to take advantage of the opportunity. All controversial, I know. But that's besides the point -- I am just lending validity to the statistics.

There are notable big employers offered same-sex benefits over 10 years ago by extending partner benefits to same-sex couples. Big names including IBM and Apple. You may have seen these kind of things in the news in the past in the newspaper a long time ago (but likely you weren't paying attention, ha ha). Sometimes it was from a gay employee group campaigning, sometimes from a lawsuit, and sometimes of their own volition (by copycatting other companies partnership benefits). Not common with small businesses, due to, the gay population issue, except to comply with discrimination-related laws. Gay couples are also typically high double income families, so the gay magazines and gay newspapers are frequently plastered with housing ads, mortgage ads, vacation agency ads. Most of it from mainstream companies that don't even speciallize to gays. We are hit by heavily targetted marketing by the likes of a familiar big realtor, the local travel agency chain, online sites such as Expedia and DiTech etc. They are after the market with a profit motive with no more of the squeamishness that existed even just 10 years ago. Nationwide gay (or rather, non-straight -- as in bisexual, etc) population is often mentioned to be approximately 4-5% or so, with wide variances of opinion ranging from 1% to 10% depending on source. The 10% figure is frequently argued as an exaggeration and 1% is frequently argued as a definite underestimation. Some metro areas definitely has some gay-dense areas (well exceeding 10% by surveys), with large spikes in "gay-village" areas of major cities. You can definitely distort statistics to get 1% or 10%, the real truth is likely somewhere in between.

Simplified instructions, because I already did the research for my own needs: 1. Print this TSA notice on high quality paper: TSA Advisory Permitting Parachutes On Airplanes -- Acrobat Reader PDF (Comes from this webpage) 2. Put one sheet per rig on top of the rig. 3. Bring your Cypres card and bring it with your carry-on rig. If you lost the card or need more copies, print the Cypres card JPEG's from this thread. 4. Use a gym bag at the minimum, for the carryon. You don't want your rig in plain view except when they need to look at it. That's all you need. (Better rig protection is recommended, but you can grab a gym bag in a pinch) Done. Very useful information in this dropzone thread about travelling with rigs.

I think I read one unfortunate incident from one source, then heard about this from another. It's a pretty sad sounding story. Ouch. Just goes to know which parachute is over your head first before using a hook knife.