RiggerLee

Not sure exactly what you are looking for. Depending on what you are looking for you might want to correct it for density altitude to get a corrected air speed. If you just drop it in to exel for instance you'll wind up with true air speed which is relevant in some circumstances but in for some things corrected might give you a better reference across the jump. Lee

Over the years I saw a number of canopies and harnesses damaged on hard openings with larger people. The amount of energy that has to be absorbed goes up with weight but it also goes up with the square of the speed. Falling even just a bit faster makes a big difference. But it's not as simple as that. Fill time of the canopy goes down with faster speeds. That's part of the reason that high altitude openings are so brutal. True air speed and volume fill rate go way up and make a disproportionate change in the opening shock. That's why a preme at a higher altitude is so dangerous especially if you are free flying or sit flying. Snatch force also goes up with airspeed causing more load on bags and canopies. the higher forces combined with heavier canopies are a good set up for line dump and staging problems. It's easier to break rubber bands with the higher load and a heavier canopy to pull against that will resist acceleration longer. Also bags are wider on larger rigs which with older bag designs means more line in between the stows trying to pull them lose. Right now I'm working almost exclusively with recovery systems dealing with 1000-2000 lb loads and the next air frame will be some where north of 7000 lb. All these things become more exaggerated, it's been interesting. You are going to want large canopies. Don't be afraid to go big. Large canopies fly so nice and you have the weight to drive them. You'll make it back from spots that no one can fly from. The opening issues are why I recommend an Optimum. It actually opens a bit slower then other reserves. That sounds like a strange thing to say about a reserve at least in a positive context. With the higher speeds that we are seeing these days I actually see advantages in it. It also seems to be more tolerant of higher speed openings. I know a couple of people that demoed them and made a point of opening them at high speeds from head down dives with no deceleration. I think they have a wider speed envelope then other reserve canopies. You're going to want a slow opening main to begin with but you might also think about having it lined with dacron line. I know it sounds strange, old school, but it does improve the openings. I don't really buy the "line stretch" theory but it's got other things going for it. There is a lot more friction on the slider. It sounds like a small thing but I think it makes a big difference in when the canopy becomes dominant over the slider and starts to push it down and how fast it pushes it down. They also have a lot more bulk and friction on rubber bands so you get better staging on the canopy deployment. That alone can be a life saver, literally. I've seen people killed by hard openings. A slightly larger or domed or flagged slider can be a good idea. Even if you don't seem to need it on normal openings it might save you on the anomalous hard one. But one change I would strongly suggest you make is to consider getting a "Speed Bag" from Jump Shack. Basically every line stow on the bag is a locking stow, they are a bit closer together, less line between them, and there are more of them then on a normal bag. It's about the most line dump resistant design out there. It's a bit harder to pack but you get used to it. Double wrap your bands. You'll break a lot of them but it's worth it. Just buy a big bag of them and keep them in a zip lock. And welcome back. Lee

Technically this is not the wanted section so I'll assume that you're looking for advice. Not sure how long you've been away. I see a frap hat and what look like kroop goggles. You're a big boy but not ridicules. And you're licensed so you get to be a big boy. A student they would be more worried about TSO max weights and liability. Booth and some others actually build sport versions of their tandem rigs for big boys rated for 500 lb loads. In reality I would recomend that you just go with sport gear. Used... tough to find unless you go with a student rig with an adjustable harness. Unless you get really lucky on here you're probable going to have to pony up and pay for a custom rig. PD makes some large reserves. I think the PDr is larger at 281 but I'd recomend that you go with an Optimum. Even though it's a little smaller and rated a bit lower I think they are more tolerant of higher speed deployments. You have your choice of mains up to 260, any of which would be good for you, but over that you're looking at a student canopy like a navigator. No mini risers or mini rings. Only full size risers and rings for you. Lee

Interesting. Taking a wag at the cell width of a 97 I would guess that it was about 21 inches. Allowing about an inch on each side for the inset of the grommets. That still makes the slider about 8 inches wider then the cell. The depth of the stabilizers also factors in. Some canopies have a stabilizer attachment on the B line a good bit lower then the A attachment points. I doubt that it's 4 inches on a 97. So for a 97 the front of the slider is probable setting on the bottom skin but not by that much. The back half of the slider will not be supported on the bottom skin and is probable doing most of the work of holding the canopy closed during the initial part of the opening. Doing more math, by the time you get to a 135 I'm pretty sure that the whole slider is fully engaged. None of it would be sitting on the bottom skin. So I can kind of see where they getaway with a universal slider size and I guess they add just a bit for the larger sizes to help hold the slider up an decelerate the jumper. That also explanes why there is a market for after market slider for their canopies. It leaves a good bit of room increase the width on larger canopies or play with the aspect ratios. Lee

