Eule

I think I understand what you want. I have created a test page with different placemark files. Under Firefox, the first option will open GE but it won't fly to the site. The second option opens GE and flies to the site, which I think is what you're after. The third and fourth options result in the raw KML file being displayed in the browser window. Under IE, the first and second options just open in XP's native compressed folder (zip file) handler. The third and fourth options result in the raw KML file being displayed in the browser window, just like Firefox. Another part of the problem may be that I am not completely free to set file associations (on the client end) and that I cannot modify the Content-Type header for the files (on the server end). Can you check out the test page and advise which option works the way you want? As far as including images - this has been done for at least one of the placemarks listed. I agree that these can add useful detail, but it's probably better if these can be included in the placemark file instead of hosted remotely. It has already happened once that the remote host became unavailable (a domain name expired and wasn't renewed right away) and this caused error messages in GE when it tried to load that placemark. I had to go in and disable the link to shut up GE - it really wasn't a big deal, but I didn't want to answer lots of questions about why GE was spitting out error messages. Eule PLF does not stand for Please Land on Face.

The site has been updated. There are 163 dropzones listed. No new dropzones this time, but I was advised that Sylt is part of Germany, not Denmark, so I moved it. 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.

Germany has a similar requirement. These reports are summarized in a presentation at an annual meeting - about a year ago, I posted an English translation of part of the 2005 report. cengelbrecht's post in that thread explains the reporting requirements. People giggled when I put the type of shoes I was wearing in the description of my landing incident in the Incidents forum - good to know that _somebody_ thinks it's useful info. :) I did witness an incident (not mine) that resulted in a broken leg. I watched the Incidents forum for several days to see if the injured jumper would make a post, but the jumper never did. I considered making a post about it myself, but I finally decided that I should leave that decision up to the injured jumper. I'd have to check through the back issues of Parachutist, but I don't _think_ a report showed up there, either. Eule PLF does not stand for Please Land on Face.

The one time I made a trip specifically for the purpose, it was to go to a boogie (Couch Freaks, Fort Dodge). Twice I was actually going to the tunnel and ended up visiting the adjacent (SDAZ, Eloy) or nearby (SD Carolina, Chester) DZ just to check it out. Once I was going to the lake for a holiday weekend with some non-jumping buddies, but stopped in at a DZ on the way (Freefall Express, Mt. Vernon) because it was there. Eule PLF does not stand for Please Land on Face.

I wonder if it would be useful to have _two_ external antennae. One of them is the one you've rigged up on your frap hat. The other would just go up on the glare shield (top of the instrument panel) of the plane. You'd get in the plane and plug in to the glare shield antenna for the ride up. Then, somewhere close to exit, switch back to the one on your hat. The main advantage here is that you don't have to be in the "right" position in the plane to get a signal on the ride up. The main strike against this idea, I think, is probably the extra antenna cable from the plane-mounted antenna to you floating around and possibly fouling the aircraft controls, rig handles, etc. It might work in a 182 but not a Caravan or Otter. It also would require fishing the GPS out of your jumpsuit to switch cables right before exit, which might be hard to do with a rig on. The "correct" way to do this is probably with a GPS repeater, which was discussed in this thread. Eule PLF does not stand for Please Land on Face.

You can get started by selling parts of your body. Renting parts of your body is a more advanced concept and is not possible in all states. For more information on this, listen to Skydive Radio show #63. Seriously? Some people buy jump planes and then rent them out to dropzones. This is probably easier to do if you have a pilot's license yourself. A brand new $20 bill, a stack of old $1 bills, a bottle of bleach, and a color copier. WARNING: Misuse of this equipment is a felony. Eule PLF does not stand for Please Land on Face.

There are "only" about 400,000 aircraft with N-numbers - that's Piper Cubs all the way up to 777s - and they go after that market pretty heavily. On the other hand, you don't see too many ads saying "Complete Rig $5,500! Add a Cypres for only $1,000 more or a full G1000 panel for only $100,000 more!" Eule PLF does not stand for Please Land on Face.

