Eule

When I was writing that, something in the back of my mind was asking, "why would they want a way to suck in outside air in New Hampshire?" I've got to start listening to the voices in my head more often. :) I _think_ even the closed circuit tunnels have a way to admit outside air into the flow, I think mostly to help regulate the temperature, but I'm not sure. But I think you're right; the item being discussed is probably exposed on the ground floor of the building, under the flight chamber. Eule PLF does not stand for Please Land on Face.

Even though guys don't always think with their brains, I'm pretty sure most of us don't store knowledge of mechanical devices in our testicles. Similarly, I don't think ladies store a good fashion sense in their breasts. All that stuff goes in the brain, so if it goes into one brain, it can probably go into another brain just as easily. :) ...but you can't pull over and park on a cloud if the plane breaks. As the report you quoted mentioned, an FCU override is most likely optional for Canadian jump planes. I don't know what the situation is in the US. My guess would be that if it's not required by law, most jump planes would only have it if a previous owner of the plane had installed it, and if it is relatively easy to maintain. (If it breaks and it's not required, it's more likely to get removed than fixed.) I don't know too much about turbine engines, but I also wonder if the manual FCU override could also be a safety concern. In this case, when the FCU failed, the engine returned to idle. It might be possible for the mechanical override linkage to fail in such a way that the engine would go to nearly full throttle, which might make it pretty hard to fly the plane. It might even cause a failure due to excessive rotational speed, like a fan blade coming loose. In other words, the cure might be worse than the disease. Eule edited to fix a quoting problem PLF does not stand for Please Land on Face.

Yes. However C-GRUE is a Piper Cherokee that probably doesn't even have shark teeth. In somewhat related news, N-3733T is also a Piper Cherokee. (N-3133T is a Cessna 177.) Eule PLF does not stand for Please Land on Face.

If you want to be excited again, let me know where your next BASE jump is going to be and I can organize beer and rifles for the spectators. :) Eule PLF does not stand for Please Land on Face.

It is dark. You are likely to be eaten by a GROO. :) You are such a geek . Lbh fnl gung yvxr vg'f n onq guvat. Rhyr PLF does not stand for Please Land on Face.

Hey, whatever he or she likes best. I sort of wondered if I was talking to the guilty party. :) See the attached for what the site looks like for me at home and at work. Eule PLF does not stand for Please Land on Face.

One constraint is that I was on a machine where I am not completely free to install what I want. Well-written software can be installed to a network drive where I have complete access, but most media player stuff is not well-written. I have to get all chntpw on its ass to install codecs on this machine. At home, I downloaded some codec packs supplied by the media player vendor. They all go in /usr/lib/win32 and everything is fine. I don't worry about hosing the registry because I don't _have_ one. :) Butbutbut... when I transcode everything into FleshtoneOptimizedCodec v0.0.0.0.0.-1.alpha.alpha, I can fit five more postage-stamp sized pornos on my hard drive!!!1! Besides my crack about television, this actually reminds me of the situation with archivers back in the BBS days. Saving 1K on a 200K archive was reason enough to switch. I used to keep about six or seven different archivers on my PC, so I wouldn't have trouble opening anything. Eventually the "market" selected zip. Eule PLF does not stand for Please Land on Face.

You too with hook knife at the airport! It took me a month or so before I remembered to put mine back. Sometimes parked airplanes will have a lot of covers or safety latches with big red "REMOVE BEFORE FLIGHT" ribbons hanging from them. Maybe this calls for an "INSTALL BEFORE FLIGHT" ribbon? Something like tying a pull-up cord (preferably brightly colored) around the hook knife pouch or the strap where it was when you take the knife out or off. Or shoving a folded-up dollar bill in the pouch with one end sticking out, or tie one of those freebie paper luggage tags around it, or whatever. Basically, something that's conspicuous and easy to do with available materials when you're wandering up to the check-in desk at the airport and suddenly remember you have to take the knife off. Hopefully, when you get where you are going, somebody (maybe even you) will notice the cord or the money or the tag and ask, "why is that there?" The above might be a bad idea for some reason I haven't thought of. It can also probably be argued that a gear check would prevent leaving the hook knife off. On the other hand, if someone else is giving you a gear check, a hook knife may not be as "essential" in their eyes - some people have them, some people don't. If I (as a n00b) was doing a gear check on a more experienced jumper, "you don't have a hook knife" would be a much lower priority than "where the hell is your reserve handle?" or "your left 3-ring is hooked up wrong". Eule PLF does not stand for Please Land on Face.