I used to print a t-shirt, "CAN I BE ON YOUR ASH DIVE?" DZ is not a place for thin skinned snow flakes. If words bother you what are you going to do when your friend bounces and you get his gooey stuff all over you? Say what is all that stuff? When I was a student I figured there would be a lot of blood but when peoples bodies break open it's all this clear gooey stuff that dries and looks kind of like thin snot. Any body know what it is? Lee

It won't be that tough to break that record. Current air frame has the performance to take a person over 200,000 ft. So if you don't recover the air frame worst case you're looking at 1.25 mill to fly some one over 200,000 ft. With a recovery system that's another 80 lb's... haven't run the numbers. Not sure you could break 150 but you'd probable still top Eustace's record. That would be about then $400,000 including building the hammer head for the capsule. So not cheep but doable. Yah, that's the same dilldo I talked to at PIA. Nice guy. I squeezed every bit of info I could out of him. My impression is that they have a long way to go. It wasn't that impressive. In his "demo" he had it pressurized up to like 1 psi. Not a real pressure. The "suit" that they have right now is not really functional. They don't seem to have tackled a lot of the real problems yet. All I saw was a really crude mock up with which they were doing a lot of self promotion in hopes of people giving them money. Not saying that I'm not interested. They seem to have a long way to go and they seem to be mostly focused on promotion. Lee

Don't get too hung up on a major or specialization. My experience is that if you are an engineer you are an engineer. What you study in school is just a starting point. You will grow into what ever industry you wind up in. Example, I'm working for a rocket company. We're rocket scientist. The head guy is an electrical engineer. My boss who does the engine development and got put in charge of recovery systems came out of the petroleum industry. I'm not sure about his degree if he has an engineering degree it's probable in mechanical? Another is just a blue collar guy out of the air gas industry. He does all of our cryogenics and most of the construction on the rocket. There is a contractor that is a dynamacist that I'm sure has aerospace degrees. But I think I might be the only person here at the shop that was an AE, aerospace engineering major and I'm the seamstress. Maybe that should tell you some thing about the viability of that degree path... If I was to actually give you advice, I'd tell you to study your math. Maybe even get a minor in it. Regardless of what your paper says, some thing general like mechanical engineering or EE or some thing more specialized like AE, there will be a place for you in what ever industry you presue. But just as an example. I'm working for this company as their parachute rigger. Thinking back on what I've used from school. Alot of my work with pattern sets and design uses a lot of protective geometry and differential geometry. Unrolling sections of surfaces out of 3d space in to 2d to form pattern sets. Reentry models goes back to my AE courses. I cracked an old Thermo text a couple of weeks ago looking at a problem we were having with our pressurization system. Analyzing INU data from drop test. People say that you will never use what you learned in school, I've found the exact opposite. Particularly the math. But more than that I find the things I studied in school just generally inform me of how things will behave. And I never actually finished my degree. Some time I wonder what else I would have learned. It was invaluable but it was also just a starting point and nothing more then a foundation upon which to start building your experience. What you learn afterwards is what your career is built from. Lee

I was going to suggest he cut a hole in the center of his slider with a coffee can but I figured people would give me too much shit in this day in age. Lee

I don't really understand your post. If you want to alter the openings of the canopy your packing technique is by far the easiest thing to change. Is this a new canopy or used? The first thing I would check is the line specs, particularly the break lines. Could it have been built with the wrong break lines? Did some one replace them between relines? Altering the break set depth is the next easiest way to alter the openings. The slider is the third option. How big is it supposed to be? Was it assembled with the wrong slider? Did some one, perhaps of a different weight or tracking habits change it out to slow it down? Changing it's size or it's ratio can alter when the canopy becomes dominant over the slider on opening. Between the three you should be able to get nice openings out of a canopy. Lee

This is a good example of some one off the center of the bell curve where a larger or domed or flag slider could be handy. A better question is are the openings with dome sliders more consistent? That's a different question to whether they can fix a problem under those conditions. Let's say you plotted opening shock for a hundred openings. You get a bell curve. What we want is to avoid the out liers at the top end of the graph, they hurt. Their are a lot of decisions you can make in design, including slider size, that can shift that curve right or left. Keeping in mind that you don't want it to open too slow as well. Are domed sliders better? The question would be if they can tighten that bell curve. Make it narrower. Avoid the out liers at ether end. No more hard openings, no snivils, smaller standard deviation. There is no question that we can shift that curve right and left. That's what we have been doing with these after market sliders for years. We just needed a higher drag slider on some canopies for some jumpers. They will tell every one about how great it is because it fixed they're problem. That is not to say that it's a fundamentally better slider design. A problem we had with the canopies for our system here is that the manufacturer tryed to build the slider too big. It's actually more complicated then that, the damn thing has 22 grommets but the point stands. I built things like this for people for years but what I was doing was shifting the curve. I have no reason to beleve that it actually reduced the spread. So I can't say that a domed slider is fundamentally better then a flat slider. I can just get a bit more drag out of it. Lee

