Eule

And right below that item... Another big win for VoIP! Eule PLF does not stand for Please Land on Face.

I had somewhat the same situation last fall. I started at a DZ ~1 hour from my home in June 2005 and my progression was, to say the least, slow. In about October (still working through AFF) I decided to go to a bigger (more people, turbine) DZ ~4 hours from home. I didn't think anyone at the new DZ was going to wave a magic wand and fix my problems, but I wanted to get a "second opinion" - maybe a different instructor would see something I was missing, or be able to explain something in a different way. The first time I went there I remember saying to a friend of mine that it felt a little like cheating on one's significant other. The folks at the new DZ were quite welcoming and helpful. I did about four or five jumps there, and then decided to do two things: give the tunnel another try, and go back to the first DZ. I was somewhat worried that the folks at the first DZ would be mad at me for "running off" to the big DZ, and that the folks at the big DZ would be mad at me for "running off" back to the first DZ. Neither of these things happened. I went to the tunnel and came back to the first DZ and everything was fine; I talked via email with one of my instructors at the big DZ and everything was fine there too. So, based on my limited experience, going to different DZs isn't a big deal. One somewhat negative thing happened when I went to the big DZ. Some of the big-DZ "regulars" were asking me where I was from, where I had been jumping, etc. When I named the DZ I started at, one of them launched into a rant about how he was glad I had come to the big DZ, since the other DZ was a bunch of no-good so-and-sos, etc. This guy wasn't a current or former staff person at either DZ; apparently he just didn't like the other DZ - he possibly had a beef with the *previous* owner of the other DZ, but that is just speculation on my part. I just didn't talk about it further with him and everything was cool. I have been to a couple of other DZs that I haven't jumped at. One was Eloy; I was there for tunnel time and didn't do any jumps, and another was in Chester, South Carolina, where I just hung out because I was in the area for tunnel time. Nobody gave me a hard time at either place. Caution: advice from someone with a low number of jumps. I do think that if you are going to a different DZ for the first time, it's probably a good idea to do it under good conditions: not too much wind, you aren't in a hurry, etc. The landing area will be different, the prevailing winds will be different, the exit and/or number of people on the load might be different, etc. You don't want to deal with too many changes at once. On one hand, I think it's good to be able to adapt to jumping at a variety of places, but on the other hand, you don't want to make it harder than it has to be. Eule PLF does not stand for Please Land on Face.

I wonder where they get in at. My best guess would be around the holes where the flap/aileron linkages go up inside the wing, but I haven't been up close with an Otter in a few months. Does the Otter get parked outside, or is the hangar porous enough that the birds can easily get in and out and therefore get into the plane? Underage chicks getting free airplane rides... yep, sounds like a dropzone. What I want to know is, did they get extra altitude? Do you know what kind of birds they are? Just by the eggs, the dark color of the chicks, and relative frequency, I would guess starlings, but it could be a lot of things. Starlings can be either very persistent or very stupid, depending on your point of view. They have been known to attempt to build a nest in a nest box that is already occupied by an owl. This has happened more than once. In a normal nest, I don't think the parents feed them for perhpas 8 to 10 hours every night, so it's not inconceivable that they could last that long. The parents would have to be on the job pretty hard from dawn until first load, and from sunset load to sunset, but they could probably get enough food into the chicks. I hope nobody gets in trouble -- these birds have been on several observer rides without rigs on. I wonder if birds have trouble with pencil-preening... Eule PLF does not stand for Please Land on Face.

What's interesting to me is what types of whuffos I get the questions from. I recently won the Titanium Lottery, and when people ask me how I got hurt, I tell them I was jumping. People with doctorate degrees in chemical engineering and mechanical engineering have asked me, "So, did your parachute not open?" Then, a truck driver came to deliver some things at work, and his question was "Did you not tuck and roll right?" I was amazed - a question that was actually relevant. The one difference between the engineer whuffos and random whuffos is that instead of saying "no", I can say "Think about that a little" and they usually realize it's a dumb question. I talked to the truck driver a little and he had been in the military, which is how he knew about jumping. Eule PLF does not stand for Please Land on Face.

