Eule

Mostly, I am making this suggestion for fun. if( ( (number_of_jumps < 50) OR (post_count < 100) ) AND ( post_text_contains("www.youtube.com") ) then { post_followup("Yes, we've seen it already."); lock_thread(); } Mostly. Eule PLF does not stand for Please Land on Face.

D'oh! Kallend caught me getting it backwards. I will plead not enough caffeine yet this morning. You went 4 * 5280 = 21120 feet horizontally, and 8000 - 2500 = 5500 feet vertically. That would make your glide ratio about 21120 / 5500, or about 3.8:1. In other words, for every foot you fell vertically, you went a bit under 4 feet horizontally. This does assume that the glide ratio was the same for the whole dive - in other words you were tracking immediately out of the door and pulled in a track. Given that the top trackers are said to be in the region of 1:1 and improving towards 1.5:1, I think one or more of your numbers is a little off. Either that or you should go win some tracking competitions. :) Like jakee said, there has to be a time to get a speed. Eule (Edited to fix backwardness) PLF does not stand for Please Land on Face.

Caution: low jump numbers here. I suspect that if you put the question as "what aircraft type makes up the majority of the US sport skydiving fleet", the answer is (still) "Cessna 182". I don't have hard data; this is based on a hunch. If you put the question as "what aircraft type are the majority of sport jumps made from", then it's probably an Otter. It's pretty simple... 23 people on a 20-25 minute cycle versus four people on a ~30 minute cycle. When I started jumping in the summer of 2005, the (weekend only) DZ had just one 182. A really good Saturday in the summer would be something like 20 or 22 loads, with Sunday maybe a few less - 18 or 20. A ballpark estimate is that about two-thirds of those loads had four jumpers and the rest had three. At 42 loads total, that's (28 x 4) + (14 x 3) or 154 jumps in a total time of around 21 hours. If you fill up an Otter all the way, it would take 7 loads in a total time of about 2.5 hours to get the same number of jumps; at two-thirds full it would take 11 loads and about 4 hours. Another way to look at it: This number is probably a few years old, but I read that in a year when the USPA had about 30,000 jumpers, those jumpers made a total of about 3,000,000 skydives in that year. If all of those jumps were from Otters, that's 130,000 full loads, or an average of 2500 loads a week, or 356 loads a day. If there's 300 DZs, each one would have to average 8.3 Otter loads a week, or 1.2 Otter loads a day. If all of those were from 182s, that's 750,000 full loads - 14400 a week - 2100 a day. Those 300 DZs would each have to average about 47 C182 loads a week or 6.8 C182 loads a day. (This is an overview and doesn't account at all for weekend-only DZs, bad weather, etc.) (Somewhere in here I start to think that I should put all this stuff on charts and graphs and run for President... :) ) This gets into anecdotal evidence, but I live in Tulsa. Excluding boogies and special events, if I want to jump a turbine, the closest few places that I know of are: - Dallas (~4 hour drive; I know they have a regular turbine) - Kansas City (~5 hour drive; MAYBE - not sure of the latest status on the turbine there) - St Louis (~5 hour drive) BSBD - Tennesse (~6.5 hours) Beyond that, probably south Texas, Colorado and Illinois, but those are getting up into the 8-10 hour drive range. I guess I don't have any definitive conclusion, but maybe the extreme cases calculated above will help people who have a better "feel" for how many loads actually go up to say "1.2 Otters/DZ/day is too low" or "6.8 C-182s/DZ/day is too high" or whatever. Caution: low jump numbers here. Eule PLF does not stand for Please Land on Face.

This might be Skydive AZ's third Otter. SDAZ provided the planes for Couch Freaks 2006 and I have a photo of 924MA sitting on the ramp. It doesn't have the "Skydive Arizona" logo on it, but it has the same color scheme as their other planes - mostly white, with red over gray over black stripes. I also jumped at Eloy about a month ago, and in my logbook I have written "929MA", but that doesn't appear to be a good number. There's a fair chance I garbled at least part of that number - I'm pretty sure about the 9--MA but the "29" might have been something else. Eule PLF does not stand for Please Land on Face.

