SethInMI

What you are describing is really a small hang glider and not a wingsuit. Wingsuits generate most lift with the body, not the arms. Is must be this way because we cannot hold ourselves up by the arms; we do not have the massive chest muscles it would take to do it. Adding a rigid frame that passes from wingtip to wingtip would allow the pilot to hang from it and would be the only way to stay in that position for the extended periods you dream of. But I agree with others who say that control of that rigid wing while locked inside of it would be difficult. Hang gliders are suspended underneath the wing and can use that distance to build leverage to control the wing with weight shift (as you know). It would also be a challenge getting a 3-4m wide wing out of an airplane. Some sort of central pivot like the F-14 had would be necessary. Base jumps would probably be the only way to use such a system. With a rigid wing you would lose most what makes wingsuiting wingsuiting, the ability to quickly re-shape your wings, from complete collapse to full flight, to achive the flight mode you wish. Very close proximity flying, including grabbing onto another wingsuiter, would also be lost. I hope someone does develop such a system someday and has success, but I doubt it would replace what we have now. Seth It's flare not flair, brakes not breaks, bridle not bridal, "could NOT care less" not "could care less".

There are no dytters with GPS. However you can get GPS logger, which is about the size of a dytter, but does not have audible tones. Some of the preferred loggers are Wintec WBT-201, QStarz BT-1000, Garmin Foretrex. It's flare not flair, brakes not breaks, bridle not bridal, "could NOT care less" not "could care less".

That is awesome. I don't think I can see swooping as hot shit ever again. It is true, "You don't know what you don't know" Never knew hang gliders were ever that small and were flown that aggressively. Fun to see the blending of aero disciplines, Speed hang gliding looks to me more like wingsuiting, as you are flying with the body. It's flare not flair, brakes not breaks, bridle not bridal, "could NOT care less" not "could care less".

I know from personal experience that naked jumps in Fremont must land off airport. It's flare not flair, brakes not breaks, bridle not bridal, "could NOT care less" not "could care less".

That was the funniest thing I have read in a while. Reading that makes me question the necessity of a long term human occupied moon or mars base. It's flare not flair, brakes not breaks, bridle not bridal, "could NOT care less" not "could care less".

I will throw in my own experience, FWIW. I jumped a Triathlon 190 from jump 55-130. Then a Sabre 2 170 from 131-190. Now a Sabre 2 150. I weigh 175lbs, too. I thought the Tri was hard to land in 0 to light winds, it was full flare then a full sprint runout. The Sabre 2 had more flare and could be shutdown better. I had and have a lot of fun doing mini-swoops, 90 front to doubles on both the Sabres. Seth It's flare not flair, brakes not breaks, bridle not bridal, "could NOT care less" not "could care less".

I like this in theory, basically saying if you and your friends can fly your RW/Tracking suits at 2:1, then you can get a WS record. But the problem I see is measuring glide is too hard. GPS is useless without knowledge of the airmass movement, and the alternatives are tools like Yuri's recording bubble-vane-angle detector. You also must address Tracking Derby style comps, where a diving start and plane out is used to improve glide results. It's flare not flair, brakes not breaks, bridle not bridal, "could NOT care less" not "could care less".

Just in case anyone else does not know, there are two industry giants who have posted in this thread. 1. Bill Booth. Founder/Owner of United Parachute Technologies, the maker of the Vector container. 2. John Sherman. Founder/Owner of Parachute Labs, the maker of the Racer container. Both men have been designing, building and selling parachute equipment longer than I have been alive and I am 37 years old. They both are intelligent engineers and have vast amounts experience. They are also salesmen and long time competitors, so keep that in mind. It's flare not flair, brakes not breaks, bridle not bridal, "could NOT care less" not "could care less".

Jim (Beatnik): I think you had a good point with the first post you made, that any sales video is not proof of reliability. I have helped make sales videos for my firm that involved multiple takes, so if I as an engineer saw a video for a product we wanted to use, I would not make a reliability judgment based on the video. I think that any analysis of low-speed deployments in this video is of limited usefulness to you and John. There are two issues you are focused on are related to AAD fires: 1. Performance under high speed deployments. 2. Long term reliability/repeatability of said performance. If this is the main concern, I suggest stop over analyzing the low speeds in that video and focus on a way to answer the two issues above. It's flare not flair, brakes not breaks, bridle not bridal, "could NOT care less" not "could care less".

