wartload

Interesting article, especially since it mentions Navy guys who are trained at Benning. There have even been a couple of submariners through that program in past years.

"Cock'er shaved pussy?"

I'd like to see the citation for that info. I know lots of folks (including me) who don't even want to be on the top rung of a step ladder without a safety harness, but who eagerly left the plane on their first jump and love flying aerobatics.

The GRE is REALLY HARD! Take the GMAT instead! Happy? I personally don't think it's the sort of thing that you can study for -- especially in one day. You'd be better off taking a long nap today, followed by a peaceful walk in a quiet place. When you get up in the morning, eat a good breakfast, then have a couple of Hersey bars on the drive over there. Be calm, relaxed, and give the stuff that has accumulated in your brain for a lifetime the maximum opportunity to reappear. You'll do fine!

I won't say who actually did that, but I think that if you could locate Pete ("PC") Luter, Jerry Warren, Claude Paramore, Freddy Shaw, (or the late Fred Irwin), one of them could give you the details. I'm pretty sure that the objective was to film a malfunction, and they finally had to tie all the suspension lines together at the skirt. It was the only way to keep the cheap-o from opening.

You beat me to it! Yep, this isn't an urban legend. The Gurkhas agreed to do a low altitude jump before they realized that the deal included parachutes. I'm sure glad they were on our side!

28' 7-TU with a 24' cotton twill reserve. Soon upgraded the reserve to a 26' NavCon and used the old one (once) as an intentional cutaway backup reserve. As someone else mentioned, the switch to a 1965 RW&B PC was like going from driving a cement mixer to a sports car. It was "short lined" about 36", so it packed up pretty well, too.

I think that would be brutal on the lines! I guess that it's possibly a true story, but I didn't know anyone who'd close the container completely when the lines were just daisey chained. You'd just hook a couple of bungees across with thestuff hanging out and clearly visible. The group that I mainly jumped with for awhile got to the point that we decided a sloppy pack on a PC would open as reliably as a good one, so long as the lines were stowed reasonably cleanly and there was a clear "tunnel" of at least four feet. I never saw a malfunction on a "trash pack" job like that, and you could do one in about 10 minutes, vs about 30. The rate of small friction burns on canopies probably increased, though.

Yeah ... someone might trip over all that stuff on the floor!

First, see if you can get her out of the house by putting a big bowl of Alpo in the front steps ... if she goes out to grab it, slam the door and lock it. Second, if the first idea doesn't work, keep in mind that you are a skydiver, so you aren't really entitled to claim any moral high ground to begin with. There are two of you, so at least one of you should be able to get some sleep on any given night. Go with the flow ... or move to another town while she's in the bathroom and assume a new name.

Don't laugh ... FINALLY last week it warmed up enough that we were able to move my wife's new "babies" to an outside pen. She hatched seven miniature ducks in an incubator and then had them in a big plastic container in the kitchen, under a heat lamp. They were real cute for the first week. Then they started getting big enough that they could make a mess faster than it could be kept clean, and the house started to get a little funky smelling. The worst part was when I got home one night and saw her walking down the hall, followed by 7 little yellow squeaky things. She'd taken them for their first swim -- in the bathtub! (Alright ... they were kinda cute, following her down the hall, and at least none of them pooped on the carpet.)

That's what I was worried about... There was something on the radio (NPR?) very recently where a state (not sure which) was trying to change their law so that it no longer reads that you have to first try to run away ... and if you can't do that, you can defend yourself against an unwanted intruder.

You sure that you haven't been seeing Michael Jackson's plastic surgeon?

One of the earliest Ronald McDonalds was an early skydiver. An advertising agency was setting up a jump with him (in costume) and some of the Golden Knights, to take place at the Myrtle Beach Sun-Fun festival. The national office near Chicago found out about it and went ape-sh**. Apparently a shopping mall up that way had recently set up a Santa jump and the guy went in before a crowd of thousands. They forced the plans to be cancelled.

Didn't really think about it that way at the time. I'm sure that you did the same kinda stuff and didn't think of it that way, either Looking out the rear window, through 35 years of the haze that time creates, we did stuff that was clearly unsafe and stupid. The thing is, that we weren't looking at it through the rear window then. Life was right in front of the windshield for us, and we figured that the rigs we were jumping were about as safe as they could possibly get ... there was just a little room for improved performance. I've still got my first "high performance" rig and plan to post some pics of it when I can get to it. It was a very early Security pig rig that had a lead stop on the ripcord, a gravel protectors on the ripcord housing ends, an "aftermarket" jeeziz string (or "oh sh**! cord), blast handle, no AOD (AAD ... they were scarce and expensive), etc. Compared to the stuff today, it might seem like a death rig, but it was pretty cool stuff at the time. The safety of today was learned from the lessons of back then ... and before. There were some military guys who worked at the rigger's shack on a base about 2 hours' fast drive away from the club where I learned to jump. They'd show up with a trunk full of "damaged" canopies that had officially been destroyed (some had a dirt smudge on them, or a small burn, etc.). They'd haul them out, take what looked like a pair of long carpet shears to them, and start cutting out panels ... just to see what various sorts of patterns performed like. I don't recall very many malfunctions, even on that sort of stuff, but people always seemed to assume that they were going to have a 'function before too long, and I think they were much better prepared for one when it happened.

