Eule

Quitting IT so you don't go to the pen on a murder one rap for following through on your detailed plan to kill the next person that phones up and says "The Internet is broken, fix it!" is probably a good idea, yeah. :) Eule PLF does not stand for Please Land on Face.

Unfortunately, there is no such thing as a "permanent" ban. Or at least not for technically savvy users. AFAIK the most common 'ban' feature in forum software is banning by IP address. That works OK as long as the person banned doesn't know how to easily get a new IP address, which is fairly trivial these days. You could take the draconian approach and start banning whole IP ranges, but do that for a month and there will be three people left on the Internet who can post to the site. This is probably a better solution. This also helps address the point that "one man's troll is another man's hero" - everybody gets to choose for themselves who to listen to and who to ignore. Over time, the more egregious posters will end up in most people's filters. A twit filter has been discussed before and one of the objections seems to be "Then you don't see the entire thread!" I would argue that that is the _point_ of a twit filter, and if someone has earned a spot in your twit filter, then the follow-ups to his or her posts are also unlikely to be of interest to you. Another way that some people have handled trolls is to have a standard "This person is a troll, please don't reply" that gets posted as a follow-up to all the troll's messages, either manually or automatically. This can have the side effect of cluing newbies into the fact that not everyone on the forum is sincere. This site uses Gossamer Forum, and looking at the vendor's info on it, it doesn't seem to support or have a plugin to support a twit filter. It does have "ban by IP" support. I will also observe that a newsgroup has a little bit different motivation than a web site. For most news servers, the admins don't care if a non-binary group gets postings or not - the volume is so low that they could serve the text groups off of an old 386 if they wanted to. For a website with ads, if the following conversation took place several times at the next big boogie, the twit filter would probably be implemented so fast it would make your head spin: Company rep: "Hey, good to see you! Sure, grab a pull-up cord. Hey, we're having a drawing for our new NiftyPig Turbo++.net - you can sign up right over there." Joe Jumper: "Huh? Turbo-wha?" Rep: "You haven't heard? It's our latest container; it's great! We've been running ads on dropzone.com for a couple of months..." Joe: "Oh, I don't go there much anymore. Too much crap in the forums." I'm not saying that this is a good thing or a bad thing; I'm just saying that when money is in the equation, the people with the money tend to get a stronger voice. Eule PLF does not stand for Please Land on Face.

This thread is still going? Impressive. You could use your main now, if you wanted. Everybody else should read this. Eule PLF does not stand for Please Land on Face.

I have some info on what engines these aircraft had originally, but your mileage may vary. From "Jane's Encylopedia of Aviation", published 1980, updated through 1993. shp = shaft horsepower (used to turn the prop); ehp = equivalent horsepower (shp + thrust from exhaust). de Havilland Canada DHC-6 Twin Otter First prototype flights May 1965 First 230 built (Series 100 and Series 200) with PT6A-20 engines From spring 1969, Series 300 with PT6A-27 engines 613 total (all series) delivered through June 1978 (Skydive Dallas just put new engines on their yellow Otter a few weeks ago. I _think_ they put on the PT6A-34 engines instead of the stock -27 engines but I'm not sure.) There seems to be a bunch of King Airs... Beechcraft King Air Model 90 Introduced September 1970 A90, B90 models C90 version has PT6A-21 engines @ 550 ehp 1227 total (all models) delivered through April 1978 Beechcraft King Air E90 PT6A-28 engines @ 550 ehp (derated from A100 engines) 61 built as US Navy T-44A with PT6A-34B @ 750 hp Beechcraft King Air Model A100 Introduced September 1971 PT6A-28 engines @ 680 ehp 275 total sold by April 1978 Beechcraft King Air Model B100 Introduced March 1975 AiResearch TPE 331-6-252B engines @ 715 shp Beechcraft King Air Model C100 Announced October 1977 PT6A-135 engines @ 750 shp Beechcraft Super King Air 200 First prototype flights October 1972 PT6A-41 engines @ 850 shp Some built as military C-12A with PT6A-38 engines @ 750 shp 318 private, 113 miiltary by early 1978 Beechcraft Super King Air 300 First flown 1981 PT6A-60A engines @ 1050 shp Beechcraft Super King Air 350 First flown 1988 Replaces Super King Air 300 no engine info Shorts SC.7 Skyvan First prototype flights January 1963 Series 1 - Continental engines Series 1A - Astazou II engines Series 2 - Astazou XII engines Series 3/3A/3M/Skyliner - Garrett-AiResearch TPE 331-201 engines @ 715 shp 127 sold by mid-1979 There are several CASAs, but I _think_ the jumping one is the C-212. CASA C-212 Aviocar First prototype flights March 1971 Garrett-AiResearch TPE 331-5-251C @ 750 shp 136 sold by 1978 CASA C-212-10 In development about 1980 Garret-AiResearch TPE 331-10 @ ? hp Yes, single engine turboprop. Cessna Model 208 Caravan I First flown December 1982 Model 208A: PT6A-114, 600 shp Model 208B and Grand Caravan: PT6A-114A, 675 shp This book isn't new enough for the PAC 750 XL, but since that's in current production, you can go look up the specs on their site. Eule PLF does not stand for Please Land on Face.