Between Jane's and a couple of posts here, I _think_ the "short" nose means it's either a -100 Otter, or a later Otter that was set up for floats at one time. I think the "long" nose is for extra baggage room, and I think it became standard starting with the -200 Otters. But for some reason the long nose and floats don't go together - probably weight and balance. Or maybe it used to have a long nose, but a biomaterials-based aircraft arresting device prevented a runway overrun at some point... Eule PLF does not stand for Please Land on Face.

Four cases of beer - $0.00012M USD Four cases of spray paint - maybe $0.0002M USD One Otter load of drunk jumpers (labor) - $0.0M USD Whiskey compass - maybe $0.0002M USD Bottle of whiskey for the compass - $0.00003M USD Oil pressure lights - $0.0002M USD Generator lights - $0.0002M USD Hand-held transceiver - $0.0005M USD Labor to take cargo door off - $0.0M USD Bench seats and seat belts - dunno - maybe $0.002M USD? TOTAL - $3.29845M USD Let's go jump! :) Eule PLF does not stand for Please Land on Face.

Well, they took the Golf platform and put a funny-shaped body on it. Cars aren't regulated nearly as much as aircraft are - there are many minimum standards that have to be met for crash safety, emissions, etc but beyond that the automakers have a lot more latitude than aircraft builders do. Relatively speaking, it's easy for an automaker to put different sheet metal on the back of a sedan to make a wagon, or to build a tall body to turn a car into an SUV, or to put on a different grille and install a fancier stereo to make a Chevy into a Cadillac. In the aircraft world, those kind of modifications would probably take a _long_ time and lots of dollars to get recertified. Another thing the car people have is volume. Toyota sold 242,675 cars and trucks in the United States in March 2007. If they keep that up all year it would be easy for them to top two million sold - if for 2007 they had to redesign some widget that's common to all of their cars, and that cost them a million bucks, that's fifty cents or less a car. There are over 240 million cars and light trucks in the US. The Viking press release cited a study that had a demand of 400 new Twin Otters over 10 years. If redesigning some widget for 2007 on the Otter costs a million bucks, that's $25,000 a plane. There are about 350,000 N-registered aircraft in the US. (That's everything from Piper Cubs, up through 182s, Otters, Skyvans, all the way to 777s.) So... the incentives for Viking are high to re-use as much of the existing engineering that they can. If I had to guess, I'd say they spent most of their time and money either proving that the existing engine mounts and airframe could handle the more powerful engines, and/or redesigning those parts to suit, and left most of the rest of the airframe the same. Note that when Cessna (who I suspect has a lot more re$ource$ than Viking) decided to start making "small" airplanes again, they re-used most of the existing 182 design. I'm sure there are parts off of an '07 182 that won't fit on the '59 182 at the DZ, but a lot of them probably will. So I pretty much agree with what PhreeZone said, except for the part about the hinge. I'd guess that that $1000 hinge had more like $300 in lawyer food built into the price... :/ Eule PLF does not stand for Please Land on Face.

I hear there's some skydiving in this movie*, if you don't mind fast-forwarding past all the naked people. :) Eule * NOT SAFE FOR WORK PLF does not stand for Please Land on Face.

If you go to the FAA and just punch in DHC-6 for the model (leave the manufacturer blank), you get about 163 aircraft. Looking at the owner's names and locations, I count about 25 of those as probably jump planes, about 27 as probably not jump planes, and the rest as "not sure". Another interesting question: if you've got about three million dollars burning a hole in your pocket, do you buy one new Twin Otter or two new PAC 750 XLs? Eule PLF does not stand for Please Land on Face.

Aero-News apparently requires you to run Windows in order to read their newsletter, but Viking seems to figure that if you're ready to drop three megadollars, you can visit their site any way you want - here's their press release. From that press release: Jane's says there were 115 Series 100 Otters with PT6A-20 engines and 115 Series 200 Otters with a longer nose but apparently the same engine. The Series 300 had the PT6A-27 engines, at least when the article was written sometime around 1980. That article also says 613 had been sold through June 1978; from that and the above you can figure that they averaged about 47 a year from 1965-1978, but only about 23 a year from 1978-1988. The press release cites a study giving a "ten-year demand for over 400 new aircraft", which seems maybe a little optimistic given the numbers above. On the other hand, lots of things have probably changed between then and now. If you've got 140,000 jump tickets burning a hole in your pocket, why not look at the brochure. :) Eule PLF does not stand for Please Land on Face.