I don't know if paint works the same way as ink (ask your painter), but a guy I know who paints signs told me that red is the first color to fade when a sign is exposed to sunlight. Something to do with the IR or UV light from the sun. Look at a movie poster or color photo that's been in the sun too long. So blue might be is a good choice. On the other hand, lots of barns are painted red, and they don't fade off too fast, so this might be BS. Idea: If the contractor is visible from the street, then after you paint it whatever color you decide, you might make up a stencil and paint "DANGER - JET INTAKE" on it in a contrasting color, as seen on the side of fighter jets. An example from an F-14: http://www.aircraftresourcecenter.com/AWA1/001-100/walk070_F14/part2/images/doc2-106.jpg OK, it's not really a jet intake, but you probably don't want to stand next to it. Since this is for marketing purposes, it doesn't actually have to be true. :) On the other hand, people might complain that the labeled "jet intake" is going to suck in a bird or their hat or their pet Chihuahua, so maybe you don't want to do this. Eule PLF does not stand for Please Land on Face.

1. Buy your DZO beer for upgrading the plane. 2. Shoot your Web designer. (Or at least take his or her copy of Flash away.) It is dark. You are likely to be eaten by a GROO. :) Pratt Whitney Canada doesn't even give the horsepower spec on their Web site. Looking around the Web, the PT6A-34 in other aircraft seems to be rated 700-750 horsepower. That sounds like a reasonable upgrade from 550 horsepower. No, but it's probably faster than in 182B. :) Eule. PLF does not stand for Please Land on Face.

The video needs the Divx 5.0 (DX50) codec. Even after downloading the codec, Wimp 9 didn't want to play it. I downgraded to Wimp 10, reinstalled the Divx codec, and that played it. One version back of Quicklime knew it needed a codec but couldn't find it on the Quicklime site; upgrading to the latest Quicklime gave the same results. If television had been like this in 1950, it'd have about a 15% market share now. Eule PLF does not stand for Please Land on Face.

That's a good write-up. For those that don't do RTF, here it is as a post: PLF does not stand for Please Land on Face.

Since I'm in the US, I like to use the NOAA/NWS sites. They seem to be fairly accurate, and I'm paying for them anyway, so why not get some use out of them? In other countries, I would try the national weather office first, for the same reason. Mainly what I look at is: - The normal local forecast. Go to http://www.srh.noaa.gov/ and punch in the city,state in the box at the left. Even though that's the "Southern Region", it will bring up forecasts for the entire US. Most local forecast offices will give you a wind forecast up to a couple of days out; some offices will go as much as a week out on the winds. - The forecast discussion. It will be linked from the lower right corner of the local forecast above. This is where the guy who made the forecast takes a couple of paragraphs to explain his thinking. From this you can tell things like "it's for sure going to rain everywhere within 50 miles of the dropzone" or "where the clouds end up are totally dependent on how far south the front comes and right now I'm guessing on the front." It will also give you details on when a front will pass, which usually coincides with a wind change. - The radar and satellite images. These are thumbnailed on the local forecast page above and linked to bigger images. The radar shows you precipitation and the infrared satellite shows you clouds. - METARs for the closest airport to the dropzone. This mostly tells you the current and recent conditions. When METARs were invented, they were designed to be sent by Teletype. Apparently, each letter cost eighteen million dollars to send, so the actual METAR is kind of cryptic. Many sites will decode them into English for you. I use http://adds.aviationweather.noaa.gov/metars/ . If you don't know the airport code, get the local forecast for the nearest town - quite often the current weather comes from an airport that's at least in the same county. You can then look up the airport code by the airport name at http://www.airnav.com/ . - Wind profiler data. This will show you what the winds aloft are and have recently been, and the resolution is finer than every 3000 feet. However, if there is a solid cloud deck, you won't get much info above the clouds. This is more useful in the Midwest, because there are a lot of profilers there for some reason. Start at http://www.profiler.noaa.gov/npn/profiler.jsp , click a colored spot on the map to pick a profiler, then set what you want at the right. I usually change the defaults to "left to right", "PNG (best)", and "L 1000x750". Note that the resulting chart has altitude in kilometers and wind velocities in meters per second. 1 km is about 3280 (3300) feet and 5 m/s is about 11 mph or 9.8 knots. In general - get used to slightly weird units. Also get familiar with what your local offset is from Zulu time/UTC, because most of the weather stuff is given that way. If you're in the US, you won't be too far off by assuming that UTC is about five or six hours later than the local time, but it's easy to find out what it is exactly. Yes, this changes with daylight savings time. I think it would be really cool to have a wind profiler at every DZ. However, only about one company makes them and they don't say how much they cost on their Web site so they're probably not $19.95 or even $1995. When I get bored I toy with the idea of buying some $40 microwave ovens at Wally World and trying to make a wind profiler radar out of them (without nuking myself). :) Eule PLF does not stand for Please Land on Face.