A little better... Eule PLF does not stand for Please Land on Face.

Wow... only 200. Eule PLF does not stand for Please Land on Face.

I wonder if it would help to compress or pre-emphasize the transmit audio in some way - maybe boost up the higher frequencies to compete better with the wind noise. Is there any chance of interposing some kind of amplifier between the mic and the transmitter? Has anybody tried using several of these systems on the ground in close proximity to each other? I am not that familiar with how Bluetooth works, but I wonder about the possibility of interference. I know it's meant to be a relatively short-range link, and in a tight formation, it probably doesn't really matter if Bill's HUD is showing the data from Joe's altimeter, because Joe's and Bill's altimeters should both be outputting very similar altitude and speed data. I wonder more about a HUD "hearing" signals from more than one altimeter and "giving up" and refusing to display anything. I'm sure this has been somewhat addressed in the Bluetooth spec, but most of the current Bluetooth applications I know about don't involve multiple TX-RX pairs in close proximity. Interference with the two-way voice radios might also be a concern. I am thinking either of the Bluetooth stuff putting trash into the RX-only radio, or the TX causing the Bluetooth receievers to go crazy. On the other hand, maybe I worry too much. :) Eule PLF does not stand for Please Land on Face.

One of the people in the Intro/Greets forum just posted a link to their tandem video there, so I checked it out. I have cookies and pop-ups turned off (Firefox 1.5/Windows) and I first got a screen that said I needed to turn them back on. I ignored it and charged ahead. It asks you for a name, email address, country, age range, and gender before it will load the video - thankfully it doesn't validate any of these, so you just have to put _something_ in the blanks. I didn't notice any other issues that I could attribute to using Firefox. I got the video loaded up and it played OK. Video quality was reasonable, if a bit small (P4/1.7GHz/256meg/Nvida Riva TNT2 16meg AGP). The graph at the bottom of speed and altitude was cute, but sometimes as the round "target" travelled along the curves, the orange curve in particular would (moire'?) into a dashed line instead of a solid one and then go solid again. Aha- looked at it again - this is the grey 'extrapolate' line that goes over to the Y-axis crossing the solid curve. It almost looked like the graph was raster video instead of a fixed background with a moving "target". I don't know much about Flash but I think having a fixed background would help make the file smaller. I wonder if two round analog gauges at the bottom might not be easier to understand - one for speed (like a car) and the other for altitude (like a skydiving altimeter). This takes out the "time" aspect, but you could always add another display (digital or analog clock) for that. On a second look, I don't quite understand what the numbers at the bottom of the time, speed, and alti digital displays are. The speed and alti ones are stuck on '00', while the time one seems to count from 0 to 99 and reset, but it doesn't seem to be co-ordinated with the seconds display. It also seems to be logging by IP address? My first visit was with Firefox, but the second one was with IE, but the site still "remembered" the data I put in with Firefox. I think Flash has cookies separate from the browser cookies, so that might explain it, instead of logging by IP. For reference I was looking at http://www.realxstream.com/?XStreamID=4232 . Eule PLF does not stand for Please Land on Face.

I think somebody else did a more involved analysis, but I did a quick one back in August at http://www.dropzone.com/cgi-bin/forum/gforum.cgi?post=1792459;#1792459 , and my conclusion was that the break-even point was around three or four hours of tunnel time. By now this may need to be adjusted for exchange rates, any discounts the tunnels are offering, etc. One of the assumptions I made for that one is that for someone in the UK, there isn't a substantial difference in money or time in the trip from home to a UK tunnel vs from home to Gatwick airport. My guess would be for that someone in or very near London this is probably true, but for people further out it may not be. Eule PLF does not stand for Please Land on Face.