I see that you got it to work, and I don't know which buttons to tell you to push in Google Earth to make it work, but I do know you can check it before you upload it if you want. 1) Save the KMZ file somewhere on your computer as you usually do. 2) Copy the KMZ file to some other file name, and give it the extension ".zip". Example: test.zip . 3) Open up the zip file. (Windows XP and Vista, and I think Mac OS X, will do this if you just click on it like a normal file. Otherwise, use something like WiZ if you can't drive a computer without a mouse, or unzip if you can.) 4) There should be one file named doc.kml inside the zip file. Open this file with your favorite text editor. (Such as Notepad under Windows or TextEdit under Mac OS X.) 5) Look at the file. If your tracks are in there, there will be a big list of numbers in x,y,z format and the file will be rather long. If they're not, you won't see the list of numbers and the file will be maybe 20 lines, tops. If your tracks are in the file, upload the KMZ file as normal. If they're not, go back to Google Earth and try saving the KMZ file again. Eule PLF does not stand for Please Land on Face.

The site has been updated. There are 167 dropzones listed. I added Speedy's entry for Marl, Germany, and updated Skydive Dallas with joblade's entry. For those of you just tuning in, I am collecting all of the files posted in this thread and putting them online at the above site. At that site, you can also download one file that contains all of the dropzones that have been posted so far. Keep those cards and letters coming! Eule PLF does not stand for Please Land on Face.

I don't know what you're complaining about... it only took me four hours to download the demo - an average of a whopping 8.4 KByte/sec! :) (Yes, I have broadband.) I have no idea if the file downloaded correctly or not. Survey says: $ sum base-demo.exe 31165 132670 $ cksum base-demo.exe 519699479 135853566 base-demo.exe $ md5sum base-demo.exe 75f30441c5368a1f1323d01f487f6b56 base-demo.exe I've put the file online here; I'm not equipped to torrent it but somebody who is, feel free to grab it. I downloaded it myself as a test and it took about five minutes (about 442 KByte/sec). I haven't tried to install it and know nothing about it; if it breaks you get to keep all the pieces. Eule PLF does not stand for Please Land on Face.

Moved to here. Eule PLF does not stand for Please Land on Face.

You might know this already, and it might not apply to Airborne guys, but I _think_ you're supposed to give some kind of "hazardous activity statement" to your CO if you want to do things like skydive or even ride a motorcycle on your own time. I've talked to a couple of guys in various branches of the service and they all had to do this - none of their commanders said "no", but they had to do it. You might look around to see if you can find a dropzone that's open at least a few days during the week as well as on the weekends - a lot of smaller dropzones are only open on Saturday and Sunday. Use the dropzone locator on this site. Many DZs have bunk rooms, sofas, or camping areas so you can stay overnight if you want to. Caution: This is based on my own (fairly recent) experiences with going through training, but I haven't jumped everywhere and things may be different where you are. That's probably in the ball park for your first 7 or 8 jumps or so. This varies a lot by region, DZ, etc, but for AFF, your first jump might be $200, the next two or three around $150, and the next three or four around $125. The first jump includes the ground school. The first three or four jumps also cost more because you need two instructors. The last three or four only need one instructor, so they are cheaper. These jumps almost always include the use of all the equipment: rig, jumpsuit, goggles, altimeter, etc. Advice: don't freak out if you don't pass a level the first time you try it. Lots and lots of jumpers repeat at least one level - some of them repeat lots of levels, like me. :) At that point, you will probably be cleared to jump by yourself. You have to make some more jumps and complete certain tasks to get your A license - there is a minimum of 25 jumps to get the A license. Some dropzones have a defined sequence of "coach" jumps to help you work towards your A license - you jump with an instructor to work on certain thngs. These jumps will probably cost less than your last AFF jump, but more than a plain jump ticket for an experienced jumper. Other dropzones don't require coach jumps - you just buy a plain jump ticket (about $20-$25) and jump by yourself. At this point you will probably also have to pay for renting the rig if you don't have your own. Another option for the first several jumps is static line or IAD. You already know about static line. :) IAD is similar, except instead of the static line, there is a regular pilot chute. Your instructor holds the pilot chute while you jump, and then lets go of it a few seconds later, which deploys your canopy. The advantage of this method is that it's usually cheaper. Once you're cleared to jump by yourself, you still have to get 25 jumps total, perhaps with coach jumps as above, to get your license. A lot of people do all their training at one DZ, but it's not impossible to switch DZs in the middle of your training. If you only get 5 or 10 jumps in while you're in Indiana, and then you get stationed somewhere else in the US, you can probably find a local dropzone where you can continue your training. Just make sure all your jumps are logged and that you have your logbook with you so your new DZ knows where you are at in your training. IMPORTANT: When making your sport jumps, remember to leave the rifle at home. Or if you do bring it, remember not to shoot the people that walk up to you after you land. :) Welcome! Eule PLF does not stand for Please Land on Face.

