rendezvous

Want to pick up one the two DVDs and want to know which one would make for better viewing. Don't want to get both.

If the choice is between paying for school or Skydiving then I'd suggest go to school. You can always come back to Skdiving. Now, if you have to Skydive then whether 3 jumps/month are sufficient to keep you current and safe really depends on you: First evaluate your skills. Some people might need more jumps than others to remain current in their awareness and canopy skills. Evaluate where you stand. If you doubt your abilities then that makes it simple. Take a break. Come back later. At 134 jumps you should have a sense for where you stand on this issue. If you feel comfortable with the thought of doing 3 jumps a month then you can enhance your safety and that of others by: * Not jumping large formations * Not jumping with those who are still working on developing their basic flying skills and awareness * Flying docile canopies * Planning your landings before hand and being extra vigilant in canopy traffic ( should anyway do ) * Being carful with you packing * Running through all your emergency procedures two to three times a month. * Doing the 3 jumps in one block and not spread over 3 weeks.

I just put it into the cavity that the helmet has for the ears. Works fine for me. Cannot get lost from there and is loud enough not to be missed. You just need to be a little careful when you are walking around with the helmet in your hands. It can fall off if you swing the helmet around too much. Other than that, no problem.

Your thoughts are absolutely normal. Skydiving is dangerous and people do die. It's been said a number of times in this forum that this sport is about managing your risk. Everything that you learn about your gear or about the sport adds to your ability to evaluate that risk. No exposure in this sport is too soon or too late. If you do choose to take up Skydiving you will continue to evaluate the risk you put yourself under against what is acceptable to you. The nervousness, the quziness, the jitters they are all here to stay. You are going to encounter them at various points in your Skydiving and under various circumstances. It's part of the sport. This is Skydiving after all. It's only as safe as you make it, beyound that it's still dangerous. Again. the thoughts that you have are normal, what you need to ask yourself is weather the risk is acceptable. Don't count on anyone trying to tell you it will not happen to you. Trust your instincts on weather you should take it up or not. It's a beautiful sport but there is nothing as beautiful as being alive either. It's not important what the statistics on d-mals are. There are plenty of other ways of finding yourself dead in Skydiving. Just keep in mind, your decision to Skydive or not to does not make you any more or less braver than you already are. Skydiving is purely a matter of how you assess risk, how much of it are you willing to take and what price are you willing to pay.

WFFC 2003. C130 load. First group out. We were doing a 10 way tube. On the red light we positioned ourselves for the exit and then ready ! set ! go ! ... apparantly we exited on the red itself. All 13 of us landed some 10 miles out in the backyard of a farm house with 8 feet corn on both sides.

yup ! hilarious. and yes I did notice the 90 sec free fall but then it's a funny commercial so it adds to it.

doesn't that make it more brittle.

does anyone do anything special to reduce the wear on the sole of the booties besides ofcourse making sure that you don't walk around on them too much.

Anyone knows when will Martini Shots come out with the Wffc 03 DVD/Video. Is it expected to take as long as it did for the 2002 one.

I'm not a materials engineer so I might be wrong but here is why I think twisted lines break faster than straight lines: when you pull a fiber it's loded perpendicularly to it's crossection. That's the orientation under which it takes the maximum load. When you twist the line you tend to orient the cross section at the point of twist parallel to the line of force i.e you introduce a surface with shear. The fiber of which the line or rope is made is not as resistant to shear as it is too longitudnal loading. Coming to when you make a rope out of a twine, well the twist in the twine is not extensive enough to make the individual fibers experience a larger shearing load. If you twist the lines enough the strands that are subject to large shearing forces will fail. In case of parachute lines, the weaking of the lines due to twisting is compunded by the wear that the slider movement intorduces on the outer fibers making them even weaker when they are experiencing shearing and longitudnal loads.

Nothing is colder than the thought of going in so I stick to what I normally pull at.

Well if you want use the digital Altimeter to keep track of your dives that's fine. However if you plan using it as an audible altimeter then my opinion is a bit different. Personally I think it's better not to use an audible until you've done about 60, 70 may be 100 jumps. Using it this early on might make you a bit reliant on the audible and may be even a little complacent. The comfort of knowing that you have an alarm set to go off if you miss your altitude can sometimes get you into bad habits. You should do a couple of dozen jumps without the audible so that you get into the habit of watching out for your own altitude. That ofcourse does not mean that once you start using the audible you can relax.