John, To the frames question, and math formulas: You missed my point. My point is, the formula you used was not correct for the situation. I think my formula was more correct than yours but it is also not correct for the situation, as both are for freefalling bodies, hence the note about the final velocity being 105mph (after 4.2 seconds). To model the situation correctly, you would need to model the reserve deployment, which would involve drag force calculations, with coeffcient of drag, changing area of the reserve, etc. A method like modified Euler or Runga-Kutta would probably be used. Without a proper math model, it does not matter how much time elapsed, as one cannot convert elapsed time to height lost without a good model. Simple as that, so frame conversions don't matter. On the 29m: I saw several samples with the reserve deployed, that were less than the 300ft limit, so I don't think adding more distance for sample timing is required. It's flare not flair, brakes not breaks, bridle not bridal, "could NOT care less" not "could care less".

One piece of information about this list that we need to start to make an informed judgement about container reserve systems is how many AAD fires have happened to each rig type, including rig types without a fatality and so not on the list. If the AAD manufacturers have this data, it would be good to know. If there are many more AAD fires on Vectors and Javelins (because more rigs in service, more jumpers with those rig types with AADs or less alti awareness etc) then the data looks less incriminating. If for some reason there were many more AAD fires on Racers and Mirages, then it would look worse for Vectors and Javs, Wings, Reflexes, and Quasars. But with the failure numbers being thrown around without the success numbers, the engineer in me gets annoyed. Seth It's flare not flair, brakes not breaks, bridle not bridal, "could NOT care less" not "could care less".

John, I read your post, stepped the video through the two low-speed reserve deployments, and don't agree with what you saw. The first deployment does start at 660m, but I see the slider down at 610m, and then the altimeter updates to 589m. I don't know exactly how the alti works, but I fail so see how you can tack on an additional 29m to the 589m value. The second deployment starts at 600m and completes at 571m and then the alti updates to 545m. I also don't agree with your math model. You are using a formula for constant acceleration but this is not a constant acceleration situation. The jumper will initially accelerate due to gravity, but then increasing drag from the deploying canopy will slow him back down. I also don't agree with your math equation. Position displacement under constant accel is d = 1/2at^2 + v0t + d0. Ignoring d0 and using 20fps for v0, and 32fps^2 for accel, you get 368 ft drop in 4.2 seconds. But the velocity is now at + v0 or 155fps or 105mph. This makes no sense. It's flare not flair, brakes not breaks, bridle not bridal, "could NOT care less" not "could care less".

If you bought a house last year, technically you are not in the negative. The house is an asset, the mortgage a debt, and the value of the house should be greater than the mortgage. If you bought before the housing crash, you maybe upside down and have a house with a mortgage value greater than the house could sell for, and then you would be in the negative, but sounds like that is not the case. It's flare not flair, brakes not breaks, bridle not bridal, "could NOT care less" not "could care less".

Your question is not misguided, but your post is in the wrong spot. The moderators will move this to Safety and Training or General. The only new threads here should be reports of actual incidents. You can search the fatality database with the word "tandem" from a link at the top of the incident forum, and that will give you alot of information. In the US, there are usually 1-2 tandem pair fatalities per year. Injuries are different. "Minor" injuries like sprained ankles and broken legs happen a lot. It's flare not flair, brakes not breaks, bridle not bridal, "could NOT care less" not "could care less".

Wow. I plugged some numbers in as I am going to Belguim this summer (close to France): Under 101 jumps, max WL 0.8 Under 201 jumps, max WL 0.87 Under 301 jumps max WL 0.95 Under 401 jumps max WL 0.95 Under 501 jumps max WL 1.05 Under 601 jumps max WL 1.05 That is right, 600 jumps 1.05 WL MAX. 601 jumps, anything you want. Is that really enforced strictly? If I showed up with my 1.3 WL and 300 jumps, would I be getting student gear?

I am guessing that the process of moving the data from the device onboard flash to the PC via USB is transparent to the device software, that is, the flash mounts as a standard usb disk and files can be read and written without having to execute custom device code. I think the questioner assumed a more complex transfer scheme, where the device software had to participate and therefore could do format conversion on the fly, taking raw binary data from the flash memory and streaming it to the PC via USB as CSV formatted text. It's flare not flair, brakes not breaks, bridle not bridal, "could NOT care less" not "could care less".