In one of the USN courses that I had to take, the old PO1 teaching us about the types of radiation and the damage they cause, said, "Now the real BAD one of all these is them gamma rays. They'll eat up your corpsuckles [sic]." As for protection against this stuff, my aluminum foil hat, combined with the aluminum sheets inside my shorts and under my hubcaps, seem to do the trick!

And that's a good thing! The only thing that was different in my own experience is that the folks that I was around were pretty good about not hitting the booze until they were through jumping for the day. If they had it on their breath, it was probably from the late night before. Other "recreational activities" were likewise generally postponed until someone was through jumping for the day.

(A little prologue first) I learned to skydive at a club that was located on an airport in a rural area. They were a great bunch of people, but there wasn't any real incentive to instruct newcomers. I'd waited around all day for someone to have time for me, but it was too good a day for jumping. The sun was starting to go down so I risked bugging one of the guys to see if there was still a chance to learn that day. He gave me about 15-20 minutes of explanation as to how to steer the cheapo and how to do a cutaway/reserve deployment, then loaded me up for a sunset SL jump. It went fine, and I was back the next day for 3 more SL jumps. Everything went fine. The next weekend I did my last dummy ripcord pull, a couple of hop'n'pops, and a 10 sec delay. I asked my instructor (not at the time rated as an instructor, but he didn't have a pilot's license, either, and he was a great jump pilot) what I needed to do about freefall. He concluded that I'd done fine up to that point, and that I'd gotten to the point where distance didn't matter all that much. The next load was going to 7,500 and there was room for one more. I might as well get on that one and see what freefall was like ... so I did. I didn't have an altimeter, but one of the other guys had just been loaned a new wrist-mounted altimeter to field test how it worked. Everyone else was using big aircraft altimeters, mounted on the reserve bungees, so this was an honor. The best thing was that I didn't really have to read any numbers ... just watch for the needle to get to the red zone. The exit was a basic student departure. The spot happened to be directly over "the numbers" at the far end of the runway. I fell flat and stable, alternating between checking the needle on the altimeter and looking at the scenery. It was really cool. Time seemed to stand still. The needle on that new type of altimeter wasn't getting close to the red area nearly as fast as I thought it would. It was still 'way up in the white area when I glanced down and saw the numbers on the runway suddenly getting *very* big, so I punched the ripcord without thinking about it. The canopy opened. I got turned almost into the wind and did a PLF on the end of the paved runway. Then I gathered up all of my stuff and had to walk almost a half mile back to where the clubhouse was, but I had a big grin on my face all the way there. The guy who loaned me the altimeter met me about 200 feet from where everyone else was standing. When I got to where he could hear me, I said, "This freefall stuff is GREAT!" "You liked that, did you?" "YEAH!" "I think you liked it a little too much! Why'd you pull so low?" "Well, I was waiting for the altimeter needle to get to the red, but it never did, so I pulled when I saw the ground coming up at me." The guy looked at the altimeter. The needle was just then touching the edge of the red area. It was an "Aww SH**!!!" sort of moment -- the face had managed to somehow lift up and rotate 90 degrees in the case while I was in freefall. I'm not sure how that happened, because I didn't get to look at the altimeter again before it went back to the manufacturer, but the design was modified before they went onto the market.

Ok. I was thinking of doing just that, but now I'm convinced that I shouldn't.

You've been watching too much Bambi!

I opened them while eating a cup o noodles with red broth. That didn't bother me. But when I read someone's description of what they have to periodically clean out of their boa's cage ('nuther thread), THAT grossed me out! I guess I can handle body parts better than snake piss.

It's good typing practice?

That can be my excuse ... I'm not fat, I just had a kangaroo for lunch!

Hmm ... sort of like the saying one of my former Navy Chiefs had - "Never F* with a man's chow or his paycheck, but there may be some room for negotiation when it comes to his wife."

I'm hip, Daddy SkyB ... gimme some skin! Then there was the military (primarily Vietnam, and predominantly black) practice of "dapping" that quickly spilled over into the civilian culture and became so complex that it was almost dance.