Congratulations! It's not that bad. Out of the 28 weeekends since I started jumping in June, I've only been at the dropzone for 24 of them. And at US$1 = €0.83, I've only spent about €WARNING: Floating point overflow at line 37 so far. I think that this picture http://www.colino.net/photos/index.php?galerie=Parachute&snimek=78 shows a full range of emotions - see attached. :) Eule PLF does not stand for Please Land on Face.

I agree that this is important - the picture should be over what you normally see. It also looks like there's only one person under canopy, but I'm not 100% sure due to the image size. You might put in a picture of a tandem under canopy. Reason why is, whuffos might think "Oh sh-t, we fall together but I have to land the parachute by myself!! Aaaahhhh!!" and get scared off. Another thing in the "make it simple for the whuffos" direction: the "120 mph" point in the box might make people think the _airplane_ is going 120 mph. Maybe having the last few lines look something like this would be a little clearer: * Over 35 Seconds of Free-fall at 120 MPH! This is a less strong suggestion, and you may have already done this, but: if you're using a 1-800 number in the ad, also consider putting your regular phone number in as well. Couple of reasons: when your ad with the naked female tandem instructor gets posted on the Internet, causing people all over the world to want to jump there, it's hard (and not free) to dial a 1-800 number from outside North America. A more mundane reason: A DZ that I jump at subscribes to 1-800-Skydive and uses that as their phone number on their ads, literature, etc. This is mostly OK for them because a lot of their tandem business comes from a major metro area (5 million +/-) that's about 45 minutes away. But for people like me that come in from another state, 1-800-Skydive won't connect me to them when I'm at home. I've wanted to call them before and had to dig through a couple of pieces of paper before I found their "real" phone number. If you use any of these suggestions, we can discuss my very reasonable consulting fees. :) Eule PLF does not stand for Please Land on Face.

Uh, you have to have electricity and phone lines before you can have a computer with a mailing list... :) Eule (in Tulsa, but who has visited Chester, AR) Edited to add actual useful information: 1. I just found out about this Yahoo! group for Oklahoma jumpers. http://sports.groups.yahoo.com/group/Oklahoma_skydivers/ I am not a member of this group, but apparently people from Arkansas are allowed in as long as they agree to bathe and stay away from the sheep. 2. You might also ask in the 'Events and Places to Jump' forum. http://www.dropzone.com/cgi-bin/forum/gforum.cgi?forum=19; PLF does not stand for Please Land on Face.

From his response so far, I think something besides sweat will be the problem. :) Eule PLF does not stand for Please Land on Face.

Here's my spreadsheet from yesterday, but with this revised data instead. I have also attached the same analysis for the Hungarian canopy size limits that phoenixlpr posted in the other thread yesterday. I think it's interesting that the Hungarian wingloadings are "notchy" just like the proposed USPA ones are. Their chart is also a lot smaller - it goes mostly by license levels, with a few "upgrades" for higher jump numbers within a license. (I think - I can't read Hungarian.) For those that may not be able to see Excel files, I have included screen shots of the wing loading tab from each spreadsheet. Eule PLF does not stand for Please Land on Face.

