klapaucius

I believe that all FAA regulated aircraft fall under the same rules as far as parachuting from them. That's good, because FAR 103 say that any flying device lighter than 255 lb, stall speed of 26mph or less and "redline" of 55mph is unregulated. I recall now an impressive video of russel who cut from a paraglider in a tricycle landing gear.

I could not care less for the FAA FARs or USPA recommendations. ... Anybody is free to jump from an aircraft at 1000' (the FAA does not say anything about jumping or deployment altitudes). Doing so under a velo loaded 2.4 with a TSO harness and 99 reserve is allowed by FAA but very, very stupid and unsafe common-sense wise. Performing the same jump with a base rig is much, much safer but not allowed by the FAA. ... A few questions: 1. Out of four (harness, container, reserve and canopy), do container and canopy have to be TSO'd? 2. Can you can pack (in addition to main and reserve) whatever you want into TSO'd harness/container? For example a handkerchief as a main, smallest reserve (approved) you can find as reserve and your BASE canopy on top of it all. 3. Is there anything regulation wise that prevents cutting (using BASE rig only) from a tandem paraglider or an FAA 103 ultralight (provided the pilot is instructor - so he can fly legal tandems and he is not paid for flying)? 4. How difficult and expensive would it be to TSO a BASE harness/container? Just a few brain waves in the heat of North-East...

No way. Not 3-5 minutes, not a minute. The rescue boats at BD were pulling jumpers within seconds of landing in water.

That is roughly my point, every accident is not preventable. But the word preventable is not a right one. Perhaps avoidable is better. They were bound to happen to someone. Unstable exits are unavoidable, 180s are unavoidable (and not completely preventable either) ..but most of the time things will end up OK. Even then.. can you prevent (=assure it will not happen) things like "unstable at deployment time" or "incorrect initiation of deployment sequence" or "unstable exit". One certainly can readjust procedures to prevent "packing aid left on p/c" or try to become wiser not to "plan Z jump instead of walkign away". As much as we would like to rationalize it away, there is rolling the dice component in every jump and more jumps means that it will fall on black more often. Jason certainly did. Maybe the luck bucket really gets refilled a bit as you fill the one with skill?

From a similar perspective, one jump in several thousand (maybe 5000, maybe 10000 - that's not the point) ends with a fatality. Unfortunately, with significantly more jumps being done (superexponential growth), the sport will have to live with higher number of fatalities. The majority of recent fatalities were referred to as accidents, and did not seem to be really preventable (i.e. two accidents in Switzerland, close tracking in Norway, TF etc.) and this points to a certain baseline "inherent" death rate in BASE, just like everywhere else...

Yes, on Industry Canada website. The search engine is a pain, though. http://sd.ic.gc.ca/engdoc/main.jsp (edit: See under Radio Frequency Search/Geographical Area)

Jason, Good to see you back... It is amazing and the title of the thread reflects it well. You recorded your freefall time of 6.09 seconds...This is only half a second longer than "regular" freefall, so you may have impacted at almost 80 mph! This is an amazing testimony to the protective capability of the armor that you were wearing. Jumping stops at the Bridge Day when medical help is administered, trains go along the tracks and boats are full and these rules seem to make a lot of sense (maybe except trains) there.

Introduction to the DVD "Superterminal" is spine chilling now.. "Good kids. no harm to anyone, Quiet evening smoking pot, you know, there is a future. But next year half of them will be on the hard stuff and a year later 6 out of 10 will be dead" Unfortunately things occasionally turn bad, with or without mistakes being made. There are packing errors, there are technical mistakes, some people assume higher risk (track close to the wall, do aerials, tricks etc). But some of the recent accidents "happened" and no amount of risk management (short of not jumping at all) would prevent them. Malfunctions happen and some turn bad. Every jump has a "roll of the dice" component to it. The dice may have 1000, 5000, 10,000 facets, depending what you do and who you are, but it does not have a trillion of them.

Most probably you will not find meaning in life from skydiving and/or BASE. These (and many other endeavours), as important as they are for the takers, are hobbies, passtimes, activities, vacations etc, Sometimes they are ever consuming, but they come in addition to the meaning-creating aspect of life such as family, children, contribution to society at large etc. Read a few months worth of posts in this forum and you will see that. Back to school...