Is the bundle of "extra" antenna cable inside the heat-shrink going under your jumpsuit? I figure it probably is, but if not, I wonder if some tape around the ends would help. Right now there's something of a snag place where you go from the bare cable to the big bulk of the heat-shrink. FWIW, I've used GPS antennas inside vehicles (on the dash or rear parcel shelf) that had velcro and electrical tape on top of them, and they worked just fine. It'd be simple to tell... just bring up the signal strength/satellites in view page that many GPS receivers have and see if the signal gets worse when you put the tape on the antenna. Does your van go 120 mph? :) Eule PLF does not stand for Please Land on Face.

Maybe it wasn't clear, but I didn't create the tracks that I linked to in the original post; somebody else did them. I'm still a n00b and strapping extra stuff to myself is probably many, many jumps down the road. Eule PLF does not stand for Please Land on Face.

Google Earth is free as in beer but not free as in speech. Paralog costs money; so does a Neptune or a portable GPS. Some computers will need an IR interface - probably a USB-to-IR dongle, these days. You _do_ need a not-completely-ancient computer to get Google Earth to run. It runs on my 400 MHz K6-2 (about equal to a Pentium II) w/96 MB RAM under Linux at home - not very quickly, but it does run. If you are trying to get all this stuff to run on a Packard Bell 486, you might be disappointed. The way I was thinking that this would work would be for one or a small number of jumpers who already have the GPS, data logger, and Paralog to make some sample dives. Then use Paralog to merge the GPS and data logger files, and output it in Google Earth format. The Google Earth file would be the thing used in training - that way you'd only need Google Earth on the computer you're using. Sort of like a malfunction training video - you only need one guy with a canopy rigged to malfunction and maybe a tertiary reserve, and one video guy to film it; then everybody else can just pop the tape/DVD into the player. If you wanted to be really, really sneaky, you could do the jumps at one dropzone and add a constant offset to the lat/lon/altitude values in the Google Earth file to "localize" it for another dropzone. The jump tracks would be the same, but they would appear in the airspace over whatever dropzone you select. This might help people visualize their flight pattern with respect to the landmarks at their local DZ. But this would be misleading if the conditions at the two DZs were wildly different - a canopy flight track from a DZ in Colorado in July would probably be pretty different from one in Houston in March. Eule PLF does not stand for Please Land on Face.

The Internet Archive has versions of the site up through 14 May 2006. It looks like the archive only got the main page; the site had a robots.txt that prevented the archive from indexing any of the posts. So, I couldn't look for any "we're closing down" posts. The whois info for headdown.net seems to show that the ownership of the domain hasn't changed recently - perhaps a quick email to the person who owns the domain would be informative: There is also a small possibility that the site is still there, but attempts to filter by country, using a list of IP address ranges and countries. This might be done to limit the bandwidth taken up by the movies - it's a lot cheaper if only a few countries can download large files, instead of the entire world. Unfortunately there isn't a good way to test for this. Eule PLF does not stand for Please Land on Face.

Hello all! In the Google Earth DZ map thread, Muffy posted a link to some GPS tracks of a few jumps at Skydive Toronto. I didn't put the tracks on the page where I'm collecting DZ maps, but I have been looking at them in Google Earth. It seems to me that this would be a great training aid for things like spotting and group separation. On some of the jumps you can clearly see the forward throw when the jumper exits the aircraft. Down low, you can see how jumpers get back to the DZ and fly a pattern under canopy. If you get the winds aloft data from the weather service and make a note of it, you could also compare jumps/spots under different wind conditions. Having been through a couple of FJCs, I have seen "dry erase marker on laminated aerial photo of the DZ" used to good effect. One DZ I've been to has the students fill out a jump planner, part of which is plotting your landing pattern on a photo of the DZ. Both of these things are good (and inexpensive). But I think the Google Earth view is even better. It lets you zoom in, zoom out, and spin the view around to any angle and elevation so you can get a really good look at a particular track. It also caches the satellite photos, so if you don't have an Internet connection where you're going, you can look at the area of interest when you do have a connection and it will re-use those images when you use it offline at your destination. I can think of a few different ways to do this. One would be for one jumper to make several "regular" jumps on different days with different winds (ground and aloft), different jump run speeds and directions, etc, and use those to show the effect of winds, spotting, etc. Another would be for several jumpers, each with a GPS, to exit with different amounts of time between them, to show the effect of group separation. There are probably several more. Maybe this is an obvious idea that everyone else is already doing. I did do a search and plotting one's track with a GPS seems to be popular among wingsuit flyers, but I didn't see much about it for general-purpose use. What do you think? Eule PLF does not stand for Please Land on Face.