Since Thursday 15 Dec, this chart has been posted five times. As far as I can tell, the first three are identical. The fourth one picked up the "individual ability" bullet and the fifth one had some changes to the left column and bottom row. Since this document is flying around and getting emailed and reposted, it might be very helpful to at least put a "last revised on: date/time" at the top. Maybe also include a sentence or two about what's different: "added 'ability' bullet point" or "changed figures for 110 lb exit". Another step is to turn on the "track changes" option in Word, but this doesn't always work very well with large tables, and isn't always portable to people who have to look at this chart in PDF or JPG or something that's not MS Word. This was the basis for many of my previous comments. I've got less than 40 jumps, so I can't make very many useful comments on the _absolute_ numbers in the chart. But I feel somewhat justified in analyzing the chart to see how the numbers that are in it relate to one another, and pointing out what I see as inconsistencies. IMHO, even if somebody doesn't understand the aerodynamic problems, they are more likely to accept the limits in the chart if it is internally consistent. Even with my limited knowledge, I tend to agree that an 0.9 wingloading on a 120 is not the same thing as an 0.9 wingloading on a 190. But so far there hasn't been a quantification of this difference. MakeItHappen has posted a couple of times on the kinds of information or curves that need to be included. There seems to be a spectrum of ways to decide what canopy to jump. It probably ranges from "talk to your instructors and more experienced jumpers, consider your own ability, and Do The Right Thing" to "here's a chart in the BSRs that you must follow, and you must step on the scale and prove you're within the limits each time you get on the plane." People with more experience than me have argued that the former way (DTRT) is not working. Other people argue against the latter ("hard" mandated limits). I think that having some kind of chart is a good idea, but for it to be accepted, all of the thinking behind it should be spelled out somewhere. I might get flamed for this, but: At a higher level, this is the same process that every organization goes through. Ferinstance, 200+ years ago, the entire law of the United States fit on about three or four pieces of paper, and set down some basic rules and some guidelines. Since then, some people have had honest debates about what the guidelines mean, and others have tried to "get away" with whatever they thought they could. This has gotten us to the point where you'd get a hernia if you tried to lift the entire printed Code of Federal Regulations. An even longer-term example - a couple of thousand years worth - is a guy that walked around with a simple message of "Be kind to each other", and how that turned into N versions of the New Testament and N different denominations with N^2 different sets of rules, often because people wanted to split hairs about what "Be kind to each other" means. Eule PLF does not stand for Please Land on Face.

Is this a regular thing that they do at that boogie? Do you have to go through a lot of training on the belly-mount before you can wear it? Is there a minimum license or jump number required to do this? I'm just curious, because I think it would be interesting to see what a cutaway feels like under somewhat controlled circumstances. I don't worry significantly about the reserve not coming out, but I do wonder what it feels like. For a high-speed main malfunction it probably just feels like a normal opening, but for a low-speed, I think the feeling of slowing down, maybe getting stood up, and then going back into freefall would be unusual. I've only seen the set-ups at two DZs. One just had harnesses between the floor and ceiling that you sort of lean forward on, and do your practices with a dummy cutaway handle - just velcro, no cables. I liked the harnesses at the other one better. They had harnesses suspended from the ceiling, with both "main" and "reserve" straps. We practiced most of our emergency procedures with dummy cutaway handles (just velcro, no cables), but on the last couple of cutaways, we pulled a "real" cutaway handle that disconnected the 3-rings and caused us to drop a few inches until the "reserve" straps caught us. I realize this is much faster than a reserve would deploy, but I think it gives a bit of the feeling of what happens, and definitely shows you what it feels like to release the 3-rings. Eule PLF does not stand for Please Land on Face.