I know that, but I don't know how to answer the "number of jumps" question. Then, ZigZagMarquis asked about "number of posts", which I do know how to answer, so I did. :) Eule PLF does not stand for Please Land on Face.

Google Earth. Pay the twenty bucks for a year. To be clear: the free version of Google Earth should open any KMZ file, no matter how it was created. If you want to _create_ a KMZ file using the track data from a GPS, one way is to get the pay version of Google Earth. I also think there are some free third-party tools that will let you create a KMZ file from your GPS data and display it in the free version of Google Earth. Eule PLF does not stand for Please Land on Face.

Two suggestions: 1. Ask USPA. They have probably dealt with this before. 2. I've heard that sometimes British jumpers go to other countries for better weather or cheaper jumps, and that some dropzones that aren't in Britain have BPA instructors that can sign off on BPA licenses. I think some of the big DZs in Florida (DeLand?) do this, for example. A US DZ that is set up to do this should be familiar with the differences between BPA and USPA regulations and should be able to advise. Eule PLF does not stand for Please Land on Face.

Earlier I was working my way through General and got a couple of "502 Proxy error" pages. One was when clicking on a thread title and the other was when trying to load the index page. The screen said: This was at about 10:31 and 10:33 UTC on 9 April 2007. I tried again a few minutes later and everything was fine. I have not configured any HTTP proxies between my PC and my ISP; my ISP may or may not have a proxy, but I _think_ this was coming from one of the dropzone.com servers. When I got these errors, I also tried other well-known Web sites (Google, Yahoo!, etc), plus checking POP3 mail, and all of that stuff worked OK. Eule PLF does not stand for Please Land on Face.

Cool! 400 MHz here which ain't quite cuttin' it. :) That's OK, though - most flight simulators only work really well on hardware that isn't released until at least three months after the sim is. That's OK. You have to make it right before you can make it fast. Premature optimization is the root of all evil. Couple of suggestions on the existing user interface: - Print a unit for the speed. (knots or mph or whatever.) - An Altitrack fits on your wrist, runs off of a watch battery, and costs a few hundred bucks. If it can really measure your angle of descent to eleven decimal places, L&B should hire themselves out as consultants to everybody in the world. (In other words, round off the degrees. :) ) Ideas for more features: - At the beginning, along with the wind selections, you should have some obstacle selections. Like "Eloy" turns off all the trees, "Toronto" is the tree grid you have now, and "" is twice the tree density you have now. - "Pause" button. - "Time of day" selections. Basically, "noon", "sunset", "night". Noon is what you have now. Sunset "dims" the screen. Night puts a little illumination on the target area (like a couple of cars with their headlights on) but none anywhere else. Ideas in general: - If you really want to implement all this stuff, you better get yourself a copy of Turbo Visual Objective C++#.Net on Rails, or whatever the cool kids are using these days. You can probably get a student version for cheap, or you can always get the Limkazrrent for free. - Or, glom on to an existing physics engine. There are third-party aircraft models for MS Flight Simulator. X-Plane is another sim; it looks like it might be a little easier to develop your own aircraft model for it. Eule (edit: spelling) PLF does not stand for Please Land on Face.

