MarkM

Ditto. I've worked pretty close to guys "making the millions", for them at least it was done via 80 hour work weeks. Myself, I'd just like to be in a position in 5 years that I can work my own hours and have enough money to live modestly and have some fun.

I can go out and buy a 1300cc Hayabusa and teach anyone how to ride it, despite my only ever having ridden a motorcycle with a third of the horsepower. And when they T-bone a car at 180mph, I wouldn't be held criminally responsible and the motorcycle industry won't fear going under. And stuff like the above happens way way more than any sort of training mis-conduct in skydiving.

You can probably blame the instability on some part of your body not being where it was supposed to be when you exited the track. I've experienced a similair thing in a wingsuit for the same reasons, so don't feel bad about it. Consider it the sky's way of telling you you need to practice getting stable at altitudes higher than your pull altitude But don't spend the rest of your life trying to get stable or searching for your main handle. 5k to 2k is 15 seconds and you probably shouldn't be spending that much time trying to deploy something over your head. Also, aside from going over the above with your instructor, really brief up on how you should be tracking. You shouldn't be falling through canopies at the end of your track, it sounds like you tracked down the flight line instead of away from it. If you don't know what the flight line is on any particular jump and how you should be tracking relative to it, don't do a tracking jump that dive.

News to me. I starting doing nothing but tracking right after AFF at two different DZs, one of which is very conservative(Homestead). Now a "tracking dive" at your DZ probably means tracking with other people, sort of like a wingsuit flock. I can see there being some requirement for that. But just doing a solo tracking jump as a newbie isn't that big a deal provided you're aware of the flight line, have an instructor plan your flight and the people on the load are aware of what you're doing.

Post about it to Playboy. Include pictures.

I always wondered why this is a different age and day. Has the human race gotten all grown up in the last 50 years? No more of those silly stupid antics like barn storming, strapping rockets to your body or shooting yourself out of a cannon? If so, that's sad.

I think Mirage does loans for their rigs. But if say, Aerodyne, had a loan option on their on their packaged Icon, Pilot and Smart reserve combo the sport might be more available to people. Especially if they worked out a deal with an AAD manufacturer to get one of those thrown in. I could see a lesser known AAD comany(Vigil?) being open to something like that, just to break into the market more. So then skydiving would cost maybe 1k for training, then 500 down and 150-200 a month payments for the gear to get into?

Boats and Harleys are easy to get low interest bank loans for.

Are you sure you're not adopted?

Technically you're supposed to always have someone else sign the jumps no matter what your license is. But in reality, no one is ever really checking the name in the signatures when they examine your logbook. And at many places when you jump at different DZs long enough that they know you there, they don't even ask for your log book since they trust you to be honest about your currency. That will vary from DZ to DZ, so where you jump for you it may work differently, I don't know.

DZ.com is like that because: 1> Most of the time, the only thing you know about the person posting is their jump numbers. 2> The site can be almost "save the children"-ish safety oriented at times. As if jumping from an airplane for shits and giggles wasn't already a stupid thing to do(from a survival viewpoint) and the little point that you don't do exactly X or wear Y turns you into a death seeking fiend. But hey, it's family, so what are ya gonna do

Progression on SL for me went something like: Initial jumps are SL jumps with practive throws. When you can prove you can exit stable and throw a dummy PC then you do a clear and pull. Then you do longer and longer delays up to 15 seconds(all solo). Then you jump out with an instructor and learn the rest of what you need(though I had switched to AFF by this point). It's sort of a baby step type of progression that first gets you so you can exit and save your own life, then puts you out the door with an instructor so you can learn FF skills. It's cheaper per jump, because you're not paying for 1-2 AFF-Is to jump with you and you're doing hop and pops for the first part. You really need to call the DZs you have available and see what methods are open to you. AFF can be as cheap as SL(to get off student status) at certain places. You also should not do just 1 AFF jump per month. It helps a lot to do the jumps closer together, even doing several jumps per day. Save up the money you need beforehand and then go out and do it. Also consider that with both methods you're likely to need to repeat levels, so budget for that.

It's called bringing the weed and/or tequila.