The site has been updated. There are 163 dropzones listed. Beatnik provided the entry for Manitoba, while tucoxn provided the entries for Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. I also added one that was sent via PM. Keep those cards and letters coming! Eule PLF does not stand for Please Land on Face.

The solution to this problem has been known for a few hundred years. Of course in the last 50 years or so, it has gotten faster. :) Eule PLF does not stand for Please Land on Face.

Devil's advocate time. This is based on discussions here on dz.com, discussions at the DZ, and thinking about it: You seem to be assuming that the USPA could/should optimize for promoting skydiving. Another argument is that like most organizations, it actually optimizes for ensuring its own continued existence. If they raise the membership by a signifcant amount, some number of people will stop being USPA members. But many of those people won't stop jumping. Some DZs will happily take your money if you're a USPA member or not. If word gets around that you can skip the annual fee but stil jump, USPA would lose even more members. If your goal is to continue to exist, this is bad. Another way to look at it is the argument heard here that the USPA has become or is becoming mostly a trade association for DZOs. If you think this is true, there is an incentive to keeping membership prices low. If it's true that DZs make a lot more money on students than they do on up-jumpers, then they'd like to get as many students as they can. Having a high membership price would increase the number of students who don't complete the student program - if you're selling $150-$200 AFF jumps, a $50 membership is probably an easier sell than a $150 one. If you really want to make more money, it's a safer bet to increase the student training requirements (coach jumps, etc). This boosts revenue to the DZOs, and if you say it's for "safety" then few will question it. Also, if most of the DZs follow the USPA training program, the student is "stuck" - he can't easily go to another DZ that doesn't require coach jumps. Again, the above is a "devil's advocate" point of view and does not necessarily reflect my personal opinions on this topic. Eule PLF does not stand for Please Land on Face.

FWIW, I agree with this approach, but I also wonder if something like this might be helpful in these situations. Eule PLF does not stand for Please Land on Face.

The site has been updated. There are 157 dropzones listed. For this update, I added the entries posted by darkwing and scuba5k. Keep those cards and letters coming! Eule PLF does not stand for Please Land on Face.

This probably doesn't apply in California, but in theocracies like Oklahoma and South Carolina, beer can be hard to come by on Sunday. Either you can't get it at all or you can only get 3.2% beer. One way to get loved by all is to hold some beer in reserve (like stashed in your car trunk) on Saturday. Don't forget to go out sometime on Sunday afternoon and get some ice and cool it down. Then on Sunday evening when everyone is depressed because they drank all the beer on Saturday, you can pull some cold "real beer" (>3.2%) out of your trunk and be a hero. Eule PLF does not stand for Please Land on Face.

No, but I might breathe hard... Seriously? Probably. I'm in Tulsa and I think the closest tunnel to me is currently SVCO. San Antonio would be maybe a little closer, but it would also be more likely that I could drive to San Antonio in the winter. On the other hand, it sounds somewhat wrong to propose building a tunnel in Texas and not putting it in either D/FW or Houston. I know you probably want "tourist density" instead of "population density", but I'd think you'd get _some_ local business. There was something of a "where to put a tunnel" thread last summer. Eule (edit: speeling) PLF does not stand for Please Land on Face.