For the conditions you gave, this seems about right. To give a little perspective: the legal limit (US FMVSS 208) for acceleration on your chest in a car crash is 60 g over 3 milliseconds. One test result for an unspecified car hitting a barrier at 50 km/h (31 mph) shows that the passenger compartment starts at 0 g, gets to about -35 g at about 10 ms, goes to about +2 g at about 20 ms (bouncing backwards a little), back down to about -35 g at about 50 ms, then back up near 0 g at 100 ms. (Source: Bosch Automotive Handbook 4th edition, ISBN 0-8376-0333-1, pp. 690-691.) Eule PLF does not stand for Please Land on Face.

I jumped twice today with ground temperatures of 39 to 43 F and it wasn't too bad. We only went to 9000 AGL because of an overcast, though. I was wearing thermal underwear (top and bottom), blue jeans, an undershirt, a sweatshirt, and a jumpsuit over all that. I just wore a Pro-tec and regular goggles on my head. When the door first came open I thought "Dang that's cold" but then I had other things on my mind for climb-out and freefall. Once I got under canopy I noticed the cold again. I was pondering a third jump but a later load reported snow at 6000 AGL so I decided I was done for the day. Under Armour is supposed to be nice stuff but they sure are proud of it. A little searching here seemed to say that polypropylene is the magic word if you're looking for the cheap stuff. So far I've been happy with my $20 set of thermal underwear from the sporting goods store: Morgan Mills, 50% polypropylene 50% cotton. Eule PLF does not stand for Please Land on Face.

Where I jump, I've only used the "small stuff" along with a student rig, so I don't know what they do if you need that stuff but aren't also renting a rig. I suspect it would be easy to borrow some goggles or gloves (they have many pairs of each) but getting a wrist alti might be harder if there are a lot of students around that day. Jumpsuits I don't know. I do know that I have graduated AFF and am working towards an A and they are still happy to let me use their jumpsuits and all the other stuff (wrist alti, goggles, gloves, Pro-tec) along with the student rig. I wear over-the-glasses goggles and I was happy using the DZ's pair until one day another student with glasses jumped before me and I had to wear some sweaty, funky goggles. I bought a pair of my own that week. :) When it got cold I got my own gloves as well. On the other hand, this weekend I went to the place where the student wrist altis are usually stashed and couldn't find them. The DZO went in the back and came out with one; he moved the stash after an altimeter disappeared recently. He was still happy to let me use one, but I could see where losing a couple of $100+ altimeters in a row would generate a policy like you mentioned. Eule PLF does not stand for Please Land on Face.

This is easy to answer. Go to the user list and click on a column heading to sort by that value. Sorting by number of posts shows that freeflir29 has over 33,000 posts. If you're really jazzed from jumping all weekend and you need something to help you get to sleep, you might find these statistics for 2005 and 2006 of interest. Eule PLF does not stand for Please Land on Face.

Caution: low jump number here. There is a device that can improve your spotting immensely. It used to be that every dropzone had one, but now you can't find one everywhere. New ones are quite expensive but used ones are cheaper and can be perfectly serviceable. This device is often called a "Cessna 182". :) One thing I haven't personally experienced, but that others have commented on: Student gear is not known for being the best-fitting stuff in the world, and some people have reported that their legs were pretty unhappy by the time they got to the ground, even on a "normal" jump when they were only under canopy for a few thousand feet. If you have a choice at your DZ, it might be hepful to use the least bad student rig you can for a high hop-n-pop. This doesn't mean that you should pick the rig that fits really nice but has a canopy half the size of what you're used to, but if there is more than one student rig that has the same size canopy and deployment type, it might pay to try each one out and see which one fits you the best. Caution: low jump number here. Eule PLF does not stand for Please Land on Face.