Wow. How much did the rush order cost? I wonder what their normal turn around time is. My PHI took months, but that was due to manufacturing delays on all of them.

I was really disappointed by this as well, though I think it's a fairly standard Seb policy(no jump ticket refunds). But the jump tickets were about $3.50 more than what they would've been at Sebastian. So even if you used them there, you were paying a nice premium for the pleasure. I bought up some tickets from people since I'm local and can use them, but there should've been a proper refund policy. Not doing that at a boogie just means people will be tying up manifest more with buying smaller blocks of tickets.

It's going to be very dependent on skill, body type and what you're wearing. Here's a BASE tracking video with someone wearing Gore-Tex: http://www.tarsis.org/vids/karlskraaura.wmv You can cover some decent distance. Whether you could track off the airport would depend on the spot and which way you fly. Talk it over with an instructor the day you want to try it.

Only thing is, it's not that easy. At some point when more people were doing small simple jumps a 4 way RW team could invite a 50 jump guy along no problem, but a 4 way VRW team today can't. A local swooper can't coach a recent grad on the ins and out of hook turns. When a new 200 jump guy shows up ZHills wanting to learn wingsuits, they're immediatedly welcomed into the flock and will be taking part in 6 ways probably the same day they show up. They leave loving the place having had an awesome time. But at 50 jumps, you can't do a wingsuit jump safely, so you're excluded from it. Now sure the VRW guys, the swoopers, the birds could all stop doing what they're doing to hook up with the new guy on a simple dive, but then they're spending their weekend not doing the fun stuff with their friends they wanted to do.

I can totally see it taking 100 jumps to find out you don't want to stay in the sport. After that long the newness of just jumping would wear off, the jumper isn't skilled enough to do VRW, wingsuits, swooping, etc, so their jump options are limited. They've been to a few DZs by then, maybe a major boogie, so then they either work really hard on getting in the skills for the next phase of the sport they want or move on.

Night jumps don't require a B, you just have to be B qualified. Unless there's a boogie somewhere that requires a B license to jump, it's pretty much a useless license as far as I know. Personally I think the chart is so skewed because the sport has a huge dropout rate between post student status and 200 jumps. Generally when I meet someone with 50 jumps it's in the back of my mind I probably won't see them around next year. But when I meet someone with 200+ jumps I tend to assume they're gonna be around awhile.

Ahh, I see how it is. I cause you to trash your phone last year so you cut me from this year's vid. Here's a mirror if anyone else is getting slow downloads: http://www.tarsis.org/vids/111_Keys_2006.wmv Nice vid. I just wish Sunday hadn't gotten so screwed up. And I really wish I was going to be able to make the PR boogie.

Then try Perl or another interpreted language sometime. This took about 3 minutes of coding: #!/usr/bin/perl print "Type in your numbers, hit CTRL-D when done:\n"; @numbers = ; foreach $number(@numbers) { chomp $number; $total += $number; } print "Total sum is $total\n"; foreach $number(@numbers) { chomp $number; print "$number is " . $total / $number . "% of $total\n"; } I do like Java though, even though I've rarely been able to use it for anything I've worked on. It was my first OO language and probably one of the better ones to learn on. I'm starting up next month as a Ruby on Rails developer and it'll be interesting to see how well that language works out.

I would want Blue Steel. Of course, the power would be so great, one could never predict the outcome of using it.

ZHills because of TK and the wingsuits. Though I'd always be stopping in at Seb.

It's extremely subjective and you're likely to just get "do it at my dz because it's the bestest" answers. I'd go to http://www.uspa.org/dz/states/FL.htm and look up the numbers for all the nearby dropzones. Call them and find out the prices for the tandem and video. Then base your decision on that. Now for my biased answer: All of them around Orlando are quality dropzones and perfectly safe. The big differences will be price, location and how much you like the staff. Sebastian probably has the best view since it's near the Atlantic(Titusville may be the same, I haven't been there yet), but it's further out from Orlando than the other dropzones in the area.

I've almost always been doing solos at Sebastian over the last year or so, because it's rare to see another bird there. It was a nice change of pace to be at ZHills over the weekend and just have so many good birds around to flock with.