I created a script that will automatically display attached images. If you are like me and don't want to click on attached pics to view them, then this may be of interest. To use: Get firefox. Get greasemonkey. Install the script here: http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/70322 It's flare not flair, brakes not breaks, bridle not bridal, "could NOT care less" not "could care less".

I watched my first live ski jump event a few weeks ago in Wisconsin. And my first thought was "a perfect landing area for Jeb". Then I found out about this super hill at Pine Mountain in northern MI. 459 ft is the record there. The slope is 39 degees, which is a glide ratio of only 1.23, but it is nice and long. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pine_Mountain_ski_jump It's flare not flair, brakes not breaks, bridle not bridal, "could NOT care less" not "could care less".

There are a lot more than 4! A partial list of container brands/manf Racer Vector Mirage Wings Javelin Infinity Aerodyne ? Voodoo Talon Quasar Atom Advance 7 Probably another 3 or so I can't think of. I don't think you will find a website comparing them all. It's flare not flair, brakes not breaks, bridle not bridal, "could NOT care less" not "could care less".

Ok, here is what I got out of the post: Self destructive paradigm shifts. And denny green's sister? I assume money, fame, etc. But as to what it all means, I am with Twardo, I think Mark is complaining about subsidized military demo teams taking work from civilians. I don't mind you posting here Mark. You are entertaining, and when you get to be too much, I stop reading. It's flare not flair, brakes not breaks, bridle not bridal, "could NOT care less" not "could care less".

I didn't know the NASA reference either. I like your (or Daniels) idea anyway, because it is more hopeful: With a big enough R&D budget, anything is possible! It's flare not flair, brakes not breaks, bridle not bridal, "could NOT care less" not "could care less".

I guess it can be thought of that way, but I have always heard without the time to market implication: Faster means higher performance. Better means higher quality (rugged, robust, fewer defects, etc) Cheaper means lower cost. The incredible shrinking transistor has made amazing exceptions to this rule (do a die shrink correctly and you can come up with lower cost parts that have higher performance with little to no loss in quality), and that has made our modern world possible. But get outside that transistor exception and the rule is a pretty good explanation for the tradeoffs involved in design and engineering. It's flare not flair, brakes not breaks, bridle not bridal, "could NOT care less" not "could care less".

My rigger charged me $75 for a skyhooked vector assembly and main & reserve pack back in the summer. (small midwest DZ). It's flare not flair, brakes not breaks, bridle not bridal, "could NOT care less" not "could care less".

Having bought and sold a few things through dz.com and ebay, I will say: The only problem I have with your experience is the fact that the seller accepted your offer. Once that is done, that should be it. When I have sold on dz.com, at least a few times after agreeing to a price with one buyer I kept getting offers, some higher than the agreed price, but I stayed to my agreement with the original buyer. This has nothing to to with auctions though, if you put an OBO by your listing, you are in fact making a private auction of sorts, and if you want to pit buyers against each other, fine, but then you should be saying to each, "Thanks for the offer, I will let you know what happens, etc". Now I think the or in OBO means if the buyer offers full price it is like the ebay "Buy it now" the sale should go to that buyer, but that is not the major fault with your experience, it is the seller agreed to sell to you, then backed out. Conduct your sale how you wish, but don't make agreements and then back out. It's flare not flair, brakes not breaks, bridle not bridal, "could NOT care less" not "could care less".

Are you kidding, if I "cut to clipboard" my malfunctioned main, I damn sure don't want to paste that mal back over my head as a reserve I put these on my handles, knowing like you say the analogy didn't make perfect sense with a mal'ed main, not to mention a straight to the reserve pull situation where there is nothing on the clipboard and CTRL-V is useless! Still after programming on a windows platform for 15 years now and using those two key combos all the time, I am very used to the idea, and I now visualize pulling my handles with "CUT" and "PASTE". It is all a part of my plan to become the nerdiest skydiver. I still have my work cut out for me, but every little bit helps. It's flare not flair, brakes not breaks, bridle not bridal, "could NOT care less" not "could care less".