All, I haven't seen any previous discussions on this, so I might repeat points that have been raised in other forums. Also, I have low jump numbers. But here goes. Some of these are user-acceptance kinds of things - how do you convince people to accept what the chart says - and some are more technical. - The weights are "weird" - i.e., not round numbers. It's easy to check that this started out in kilograms - 50 to 120 kg in 5 kg (11 pound) steps. It might be better to have 10-pound steps, although this would add one column to the table and it would end at 260 pounds. This may not be good, in light of my next comment. - IMO, the table has too many numbers in it. People are going to look at it and their eyes are going to glaze over. The main thing affecting this is the 20-jump step for the rows - I think this may be too small. A 200-jump step is too much and a 100-jump step is probably too much. I think something like 40 or 50 should be better. The way it is now, a particular weight person stays on the same canopy size for 80-120 jumps, so I don't think it's a big deal to have them on a bigger canopy for another 10 jumps or so. It might also be desireable to have two separate tables for midrange and minimum, instead of one big one. - The chart should probably start at 30 or 40 jumps, and there should be some supporting text that it's not for students. - The fact that this chart isn't for reserves should be right up at the top, like "USPA Main Canopy Downsizing Chart." This info is in there now, but it's down at the bottom. - The 'average' weight of a rig was pretty obviously 10 kg, but that probably doesn't matter much. - It may help to mention that the chart is for MSL and that the "every 2500 feet" refers to MSL. Stranger things have happened... - Do any other national associations have a chart like this, or is Sweden the only one? Or is Sweden considered the 'best' of the alternatives? - The "midrange" numbers have been made to fit some popular canopy sizes: 135-150-170-190-210-230-260. But the "minimum" numbers haven't. Saying that "since you have 20 more jumps, you can now jump a main that's 5 square feet smaller" is a little silly. - Probably a typo: somebody that weighs 220 pounds and has 100 jumps gets to downsize from a 230 to a 220 to a 210 as he goes to 140 jumps. Nobody else gets to use a 220. "220, 221, whatever it takes." - If you calculate the wingloading using the weights and the midrange canopy sizes, the results are "notchy". The WLs always go up as you go down the columns, but sometimes go up, down, up again as you go to the right in the rows. This is probably caused by the limited number of standard parachute sizes. The goal is to be safer, not to have a "pretty" chart, but I thought it was interesting. Maybe somebody will use this as a knock against this chart. - If you calculate the wingloading using the weights and the minimum canopy sizes, the results look a lot smoother. On the other hand, the minimum sizes aren't made to fit "standard" canopy sizes. I have made an Excel spreadsheet (attached) which tries to back up some of the above comments. The midrange WLs are shown on a colored table and on a 3D surface chart to help show the notchiness. The minimum WLs are also shown on a colored table. These colors were done by hand, so they won't update if you change the numbers. On the last tab "Attempting a 'smoother' chart", I have it set up so I can play around with the WL values. Basically you enter the four 'corner' WL values, shown in bold, and the WL values for the rest of the chart get linearly interpolated (table 2). These WLs are then used with the weights to get a "raw" canopy size (table 3) and fitted to the 135-150-170-190-210-230 sizes (table 4). Finally, the actual WL obtained is computed (table 5). Tables 4 and 5 have automatic colors that will change as the numbers change. Excel limits you to 3 colors, though. The cut-offs for table 4 are set at 210 and 169, while the cut-offs for table 5 are adjustable. As an example of the last tab, I set it up so that at 20 jumps, 110- pound people start at 0.70 and 265-pound people start at 0.90. This goes up to 1.20 and 1.40 respectively by 500 jumps. The results are that this starts the skinny person off on a 150 and takes them to a 135 by the 120th jump, and a big person starts off on a 230 and goes to a 210 at 320 jumps and a 190 at 440 jumps. The WL chart is still "notchy", but maybe not quite as bad as the original data. Maybe something other than a linear interpolation would help. Again, the goal is safety, not a "pretty" chart. But I feel that if the chart doesn't quickly make sense to people, they will tend to disregard its recommendations, IMHO. As to whether these should be "recommended", "strongly recommended", or "required" - that's a political debate that I don't much care to comment on. Before someone asks: Yes, I have absolutely no life whatsoever. :) Eule PLF does not stand for Please Land on Face.

Here you go. If anyone has both Word and Acrobat, they can check to make sure I am honest. :) Eule PLF does not stand for Please Land on Face.

I took apart the PDF brochure with tools I have at home and found a _much_ better blank inside, which is attached. I did another sample using this blank, but I had to reduce it so it wouldn't be too large. Eule PLF does not stand for Please Land on Face.

You can come up with a worst-case rate just by looking at the total installed horsepower of the motors. I did a little math for this at http://www.dropzone.com/cgi-bin/forum/gforum.cgi?post=1944782;#1944782 . Eule PLF does not stand for Please Land on Face.

So far I've gotten one traffic ticket going _to_ the DZ. It was in the next small town east of the one the DZ is in, and was a speed trap - I got busted about three feet past the 45 MPH sign - but the rest of that is for Speaker's Corner. I also did some minor damage leaving the DZ once. I was going a bit fast on a gravel road when an oncoming car came over the top of a hill. I tried to move to the right and overdid it; dropped the right front wheel into the ditch, bent the bottom of the front fender behind the front wheel, and scratched up the rocker panel. No damage to the running gear. I've gone to a DZ that is a ~4 hour drive away a few times, but I've driven that load a _lot_ and I know where the speed traps are. Consequently, I don't get tickets on that drive. Eule PLF does not stand for Please Land on Face.