Driving fatalities per 100,000 licensed drivers 22.06 (2001 statistics used) Driving fatalities per 100,000 population 14.86. Skydiving fatalities on average, don't even come close to this. 2,000,000 jumps in any given year with general fatalities falling under 30 per year. If you exclude the fatalities which arise from skydivers killed in a plane going in, the fatality rate is lower. Not quite. The comparison is not parallel. Licensed Drivers and a populations of people cannot be logically compared to number of jumps. 30 fatalities per 2 million jumps needs to be compared to something like # of car accidents per 2 million outings of cars. A slightly more balanced approach would be if you compared fatalities against the average time of exposure to risk. e.g is an average outing in a car lasts 15 min and an average Skydive lasts 1 min, assuming the risk is evenly distributed over the time span ( just to keep things simple ) then time exposure to risk is: 1 * 100,000 min per 100,000 Skydives and 15 min * 100,000 per 100,000 outings of a car.That would make your fatality number of approx 30 for both cases look more like Skydiving 30 per 100,000 min Driving 30 per 1500,000 min Time of exposure to risk vs fatalities or injuries in that period make driving much safer and base jumping probably much more challenging.

If you are talking about going through the drill of pulling the handles, I do it when gear up, when I'm getting ready to jump in the plane and every now and every now and then even if I'm not Skydiving. If you are talking about how many times to I go through the procedure for handling the various malfunctions, I revise them about once a month and somtimes twice.

I've owned a talon 2 for the last four years. Started of as my fisrt container. Still have it. I've had no problems with it and no problems with the walrus teeth either. I'd say go for it.

can this piece be made part of some kind of an article collection so that we don't loose it and can come back to it without searching for it in the forums.

If you can land a ZP 9 Cell then you can land a ZP 7 cell or vice versa. If you are facing problems have an instructor look into what you are doing or using as gear.

Well if I can happily jump into an aircraft that isn't necessarily engineered, built or maintained by pilots and go to altitude to make a Skydive or take off on a vacation then I don't see why a propoerly certified non jumper FAA rigger should be a problem when it comes to my Skydiving gear.

ok ! I felt the same. At one point I even thought I'll never be able to get the canopy into the container. I saw a ton of videos and tired to find answers from people that would suggest there is another way ? It didn't happen. I still couldn't get it in. Then this lady at my DZ walked me through my pack job. The problem was that I was trying to be too careful about how my pack job looked while I was trying to shove it into the D-bag, as a result it would start slipping out and then I would give up on it thinking I'd screwed it up. She helped me to recognize that while you need to be relatively neat with your pack job you don't need to be obssessed by it. As long as you keep the lines clear, the slider all the way in,the brakes stowed and don't throw the canopy on the ground but lay it out, you have a lot of margin for pushing and shoving it into the Dbag before it get's to the point that you loose your pack job and have to start again. At all point simply try to visualize where the lines and the slider are and as long as you feel they haven't been dislodged from the middle and gone over the front, just pack it in. Basically, what I'm trying to say is that when you are new to packing sometimes you over do the "being cautious part" to the point of it becoming frustrating. Try to understand what the process of packing is trying to achieve. There's not much to it.

I belive reserves are designed and packed to open withen 300 feet of deployment. If that's the case I assume the openings in case it's deployed at terminal ( bag lock etc ) are very hard, is that true or does the slight snivel make it bareable. I do understand it's better to have the reserve slam open above your head rather than be dead, but is there a possibility that a reserve opening at terminal can actually cause serious injuries.

For $100,000,000 = definitely YES ! $10,000,000 = definitely YES $1,000,000 = YES $100,000 = Will think about it, probably yes. $10,000 = NO

Stow the slider, behind the head would be even better. Pull the rear risers down about 2 inces or until you feel your canopy flatten it's glide, pull your legs up and go small. doing this has gotten me back from quite a few long spots. Sometimes all the way back and sometimes close enough and over a good landing area. How far it'll fly back will also depend on the wind and where it's coming from relative to you, but you'll definitely get a pretty decent glide compared to if you did nothing and let it sink in.

If Indian + 200 odd jumps works for you and you plan visiting Sky's the Limit in NJ, I'll jump with you.

Congratulations Tom ! I hope I get to jump with you when I get into the sport. From where I stand right now, that's a remarkable number and achievement.

Love to hear your experiences at the FJC. How did you find it, what did you learn from it, what didn't match up to your expectations etc. By the way which FJC was this ? I'm going to go for one someday so I would love to hear what your experience there was.