Caution: low jump number here. I had a somewhat similar thing happen somewhere around my 6th or 7th jump. On my first few jumps I was quite paranoid about the canopy and would spend a little time looking it over after it deployed and before I unstowed the brakes. On the next few jumps, I got a little lax about it - I would glance up and if it was square and stable, I would quickly grab the toggles and see if it was steerable. On this jump, I glanced up, then looked out in front of me, unstowed the brakes, and noted that the canopy kept wanting to turn right on its own. It wasn't violent, but it always wanted to do it. I found that by pulling the left toggle down to between my shoulder and waist, I could make it fly straight. I could turn left by going all the way down on the left toggle, and turn right by letting the left toggle all the way up and optionally pulling down on the right a little. I could flare it as well, so I figured I was good. I wrote off the funny behavior to the fact that I was jumping in slightly higher winds (~10 mph) than I had before (calm to ~5 mph), not realizing that it wanted to turn no matter what my angle to the wind was. Also, since this was relatively early in the training, I didn't know about tricks like riser turns. I flew it on down, listening to directions over the radio. I could tell that the voice on the radio sounded a little annoyed, but I figured that he could have just been arguing with somebody on the ground, or whatever. I remember one turn direction in particular where I heard "turn left... OK, stop turning.... (long pause) (quietly) damnit!" I still didn't connect this with something being wrong with my canopy. At landing, I let the left toggle up some before flaring, because I had it in mind that "flare" meant starting with both toggles up. I didn't let it all the way back up, though; I started the flare with the left toggle maybe a foot below the right one. The canopy did turn right on me as I landed, and I landed a little rough, but wasn't hurt. One of the video guys came out on the golf cart to pick me up and asked if I had noticed anything wrong with my canopy. I mentioned that it wanted to turn right but it passed the tests so I kept it. He then told me I had a pilot chute over (ripcord+spring pilot chute rig) and was amazed that I hadn't noticed that. I told him that all I noticed was the turn. When we got back to the hangar, my instructor told me "that was almost a cutaway". I explained that it passed the tests, which was why I kept it, and that seemed to calm him down a little. Still, we had a long discussion about the proper amount of inspection of one's canopy after opening. I can think of a few reasons why this wasn't exactly like your situation: - Different canopy. This was on a 280 ft^2 student canopy loaded at about 0.77 lb/ft^2 with both ZP and F-111 fabric; things probably happen a lot slower on that than on what you jump. - I had a lot more time. On this jump I pulled at either 5500 or 5000 and was in the saddle above 4000 so I would have had a lot more time to get a reserve out if I had decided I needed it. - What I had was probably less likely to clear itself. Talking to the people on the ground, the pilot-chute-over was pretty close to the middle of the canopy. This probably accounted for the gentler turn it made, but since it wasn't just barely hooked over the corner, a flare or sharp turn up high would be less likely to clear it. You saw your knot and I didn't, but I agree with the previous post that there was probably a non-trivial chance of it coming un-knotted down low. - I probably had a more forgiving landing area. There are trees, hangars, and runways, but all of the grass is fine to land in, even if it hasn't been mowed. See: http://terraserver.microsoft.com/image.aspx?T=1&S=12&Z=14&X=875&Y=4975&W=3&qs=%7ccushing%7cok%7c Also, I tend to agree with AndyMan's idea that surviving is not equal to having taken the best course of action. On a different jump, I managed to get unstable in free fall as I approached pull time. I tried to get stable again before I pulled; just before I pulled I got back belly-to-earth, so the pull was uneventful. When I got on the ground, I told my instructor that "I was unstable, but I did X right before I pulled, which flipped me back over" and he told me "yes, you did X, but doing Y was actually what flipped you back over." I didn't realize that I had even done Y. So, hooray for pulling stable, but it bothered me a lot that what I thought I did to get stable and what actually got me stable were two different things. In the world outside of skydiving, I think there are lots of things like this: you can get away with it, but it isn't necessarily a good idea. Eule PLF does not stand for Please Land on Face.

Story of my life. :) I don't know how good the DZ's gloves are as I haven't jumped with them yet. Mainly I was thinking about my experience with goggles. I use over-the-glasses goggles; the DZ had one really good pair and a couple of beat-up pairs. Usually I was the only one there that needed them, but one day a bunch of four-eyes showed up. I grabbed the good pair and they were all sweaty and funky; I then resolved to buy my own goggles. Thanks! Eule PLF does not stand for Please Land on Face.