You might check out... https://dekunu.tech/dekunu-one#data They are Australian and no one can pronounce the name of the thing but it's an interesting unit. I was talking to them at PIA and it's a small INU with GPS, accelerometers, gyros, pressure transduicer etc. It's basically a little data logger but what is really interesting is the back end cloud software for analyzing and sharing the jump. Got a student? Let's see what your holding pattern really looked like. Where was every one relitive to that big way CRW formation as it built? How hard was that opening. I literally got mine yesterday so I have not had time to play with it but I cant wait to pull data out of it. You're supposed to be able to get the raw data from it as well. If you go to their web sight and scroll down to a video you can get some since of it. It's edited in with a lot of bull shit video like a toy commercial but there are shots of the interface as well. Looking forward to playing with mine. Lee

Flat sliders are easier to build. You try to design some thing that you can build. You try to design the canopy so that you don't have to resort to things like domed sliders. There are some tandem canopies with slightly domed sliders. But you try not to have to go their. You'll see most of these things after market where people are trying to deal with a bad canopy that is prone to aberrant hard openings. Lee

I never had a manual. What I remember is mainly about the crown lines. As I recall it splits into three sub bridles. You had to make sure that each of them was clear. From that point onwards I don't recall it being that diffrent from a PC in terms of flaking. I think their might have been some excess control line to be stowed at the cascade to take up the slack. I might be confusing that with another canopy. It was the coolest thing I ever jumped. Wish I could have hung on to it. As I recall the crow lines were the key thing in packing the canopy. Lee

Thanks, that's exactly the kind of answer that I was hoping for but I don't fully understand it. Some of the terms like API are beyond me. I don't have a good grasp of the mechanics of how this works. I can't even deal with a sewing machine that's less then 20 years old. Are you saying that they do voice recognition or other things when they classify videos beyond the information provided about it? And that these key words or tags are hidden some how? I was under the impression that... spiders? or some kind of program went out and mapped every thing about every web page? Any subject I type in to google will in addition to web sites pop up endless you tube videos on that subject. Looked up how to change a starter motor the other day. I thought all of these key words and links were public in order to maximize their traffic. Some one told me that all web pages have hidden key words embedded in them beyond the visible text to help search engines find them. STARTER, ENGINE, HONDA, 4 WHEELER... etc imprinted into them just for this purpose. If you tube is trying to keep their content secret and propitiatory they seem to be doing a very poor job. Lee

I'm not sure whether I should post this here or in the soap box. Although it might touch on controversial issues what I'd really like to focus on is feasibility of the idea it self. A lot of people are really butt hurt about Youtube for all kinds of reasons. Although there are alternatives out their they are insignificant to youtube with it's vast collection of every cat video ever recorded. No one will ever be able to compete they are just too far ahead. So I came across this video the other night and it got me thinking. So basically it seems that they have come out with yet another addendum to their terms and conditions. Basically they are going to stop their algorithms from recommending "conspiracy videos" and any thing else they deem to be fake news. In the video this guy comments on some thing he put forward that got him flagged that turned out to be totally true. So basically he was flagged for publishing some thing that contradicted CNN or some shit like that. What this basically means is that they are going to start editing out desenting opinion. They are not technically censoring these videos. If you search for them by name they will still pop up. But they will not pop up on your home page recommendations or along side other videos as recommendations. Basically it's just one more thing for people to get their panties in a wad about. So moving on to the actual idea that I'd like to put forward and discus. Let's say you were a web page designer with a good grasp of search algorithms. Youtube doesn't seem to have any problem with any one linking to their videos. Come one, come all, watch our adds. So lets say this bright boy, the next internet billionaire, lets call him Bob Gates, builds a web page that looks just like the home page of youtube, that you sign into just like youtube, with recommended videos for you just like you tube. Lets call it YourTube.com It tracks your viewing and likes and every thing else just like you tube does. Links from it just go to youtube. Their videos, their page, their advertising so you are not depriving them of any of their business. What this home page has going for it is an unbiased set of algorithms recommending to you the videos that you would actually want to see based on your interest, subscriptions, likes, etc. Rather then trying to build competitive content, use you tube as an archive with a new indexing on top of it. It only increases their traffic but you are offering it with out all the political censorship that people are screaming about. It's not a solution for content that has been banned by youtube, that just wouldn't be there. There is a lot of contact that has been demonotised or pushed down on the search results or now removed from the recommendations. Which basically means that you will never see it. Unless you already know the title and search for it you can't find it. This puts those non favored content creators back on equal footing with their more PC counter parts and goes a long way towards equalizing it as a public square for conversation once again. This is totally straight out of my ass. I have no idea how to do this or if it could be done. I am not Bob Gates. I'm just tossing this idea out into the wind to see what happens. Tell me how stupid it is. Begin... Lee