I don't think the USPA has an age requirement for the license, but most dropzones have some kind of cutoff age. This varies by state and by dropzone. If you're 21 you're good most anywhere; some places will do it at 18 (but your parents may have to sign something); a very few places *might* do it at 16. You'll have to ask at the local dropzones to find out what their policies are. That's the first one USPA issues. The other three are B, C, D. There are some other ratings and qualifications you can get, but those four letters are the main ones. You might want to look at the SIM (the skydiving version of the AIM) at uspa.org - you can buy a printed copy or download it as a PDF for free. It costs about $200 to get started and then half of your paycheck for the rest of your life. :) Seriously, it depends on what training method you choose and how fast you progress, but I would count on at least a couple of thousand dollars minimum. That's just the jumps and gear rental - it doesn't include buying your own gear. The sectionals lie. Use the dropzone locator on this site to find out what's close to you. I know Florida has several dropzones so there should be one nearby. You might also want to read the articles here on getting started. Eule PLF does not stand for Please Land on Face.

Get it ready, then check the forecast as late as you can tomorrow before you have to go to the airport. Right now they don't know. The blurb from the NWS is "Saturday: A chance of showers, with thunderstorms also possible after 8am. Mostly cloudy, with a high around 62. Chance of precipitation is 40%. New rainfall amounts between a quarter and half of an inch possible." When the forecast is shaky like this (say 30% to 70% rain chance), the nice thing about the NWS is that you can read the forecast discussion. Even though it is written in weatherman and not English, you can still get a feel for how much confidence there is in the forecast. The 10 May 16:46 discussion is at the end of the post; there's a lot of stuff in it, but I left it all in because the wording tends to show the uncertainties in the forecast. The shouting (all caps) is theirs. They twiddle the forecast continuously, but many (most?) NWS offices tend to issue completely revised forecasts around 0400 and 1600 local time, plus or minus an hour or so. Check the forecast and the discussion on Thursday morning and the picture should be clearer. Eule PLF does not stand for Please Land on Face.

If you have traveled a long way to jump, you may need to turn it on a long time before you board. The receiver stores some data so that when you turn it off and back on, it can sync with the satellites more quickly, as long as it is in roughly the same area. If the receiver moved a lot (several hundred miles or more) while switched off, it will have to discard most of this data and start from scratch. This is an extreme example, but my brother-in-law brought his GPS with him from Germany over Yule. He wanted to show it off, but when he turned it on for the first time in the US, it would only find one or two satellites. We twiddled various settings, but finally just left it turned on and sitting outside for about an hour. After that, it found plenty of satellites and worked fine. Most people won't have to worry about this, but it might come up if you fly to a far-away DZ for a boogie or whatever. You don't have to wait until you are at the DZ to do this; if you arrive the night before and/or have to fly in to the big city and then drive to the DZ, switch on your GPS as soon as you get on the ground and let it start acquiring. It may take a while, but once it's used to its location, you can shut it off, and be fairly confident that when you turn it back on, it will quickly acquire enough satellites. Eule PLF does not stand for Please Land on Face.

I fixed your post. :) On a related note, . Eule PLF does not stand for Please Land on Face.

I don't have that many more jumps than you, but I have noticed the same thing. I'm under canopy and everything is OK, and I look down to see if I can see my AFF instructor under canopy. For a long time, when I first caught sight of him, I _always_ thought he was just about to land, and would freak out a little - "shit, he's still over the trees!" Then I'd watch him continue to fly, and realize he was much higher up than I thought. This probably doesn't work right around noon, but I figure like this: if my instructor really is as low as I think he is, then his shadow shouldn't be that far away from the point directly underneath him on the ground. When I've applied this idea, I've usually found that the shadow was very far away or so far away I couldn't pick it out, which means he is a lot higher than I first thought. Eule PLF does not stand for Please Land on Face.

What makes you think the "government" printed and scanned. In Word, File->Properties->Summary-tab has "DOT/FAA" in the Company field. (See attached screen shot, done at work.) This is trivial to forge, but since most people don't even know it's there, they don't do it. I figured if USPA (or other entity) printed or scanned it, it would have some other entry there. I was thinking more along the lines of the definitions that pop up when you do http://www.google.com/search?q=define:interoperability . No. "This shirt is a munition", though. Not jumping out of airplanes works just fine for most people, too. Then there are the crazy ones, that don't have a program that understands Word documents on their system. Maybe they run Windows and don't feel that Microsoft needs any more of their money. Or maybe they're really crazy, like me, and run Linux on an 11-year-old PC, which can read Word documents slooooowly or PDF documents more quickly. (A good PC is at least 25 jump tickets!) Then there's the open vs. closed standards thing, and other arguments that only a geek can love. Eule PLF does not stand for Please Land on Face.