Nobody expects the Spelling Inquisition! The main thing is the "I am aware of". Again, I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice. But, you can't disclose something you don't know about. What I am thinking of is something like this: next year, the rig maker discloses that rigs from serial number X to Y were mistakenly fitted with cutaway handles from the scrawny South American handle tree instead of robust Florida handle trees. If whoever bought your rig wanted to be sufficiently bloody-minded, he or she could come after you, claiming that you didn't mention this at the time of sale. Not that anybody would be that bloody-minded, but you gotta watch out for those Harley riders. The fumes from the chrome polish and incomplete combustion (from the famous 'potato-potato' sound) tend to addle their brains. Plus they get grumpy for a week or so every fall while their bike metamorphoses into an Escalade, and then again in the spring when it changes back into a bike. (This is based on nature studies at a bar near my house.) :) Eule PLF does not stand for Please Land on Face.

Hello! I don't think I've asked this already (I did a search), so here goes. Once you log in, then in most areas of the site, you have three links at the upper right of the window: "Logout - Account - Help". They are on the same background as the DZ.com logo and the banner ad. However, when you click on the Email tab, this changes to just "Account - Help" - you can't log out from the Email page. There might be a reason (involving keeping the webmail happy?) why you can't log out from this screen, but sometimes it's annoying to have to click off of the email tab before you can log out. But if not, can there be a Logout link on the email tab? Thanks! Eule PLF does not stand for Please Land on Face.

After watching the licensed people bundling up this weekend, I'm thinking about getting my own gloves. (I didn't get to jump due to wind and clouds.) The DZ provides loaner gloves for students, but I am wondering if it will help to get a pair of my own so I can wear them occasionally before I go to the DZ - like when driving, or when carrying boxes around at work, or whatever, so I get used to the "feel"? Or will that tend to be confusing? I know it's hard to say what will work for somebody else, but I am wondering if there is a general consensus on this. Eule PLF does not stand for Please Land on Face.

That makes more sense. I was having trouble trying to reconcile "concentrated" with "all the cells have the same DNA". Does this make anyone else think of the recent Star Wars films? Dear Rutgers and Harvard: I hereby volunteer for the study. All you have to do is buy the jump tickets. :) Eule PLF does not stand for Please Land on Face.

First off, thanks for the many replies! I'm going to respond to several posts in one reply, so we'll see how it goes. I had thought of doing something like this. Sort of like the GPL, "no warranty, you're on your own". I thought of this too. :) We go over the design, and a tool mysteriously shows up in the loft a few days later... ...one will be appointed for me? Just reading that phrase made me think of Miranda rights. Hey, maybe I can get busted for something, get a public defender, and then ask him or her about this question as well... that'd be free, too! :) Agreed. I'm not as concerned about that, mostly because I figure it's less likely to happen. Basically I figure that a rigger breaking his finger is more likely to conclude "shit happens" and let it go at that than someone who got hurt on a jump. Patents are interesting... they don't actually stop you doing something, they just give someone else the right to sue you. Of course, I am trying to avoid getting sued at all. I'm pretty sure that if something _is_ patented, I can make one for myself for "educational purposes" with no problem. Like you said, selling lots of copies would be a problem. Depending on what the modification is, it might even work out to just sell the improved part to people that already own the basic tool, or to buy the basic tool in quantity, modify it, and sell that version. Understood. I already thought of basic things, like needing to radius all the corners on hard materials used in a tool so there's not any sharp edges that might cut the nylon, or using locknuts so a loose nut doesn't end up in a packed canopy, and so on. For anything that's a variation on an existing tool, I want to hold the existing tool in my hand, and watch how it is used on a rig, before I think about a modification. At this point, I'm at least going to talk to him in more detail about what he wants to do, and maybe sketch some things out. Depending on how that goes, I may start making chips, or I might seek some legal advice. Thanks! Eule PLF does not stand for Please Land on Face.

Don't worry about it. Among other things, I do technical writing, where one tries to clearly explain a complicated subject. This is precisely the opposite goal of (traditional) legal writing, where you take a simple subject and make it sound complicated. :) Some of the problem with legal writing is that it's not 1800 anymore. The main problem, though, is that you're trying to express formal concepts with natural language. Imagine if there weren't equations, or symbols for the elements - writing about math or chemistry would involve great masses of words, like much of the law does now. On the other hand, if you did come up with some kind of formal grammar for the law, you'd simply change the set of people that can read it from "lawyers" to maybe "mathematicians", which may or may not be an improvement. I have noticed, over the past several years, an increase in everyday legal things like credit card agreements that are written in relatively plain language. There is a group in the UK (Plain English Campaign) that actively promotes this. I used to program computers for a basketball coach from Mississippi and about the third time I heard about leveraging synergies, I put a copy of 'Brevity' http://www.plainenglish.co.uk/reportguide.html#Anchor-'Brevi-65454 on the outside of my cube. Eule PLF does not stand for Please Land on Face.