He couldn't descend rapidly or change his glide angle much at all with the passenger hanging from the bar. That locked the bar down and the glider into one trim. They are lucky that it was set up well to fly at that one trim. Lee Lee lee@velocitysportswear.com www.velocitysportswear.com

Saw the same thing. Looked to me like the passenger had most of his weight hanging from his left hand on the control bar. It's weight shift. The pilot was all the way to the right. He got it lined up to land in that field, and I was like, "you got this." but you'll see the glider turn slowly to the left even with the pilots body far right. I think the passengers weight hanging from the bar, normally it would be from the top point, turned the glider against the will of the pilot out over the valley. You'll see the pilot reach down and grab his harness. I don't think that was just him trying to save his life. After that he seemed to have better control over the glider. pulling up there shifted some of that weight onto the top point and made it more controllable. My interpretation. Lee Lee lee@velocitysportswear.com www.velocitysportswear.com

I saw that one as well but considered it less interesting. I don't know if part of the beaner stayed with the harness or not. It would be interesting to see the fracture line. Looks like it failed on the opposite side from the gate. I'm thinking that it got thrown down on concrete or some thing. Got a small fracture and then grew over time as it was loaded and unloaded flexing as described above. I shared it because I found it interesting even though it's not a peace of hardware we normally use. I just think it's worth remembering that hardware is one of the scetchiest parts of our systems. And we put a great deal of faith in it some times. Any one that's been around long enough has stories. I found a main ring with a fracture in it when we were proof testing a batch of hardware. It broke way below spec. I remember a badly forged 22040. I've also seen them with the bar upside down. There was a bad batch of those going around at one point. I've seen rapid links split and stretch. Lines fell off his canopy after he landed. I've seen slinks break under canopy. Although it's from a different industry it's a good object lessen and shouldn't be ignored. Lee Lee lee@velocitysportswear.com www.velocitysportswear.com

https://www.foxnews.com/world/paraglider-pilot-dies-saving-his-passengers-life-after-cord-snaps-midair Lee Lee lee@velocitysportswear.com www.velocitysportswear.com

It does and it did correct for for it. That correction was through the gimbled thrust of the engine not aerodynamic in any way. It just takes time. That was a big jerk on the bottom of the rocket. It caused a big deviation, about 12 deg. That's big it's going to be a big woo-wo-wo of a curve to bring it not just back to vertical but back to center line. Proper damping involves a certain amount of over correction. The rocket has a lot of inertia in that axis. Depending on how much gimbal angle you have to work with it can take a bit of time to correct. Lee Lee lee@velocitysportswear.com www.velocitysportswear.com

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VHPeGH7t_QQ&feature=youtu.be Here's an edited release. There was a couple of film crews out there. One from space port America and some other stuff going on. I'm not in the loop on any of this. I don't know if this is the final product or the first of several clips. It's mostly a bunch of B role. No flight footage from the rocket. Not even the rocket flying or landing under canopy although my ballute does make a brief cameo descending with the nose cone. So I have no idea what these people were thinking. It does have shots of all the usual suspects. And it has the launch shot from the trailer. This is actually a very cool, Oh Shit! kind of shot. I'll explane. DO to some plumbing issues we are not getting as high of a pressure to the LOX at the engine as we would like. We have reworked the plumbing to fix that but at the time we decided to short load the LOX. So as a result of that decision the milk stand, big heavy blast deflector that the rocket sits on prior to launch, rather then being bolted down to the pad was sitting on a set of large scales to allow us to weigh the LOX. Well some one apparently forgot their fluid dynamics and did not think to secure the milk stand in any way. Well when 5,500 lb or so of thrust hits the graphite plates and turns 90 deg they forgot that you get 5,500 lb of force sideways on the stand. Well it went scooting along the pad till it hit the launch rail which bowed and flexed. In fact it flexed enough that it pulled very hard in the lower launch lug of the rocket. It was still in that lower section of the rail when the milk stand hit the launch rail. It actually ripped the lug off the rocket where it was welded in to the lower bulk head of the fuel tank. This imparted a big tug to the base of the rocket. Some thing you really do not want to do. That is why you see it take a big curve away from the launch rail. Then the engine cranked all the way to the stop on the gimble brings it back and a little past vertical to bring it back over the pad and then away it goes on it's marry way. But when you see all of our faces that is why we are all saying "Oh, shiiiit!!!" They politely edit that out and play mood music all through the video, but if you can read lips you'll see it. Actually it was a great, absolutely grade A+ test for the control system. You couldn't ask for a better small perturbation test right off the pad. Speaking of which if you want to see how we used to do that test, if you scroll all the way down to the bottom of the You tube page you'll see an old Armadillo aero space video that includes them doing rocket tug of war during a hover which is actually how we used to do it when testing the control system. It also includes shots of all the same people minus about 10 years. Flash backs. Lee Lee lee@velocitysportswear.com www.velocitysportswear.com