That's what I've done, most of the time, and it worked. Just that one time was exciting. I wasn't being drug around by the canopy, but I sat down as it seemed easier to deal with from that position. I already won a Titanium Prize for landing in winds/PLF technique and therefore have a few more months to think about it. :) Eule PLF does not stand for Please Land on Face.

Some random ideas: - Provide a way for the uploader to also upload a couple of stills (JPEGs) along with their video, to give a little preview of what the video is about. This might help people to decide whether they want to download the full video or not. - Alternatively, have an automated preview. After upload, extract stills from 1 minute in, halfway through, and 1 minute to end (or whatever) and show them on the detailed video page. This isn't as good because it's harder to catch a key scene, but it's less work. - Like the above, but extract a few seconds of video from various points, transcode to a low resolution, and offer that as a preview. - On the video detail page, put the frame size of the video (640x480 or whatever). This can help show whether the video is high or low quality, and help people decide if they want to download it. - This one is tricky, but: Let people host their own videos. The clear problem here is that people will submit a video that isn't theirs, or is on a server that isn't theirs, or on a server that will fall over under the load (i.e. Windows). The idea is that they could enter the meta-data into your site and have it show up in a search, but your site will link to their provided URL. You might have to do a verify step where you send them a video or image that you have created, and have them put it on their server, to give some kind of assurance that they control the server they want you to link to. - Compute a 'top hogs' each day - how many megabits per video. This catches both huge files that aren't so popular, and smaller ones that are very popular. Then see if compressing or transcoding those files yields any benefits. Unfortunately the rework is hard to do in an automated way. Maybe have an email list of volunteers (perhaps per-category?), email the list of top hogs to them, and let them try making one of the top hogs smaller. - Unpopular, but: set some limits on max size, taking into account frame size and video length. Or, accept the upload, but if it's over a certain size, tell the uploader "this will take a day or two to show up". Then manually re-encode it to get it smaller before making it publically available. The step that sucks on all of these is the "manual re-encode" part. You might be able to automate this somewhat with mplayer/mencoder - it's what I use to view videos on Linux, and since you seem to be on DeadRat, this should work. (I have had less trouble using mplayer to view AVI/WMV videos than using Windows Media Player!) On Windows, Mediacoder uses mplayer/mencoder as a back end and still has a few rough edges, but usually works pretty well. Thanks for your work on the site! Eule PLF does not stand for Please Land on Face.

If we're jumping on a no-wind day (severe thunderstorm warning or below), the canopy just kind of collapses by itself. For F1 through most F3 tornadoes, hauling one toggle in about halfway does it. Some F3s and most all F4s require you to haul one toggle in all the way, turn around, and run towards your canopy. For an F5 you don't have to do anything at all - within a few seconds a cow or pickup truck or small house will land on your canopy and collapse it for you. Seriously - with about 40 jumps in Oklahoma in February, March, and June through October, the most I've had to do is turn around, sit down, haul one toggle in all the way, haul on the risers on that side a little, get up, and walk about halfway to the canopy. This is with a 280 ft^2 student canopy, too. Eule PLF does not stand for Please Land on Face.

Same document, saved as PDF for better interoperability. Eule (You'd also think the government could go straight to PDF instead of printing out and scanning back in, but there you go.) PLF does not stand for Please Land on Face.

Have you ever seen The Money Pit? It's about a young couple who are trying to fix up a really run-down house. A running joke in this film is that whenever they ask a contractor how long something will take, the answer is always "2 weeks!" Caution: If you watch it now, you will probably think it is a documentary rather than a comedy. Eule PLF does not stand for Please Land on Face.