Some thoughts... I know a guy that has a (non-jump) 182 that's painted in a rather distinctive color scheme. The paint is a little old but it doesn't look too bad. One day he said he wanted to paint it to look like everybody else's 182 - mostly white with a contrasting stripe down the side, maybe blue. I said the paint job on it didn't look bad and asked why he wanted to look like everyone else. His reply was that because of the paint job, people tended to remember the aircraft, and that wasn't always a desirable thing. :) I heard a story this weekend at the DZ about their white Caravan. It seems there was a competition at the DZ that was being judged from the ground with the use of high-powered scopes and binoculars. On the first day, the Caravan had the usual stain along the bottom of the fuselage from the jet exhaust. That night, the pilot decided that the plane needed to look good for the competition, and put a lot of elbow grease into taking the exhaust stain off of the bottom. Unknown to him, the judges had been using the stain to help pick out the plane against some high clouds. The clouds persisted into the second day and with the stain gone, the judges had a really hard time picking out the plane. If you have a big airplane (Otter), you could paint it white and then paint the outline of a smaller airplane (182) on the side. The FAA, CAA, etc, might object to this as being confusing, though. Googling around, there doesn't seem to be a free "design your paint job" for aircraft like there are for canopies. I found a couple of pay sites at http://www.aircraftpaintschemes.com and http://www.aircraftcolor.com/. This second one does have free downloads of line drawings of different aircraft - here are some direct links: http://www.aircraftcolor.com/linedrawings.asp?Page=7 Cessnas http://www.aircraftcolor.com/linedrawings.asp?Page=31 Otter From your profile it looks like you might be interested in a PAC 750XL. Their US importer has a somewhat crummy line drawing on http://www.utilityaircraft.com/specifications.html. There is a much better one inside a PDF at PAC on pages 6 and 8: http://www.aerospace.co.nz/downloads/Pac_750xl_Brouchure.pdf If you're using Acrobat Reader, you might can use the "snapshot tool" (normally just to the right of the "select text" button on the tool bar) to copy just the picture to the clipboard, and then paste it into Paint. However, I am having trouble with this. Another way is to take a screen shot (Alt-PrintScreen) of the PDF page and paste that into Paint; this is working better for me. Or, just use the blank that I have attached. :) With a line drawing, you can print it out and draw on it, or use the "bucket fill" feature of most paint programs to do large areas of one color. I have attached some PAC 750XL examples. A couple of them were done in Microsoft Paint (that comes with Windows) and a couple of them were done in Gimp for Windows http://gimp-win.sourceforge.net/ . Standard disclaimers apply; I don't get money from any of the sites or companies I mentioned. Eule PLF does not stand for Please Land on Face.

Congratulations! As far as being a hazard... I wonder why they don't make us students wear bright orange jumpsuits or trail a banner that says "STUDENT PILOT" behind us... I most likely won't be there the next couple of weekends, so when you bring , you can take mine to Sniper, or give it to Ron - the only other instructor there who's nuts enough to jump with me more than once. :) Eule PLF does not stand for Please Land on Face.

This summer I was trying to choose between two tunnels; one had been open for a while and the other one was going to be open Real Soon Now. Next week, for sure. Well, OK, end of the month, for sure. No later than the 15th of next month, honest. They eventually did open, about a month after I did my tunnel time at the other tunnel. I've since talked to jumpers who've been around for longer than I have and they advised me that this wasn't all that unusual when a new tunnel opens. Since you seem to be fairly local, it might not matter to you, but to somebody who's trying to get an advance-purchase plane ticket, it might be pretty important. Eule PLF does not stand for Please Land on Face.

Yeah... Nancy Reagan told me just what to do. (My DOM is about 1973.) It worked, too, for a little while. Somewhere around late junior high, all of the anti-drug stuff started working backwards. "If the adults are telling me this stuff is so bad, that must mean it's really great!" So I fired it up a few times. I concluded that it was good, but that it was mostly similar to drinking booze, and you don't get busted for having booze in your trunk. I don't smoke now, but I don't really care what other people do in their own house. I know of a couple of skydivers that do smoke and for them it's strictly an after-the-beer-light-Sunday kind of thing. I've _heard_ stories of people lighting up before a load (or _on_ the load) but as far as I know they're just stories. I don't know that I'd want to get on a load with somebody that was high (or drunk, or whatever), but if they wanted to go by themselves or with a group of people that agreed to it I'd tell them to go for it. One thing I have noticed is that it seems like there are a lot more skydivers that smoke (regular tobacco cigarettes, not weed) than there are in the general population. I'd like to hear a stoner from back in the day comment on this. (Maybe I just did.) It doesn't seem unreasonable that the product would improve with time, but it also sounds very much like something the Man would say to try to stop people from trying it. I've even seen anti-drug ads targeted at parents that say things like this - "even though you tried it in high school, the stuff your kids are getting is way more powerful!" The guy that first hooked me up got me thinking this way about the War On Drugs That Aren't Sold By Large Corporations - he pointed out that the police love to raid some small house and announce that they found eighteen million dollars worth of pot, when that much pot (even at retail) wouldn't fit in five houses that size. Eule PLF does not stand for Please Land on Face.