The site has been updated. There are 155 dropzones listed. I did this update on Tuesday so it doesn't yet have the two entries posted by darkwing and scuba5k. I should get those added by the end of the week. In response to some questions... McDragon: Your list for the UK had more dropzones than I had. All of the ones I had were already in your list, and your list had a few dropzones that I didn't have yet. OSOK: I checked the individual file for Perris and Perris' entry in the big file of all dropzones and both of them worked for me. I also manually unzipped the file for Perris only and the contents look OK to me. This thread also got a mention on this week's show on Skydive Radio. Keep those cards and letters coming! Eule PLF does not stand for Please Land on Face.

I agree with this. I worked for a while on the 36th floor of a 50-story building... no problem. I've gone up in the Space Needle in Seattle (including on the outdoor observation deck) and in the Gateway Arch in St. Louis... no problem. At work, there's a self-supporting tower that's about six feet (2m) square and maybe 3 stories tall, with a ladder running up inside the tower - I've climbed the ladder and stood on the top of the tower (with guard rail)... no problem. In the autumn, I have to climb a 6-foot (2m) stepladder to get on the roof of my one-story house to clean leaves out of the rain gutters and off of the roof. I hate the transition from the ladder to the roof, even though I'm only about eight feet (2.5m) off the ground at that point. I can crouch down and walk along the edge of the roof, pulling junk out of the gutters... OK. When I stand up straight and use a broom to get leaves off of the roof - OK as long as I'm not too close to the edge of the roof. Closer to the edge I get nervous. When I was younger, my dad hated going up on the extension ladder to paint the trim on the second story of the house, and sometimes I would do that part of the house for him. With the ladder on the concrete driveway, no problem. With it on the lawn, even properly supported and braced, I was nervous. Eule PLF does not stand for Please Land on Face.

Zero - my AFF 1 was my first jump ever. Yes, I got sensory overload. Based on that, my advice to n00bs (if I can say that with less than 50 jumps myself) is to do a tandem first. That way, most of the "OH SH-T I JUST JUMPED OUT OF A PLANE AND I'M FALLING" can happen when you don't actually _have_ to do anything. You'll probably still get a little of that on your next few jumps but it won't be nearly as bad as the first one, IMHO. Eule PLF does not stand for Please Land on Face.

Follow-up n00b question: if you notice that the label on your canopy is getting a little beat up and hard to read, is there any defined procedure for creating a new label with the same info and attaching it to the canopy? This would preserve the DOM, model, size, etc for the future - like the next owner, or a rigger who has to check canopies against a newly-issued service bulletin, etc. The new label would be in addition to, not a replacement for, the original. I realize it wouldn't be a particularly great idea to be able to make up new labels at random - otherwise you'd see canopies getting five years younger overnight. But I'm just curious if this has come up before. Eule PLF does not stand for Please Land on Face.

NPR did a story this weekend with a good (IMHO) overview of the situation. Eule PLF does not stand for Please Land on Face.

The quick answer for USPA is US$51 for a new membership within the US or to renew a long-expired one and $49 to renew a current or recently-expired one. Foreign memberships are $60/$58 respectively. Figures are from the application in the February 2007 Parachutist. For this you get 12 months of the magazine via standard mail and third-party liability insurance; I'm not sure offhand what amount the insurance covers. The insurance only covers "regular" jumps - for demos you have to get insurance separately. At today's rates, US$51 is about... £26 1s 8d (or even £26.12) €39 60 snow pesos (Canadian $) AUS $65 NZ $73 If you have an instructor rating, that costs an additional $20 to renew, and a PRO rating (for doing demo jumps) costs an additional $13.25 to renew. You can get a lifetime membership that includes the magazine but not rating renewals. Fun fact: at £152.10 a year and today's rates, three years of BPA membership is worth a lifetime USPA membership ($800)! If I jumped in the UK, I'd consider all the options. :) Eule PLF does not stand for Please Land on Face.