Thinking about it some more, smoke would be good for showing you _where_ the airflow is, but not so good at _how fast_. What would probably work better is deploying a matrix of anemometers throughout the test section and comparing readings. Yes, the anemometers themselves will change the flow a little, but almost any type of measurement you make will do that. Also, they won't block the tunnel nearly as much as four people will, I think. A way to see if the fans are causing it might be to put a high-speed video camera between the test section and the fans (SV-type total-loss tunnel), point it at the fans, and record it split-screen with the normal tunnel cam. Then review the video, and see if one guy going low in 4-way is reliably synchronized with a certain blade position of the fans. You could also do this on an SV-type recirculating, but you'd need two cameras with lights for the fans. (I wonder if SV Colorado behaves the same way as Eloy, Perris, or Orlando - all have multiple fans, but the recirculating ones also have two airflow paths instead of just one.) It occurs to me that _somebody_ must have done something like this in order to build these things in the first place. I would guess that they probably built fairly large scale models and attacked them with smoke, ribbons, anemometers, etc. You probably don't get to see this data unless you've signed an agreement to build one, though. I would further guess that the first full-size version of each design was similarly attacked with measuring instruments before it was opened. I don't _think_ most of the current tunnels adjust the pitch on their blades, just the speed, but I could be wrong. I do know that the tunnels I've been to all have three or four refrigerator-size boxes for the control gear. Some of this is just to handle the electrical power levels involved, but a reasonable chunk of it is probably data acquisition and processing - they have more computrons than an RC transmitter and receiver. Eule (Yes, this is a late reply; I'm catching up on a backlog.) PLF does not stand for Please Land on Face.

Hey... I think I know that guy. Yep. I did my AFF 1 in June 2005. After still being in the middle of AFF after about 15 jumps, I went to the tunnel. It helped a little, but I didn't get the breakthrough that some people seem to. I did another 20 or so jumps; in the later jumps in this sequence I was getting stubborn and determined to "jump my way out of it." After a couple of not-so-good jumps in a row, I went to a different DZ. I didn't expect anyone at the other DZ to wave a magic wand and fix me; I just wanted to get a "second opinion" from a different set of instructors. They did give me a different point of view and some helpful advice, but I still was going fairly slowly. After about 5 jumps at this DZ I decided to quit being stubborn and go to the tunnel again, this time to a different tunnel. So I went again this January, and came back to my original DZ. This time, I think the tunnel "took". I started progressing a lot faster than I had been - like one or two jumps per level instead of nine or ten. My L7 skydive went absolutely great for the first 10,995 feet. The last 5 feet kind of sucked, but I did win a shiny piece of titanium with professional installation. To be continued... Anyway, what I'm getting at is that I had to try a couple of different things (tunnel (twice), different DZ/instructors) before it seemed to "work" for me. Along the way I wrote one or two posts that sound remarkably like the one that started this thread (do a search). In the few jumps I did after coming back from the tunnel this January, I finally felt like I had figured it out, and I think my instructors did too. I'd like to be able to close with "and he got his A and was a happy owl" but I can't do that yet. But I will get back in the air. I hope something of this is helpful to you. Eule PLF does not stand for Please Land on Face.

A step? Yup. Big enough to have a tea-party on... After reading this and zooming in on the picture, it made more sense. I was visually parsing it wrong, and I also was thinking "that's way too big to be a step." Now what I see is a vertical part, curved along the top to conform to the fuselage, and a horizontal part that you actually stand on. The four protrusions at the bottom are the ribs or support beams that wrap around from the vertical part to the horizontal part to make it solid enough to stand on. Thanks! Eule PLF does not stand for Please Land on Face.

I thought everybody put their repack dates in their crontab or .calendar file or something like that. I must be weird. Maybe everybody knows this one, but at one DZ I've been to, they put a tag on the left leg strap of their student rigs, right next to the container, with the repack date written on it. They use those papery-plasticky wristbands you sometimes get when you go to a concert or a club to show that you're of drinking age or have paid your admission or whatever. The tags seem to last the requred time, and stay put on the leg strap. If all you have to do is look at your rig to see the date, that seems pretty easy. Of course this may not work as well for longer-term events like AAD batteries/maintenance, statute of limitations expiring, etc. Eule PLF does not stand for Please Land on Face.

Yup. She's an after-market conversion with a Garrett engine. Some photos. Nothing sucks like a VHAAX! Looking at the pictures, I _think_ the stretching happened between the little round window and the tail. Is this a common modification for these planes, or was this a one-off? (Clearly the cowling was lengthened for the different engine.) I notice the top of the tail got squared off at some point as well. What is the dark-colored object hanging under the door on the top two pictures? Is that the "bomb door" or is it something else? Eule PLF does not stand for Please Land on Face.