I was annoyed by a lot of the same things. It seams like they played into a lot of the stories about those events. Like the X-15 landing. He did in fact make a straight in approach over the hills on that landing. That was not normal. The normal flight path was a long steep spiral to landing that pretty much kept him over the lake bed. Allowing him to hit a window and follow a preplaned banking approach to final. Kind of like a carrier landing. The fact that he made a straight in approach evolved into a story about him scraping the trees as he came in, which was just not true. In fact the book that the movie is based on covered this. So I was rather disipointed that they didn't do better. But I was pleased that they made an effort to try and touch on so many things beyond the Apollo flight. If you know much about him you can see hints about his work as an engineer. And he was more of an engineer then he was a pilot. People considered him to be a bit of an egg head. There was actually a lot more that he did with very low L/D flight and approaches. He was a part of the Dynasore program which was an early space plane concept. There was a lot of work going on with lifting bodies and other low L/D designs that might be capable of reentry. Eventually some of that turned into the space shuttle. He did a lot of work with control systems and in particular simulators. And trying to make them actually fly like the vehicle which at the time was not necessarily the case. After he left nasa he did a lot of work on early fly by wire systems. You should thank him every time you get on an airliner because it is a decedent of one of his computers that is flying that plane. A human can't fly a 787. It wouldn't exist with out the kinds of flight control that he developed. A person can not maintain the AOA and side slip that is necessary to achieve the fuel efficiency necessary to make that plane viable. Want to see what the difference is? Ride in the back of an old DC-3 on a bumpy day with the tail washing around in a dutch roll. That's the best that a human being can do. And I think they did a pretty good job of capturing a picture of one of the most quiet, kind, and reserved personalities to ever be part of the space program. That was probable one of the nicest people to ever live. If he ever said one cross word to another human being no one ever wrote it down. And Iron Sky is awesome. I think I fell in love with the blond. It made me wont to be a Nazi. Lee Lee lee@velocitysportswear.com www.velocitysportswear.com

Currency on emergency procedures. Lee Lee lee@velocitysportswear.com www.velocitysportswear.com

On police behavior in relation to investigations. The truth is it runs the whole gambit from one end of the spectrum to the other. I'll give you two examples. At Quincy there were more then a few fatalities. They actually had a very good relationship with the police. Nothing was moved. Nothing was disturbed. Every thing was fully investigated with a group of riggers manufactures and the police together. By far the best most comprehensive investigations I've ever seen. Literally defines the far end of the spectrum. I'll give you an opposite example. Drop zone I used to work at. Several fatalities over the years, I was around there for over ten years. Police ceased every thing. Rolled it into a ball. We might be able to send some one over a week or two later to look at it, if they chose to allow it. Later we might get the gear back in a ball wrapped in a sheet and have the chance to try to peace it together. And that's the way the drop zone liked it. The management of the drop drop zone took the position that the less information, found, preserved, and recorded the better their position in a court case. It's just a mystery. Any thing learned is some thing that could be twisted against them in court. Lee Lee lee@velocitysportswear.com www.velocitysportswear.com

There is nothing wrong with innovation. There was in fact some work done to develop a better curved pin to address actual problems. There is a guy in Europe making them now if you're interested. By the way that work resulted in some thing that looks nothing like this abortion. The exact opposite in fact. So for me the real question is how well does this thing work. If he's been selling them all this time, that is if people are actually using them, we should have some numbers by now. How many reserve rides have there been? I know what I would expect the answer to be, but I've been known to be wrong...it happened once, a long time ago, I don't like to talk about it. So who is this guy? Any body know him? Could you sneek a peak at his packing data card? Lee Lee lee@velocitysportswear.com www.velocitysportswear.com