In Canada certain group life insurance plans offered to some professionals (doctors, lawyers, engineers) pay for death of any cause, including suicide, provided insurance has been in effect for more than 2 years.

Not that many anyway. Others retired before rolling the dice 1000 times? Or are too young to have rolled the dice 1000 times? Or... The dice is not exactly one in six, but is not one in a million either. PS. By rolling the dice I mean that there is alway an element of unpredictability and not that it's all crapshoot. Jaap described in great detail two close calls he had in 82 jumps. It's close to a 100 option in his poll and rather far from the 1000 option.

How many people have made 1000 jumps and are still in the sport?

In this area of Canada people are searched for and rescued all the time. People engage in every single imaginable outdoor activity (including teasing grizzlies, snowmobiling on 2 inch ice and backcountry skiing in high avalanche risk times and areas :-) This was certainly a spectacular rescue, but let's not forget that Canadian military has enough problems with helicopters (issue well advertised in Canadian media) and I am sure they are keen to advertise a success story. edited for typos

If you search for "physics for game developers" on Amazon you will find a few books containing physics primer for all sorts of motion, including some C++ codes. Solving diff equation for flying at 24 frames a sec is not a problem on current PCs and is not much more difficult than using those simple models discussed before.

With all due respect to residents of Twin Falls, what kind of a job you can find there. Abbie, are you a nurse?

Quoting skypuppy: It ain't brave if you aren't scared....

Former ab initio Navier Stokes whatever...

I think what he meant was that: Velocity goes linearly with delay Air resistance and kinetic energy go as square of delay Power goes as cube of delay I do not think this is entirely correct here. If the canopy opening takes same time at all airspeeds, then power ("spank") is roughly proportional to the square of delay. But if they open faster, the faster you go, then the depency will be more than square. Opening time would have to behave like inverse of delay to get the cube dependency of power. Quite non-linear anyway. (From a former computational chemist/physicist, so take it as pure speculation and with grain of salt)

Natasha Stillwell. She is as British as they get http://www.exn.ca/dailyplanet/story.asp?id=2004111651

I do not think he got more than 5gs. The launch took a second or so and to get to 120m he must have accelerated to 40-50m/s. 4-5 g for a second can't be too bad.

Parachute comes from French: "chute" means a fall "para-" means to shield parachute = shield from falling parapluie = shield from rain ("pluie" = rain) parasol = shield from sun ("sol" = sun) parapente = paraglider = shield from slope?? ("pente" = slope, hill)

There is a recently posted plot of speed and glide angle for a track that was uniformly described as awesome: http://www.dropzone.com/cgi-bin/forum/gforum.cgi?post=1957747#1957747 Maybe the author could post the actual distances, but you can extract some stuff from the speed plot. The jump itself is at 2 seconds. The jumper takes some running start (1 second of it) - so it's a just a few steps and jumps at 2 seconds. The horizontal speed is ~10-15 km/h =~ 4 m/sec. After 1 second tracking starts and the horizontal speed picks up to ~ 10 m/sec at 5 seconds after the jump. Then the data are lost. (It's easy to interpolate, though) The table shows roughly how far down and away you would be from the exit point. forward time (sec) down(m) no track(m) with track(m) 1 5 4 4 2 20 8 9 The track starts! 3 45 12 16 4 80 16 23 5 135 20 32 (without track it would be

Flight simulators that allow creating own models could be a starting point. There are paraglider models that could be adapted to canopy flight. (e.g. http://www.xplorer.co.za/hangsim/) Wingsuit could be approximated with a "delta glider" profile with L/D around 2 (The ailerons and elevator controls must correspond somewhow to human limbs, with or without coupling) The whole VR part is dealt with quite comprehensively including famous bridges, cliffs,and buildings etc.. and programmable and downloadable sceneries. A custom supersonic helicopter would provide means of transportation from place to place.

This kind of suit should address many issues http://unitech-rf.com/personnel-rf.html http://www.nspworldwide.com/rf_frame.htm It forms a Faraday cage around the body, so electric fields and magnetic fields inside are nil.

Graphic illustration to the comments about AM antennas