Welcome to the Internet. For most people, the only thing that helps it is time. I don't get nearly as bent about online discussions of any type as I did when I first got on the intarweb (my first USENET posts are within a year or so of being old enough to drive). People will carry on flame wars online over things they'd never argue about in person. After awhile you learn to separate the wheat from the chaff and to just go on to the next thread when the junk starts. Another thing that time does is allow people to meet other online people in real life. It starts to dawn on them that the little glowing letters were put there by another live human being, and it's harder to be mean to a live human being than it is to little glowing letters. This program posts news to thousands of machines throughout the entire civilized world. Your message will cost the net hundreds if not thousands of dollars to send everywhere. Please be sure you know what you are doing. Eule PLF does not stand for Please Land on Face.

I'm not experienced, but here's another goofy idea anway: Would dialing it in on the ground help at all? What I am thinking of is to find a suitable location on the ground, and wait for a day with winds about equal to your canopy speed. Go out and fly the flag, but hang it just from the top corner like you would on the jump. Adjust weights and see what happens. Finding a "suitable location" might be tricky. For a small flag, a regular flagpole would work. For a huge flag, it might be hard to fly it from a pole without it ending up on the ground a lot; then it gets dirty and sometimes makes people mad. Maybe you could hang it under a bridge if there is a tall enough one in your area. For small to medium flags, you might be able to rig a "flagpole" out of wood in the bed of a pickup truck, and have one person drive the truck while the other person watches the flag. I realize the weight would probably have to get fine-tuned on test jumps. I am just thinking of a way to get the weight in the right ballpark so it doesn't take as many jumps. Eule PLF does not stand for Please Land on Face.

If the DZ I jump at was buying that much turbine fuel, we'd better be having some kick-ass bonfires or something, as I don't think you can run Jet-A in a 182. I thought 100LL was usually cheaper than Jet-A, but looking at http://www.airnav.com/fuel/report.html , it looks like Jet-A is actually a little cheaper right now. I usually figure that 100LL sells for $1/gal more than whatever the corner gas station is charging. On a semi-related note, http://www.gasbuddy.com/gb_retail_price_chart.aspx?time=24 can be instructive. Ask for a chart of the USA average price, with nothing for "Area 2" and "Area 3". Check the "include crude price" box and ask for a 9-month or 1-year graph, and watch what happened to gas as compared to crude around early September 2005 (Hurricane Katrina). It's also instructive to just plot the average price for your area for a year or so; around here, when the price isn't being fooled with, the natural pattern is a sawtooth without about a 3-week period. Eule (Yes, this is a late reply. I'm catching up on a backlog.) PLF does not stand for Please Land on Face.

I asked for Offspring - Original Prankster on my video. Some tunes I haven't heard used on videos, but I think would be interesting to try: Rush - La Villa Strangiato. Instrumental and might need a bit of editing - parts of it are somewhat slow and it's a rather long track. Peter Gabriel - Solsbury Hill. The acoustic guitar wouldn't fit very well, but the lyrics are perfect IMHO. Devo - Here to Go. Might be a little too 80s-synthesizer for some, but the music and words fit well. Devo - Gut Feeling. Mostly for the great instrumental buildup that happens in the first minute or so of the song. This would be put with the gear-up and climb footage; the cymbal crash/first words would get synced to the exit. Orb - Little Fluffy Clouds. Sort of a dance/techno sound. Yes - Starship Trooper, Roundabout, Owner of a Lonely Heart. A few of these are long and/or have slow bits, but I think they'd work. Plus possibly some Emerson Lake and Palmer tracks and some _early_ Pink Floyd tracks - not the obvious one or the stuff they play on the radio all the time. Eule Yes, this is a late reply; I'm catching up on quite a backlog. (edited for tyops and to add stuff) PLF does not stand for Please Land on Face.

I've been around two different dropzones enough to see how they do their videos. The first one has the customary stack of CD-Rs with lots of tunes on them; the students get to pick from a list of about 100 songs, or if they want, the video guy will use a track from a CD supplied by the student. The second one apparently only has one or a small number of songs that are used on tandem videos. I get the impression, but don't know for sure, that this is because they've only licensed those few songs. This is something I've wondered about myself, but never checked into. If somebody does actually talk to ASCAP or BMI about this, it might pay to be fuzzy about your precise line of work; DZs everywhere will be swarming with landsharks if they get a hint of blood in the water. Eule (Yes, this is a late reply; I'm catching up on quite the backlog.) PLF does not stand for Please Land on Face.