That pill has been out for a long time, it's called Valium.

Hello all! (Not sure if this is better in General or Gear+Rigging; mods please move as appropriate.) Last weekend I was talking with a rigger I met recently. The conversation came around to our day-time jobs; as part of my job I have access to machine tools (a mill and a lathe) and this interested him. He asked about making some rigging tools and rigging tool parts. I think mostly he wants to duplicate existing tools, but in different (stronger) materials - he feels that the useful life of some of the tools he uses is too short. We just talked briefly about what he had in mind; if I was actually going to make chips we'd have a much longer discussion first. To be clear, these are tools that would be used by a rigger when unpacking/inspecting/repairing/repacking rigs - not something that would actually fly as part of the rig. Initially I thought it would be kind of cool to turn out a useful prototype for him. Also, there's the idea that if we do end up making a better tool, we could put it into production, get rich selling it, quit our day jobs, and jump all the time. :) But then I started thinking of What Could Go Wrong. The big one is probably that I make a tool for him, he uses it on a rig, and then Joe Jumper uses that rig and something goes wrong with the rig. First I would have it on my conscience that maybe something I did wrong contributed to Joe getting hurt or dead. Then there's the possibility that Joe or his family is going to get the police or a landshark to go after the rigger, me, my employer, and anybody remotely connected with the rig. This made me want to reconsider my (potential) involvement in making accessories for sport parachuting. The first thing simply means that I better know what the hell I'm doing before I make this stuff. I know that to get the intricate details of the second thing would require me talking to a lawyer or perhaps an insurance agent myself and I am not asking for detailed legal advice here. Basically what I'm after is a calibration of my paranoia scale - am I worrying too much, or just being careful, or am I perhaps insufficiently paranoid? Is it silly to worry about what a lawyer could do to me, compared to what a large planet being thrown at me could do to me? I haven't given the rigger a definite answer one way or the other, and I know of a few places that can probably do what he wants that I can refer him to if I decide not to do it, so it's not a big deal to say "no" at this point. I've also looked read some of the threads in Gear+Rigging about riggers and liabiilty issues. I just wanted to get some input from people who may have been there and done that first. Thanks! Eule PLF does not stand for Please Land on Face.

Sure, but do you ever get to jump a Harrier? I'm sure if you take a copy of last year's tax form ("Hey, I _paid_ for this plane!") down to your local RAF base they can fix you up. :) Eule PLF does not stand for Please Land on Face.

Hello! A question about the way the software flags unread posts and threads. Basically, does it start marking things as read once you've been logged in for a long time? Read on for the details... Previously, if I logged in to DZ.com and read posts at home, I would log out before I went to work. Then, I would log in to DZ.com again from work. If I had caught up on everything at home, this was fine. But if I had left some threads or messages unread when I logged out at home, the act of logging out seemed to mark them as read. When I logged in at work, only the messages that had been posted since I logged out at home would be flagged as unread. On Tuesday, I did an experiment. I logged in at home, and read some of the new posts, but not all of them. I then navigated away from DZ.com without logging out, made a copy of my cookie file, and closed the browser. I then went to work and added the DZ.com cookies to the cookie file there, and started the browser. This did what I wanted - DZ.com recognized me as being logged in already, and all the posts that were unread at home were still showing as unread at work. I read a few posts at work, then did the same thing in the evening - I didn't log out at work, took the DZ.com cookies from my work browser, stuck them in my home browser, and picked up at home right where I left off at work. I still didn't get fully caught up at home on Tuesday night, so I prepared to do the same thing by making a copy of my home-browser cookies for work on Wednesday. I took them to work, but I actually had to work on Wednesday, so I didn't get to log in from work at all. When I got home on Wednesday night, I went back to DZ.com with my home browser. It knew I was still logged in, but somehow many of the posts had gotten marked read. When I left it Tuesday night, I had about the first two pages of General left unread. Tonight, only about half of the first page of General was showing unread. It's quite possible that I did something in the wrong order, or maybe I managed to not catch a session cookie before it went away. But I'm curious to know if there are conditions other than logging out where the forum software will start marking posts as read. The meta-problem here is the time-honored argument between keeping state on the server vs. keeping state on the client. Thanks! Eule PLF does not stand for Please Land on Face.