SkymonkeyONE

We have done four flights today; the last two were 12-way stacked vertical wedges. It's a great day here at Z-hills.

Listen everybody, Jim Slaton is a friend of mine. That said, he got his (and his staff's) username on this site disabled because he simply would not refrain from blatantly advertising his products and services on this forum. I do not make the rules here, but I have been charged with enforcing them since the very inception of this forum. Feel free to discuss any canopy control and swooping topic you want to here, but please refrain from cutting and pasting stuff from Jim's site and sticking it here. If Jim would have been a better member of this community in the first place he would have simply answered questions as they were presented here. LIke I have said many times before, there are PLENTY of professional canopy pilots on this forum who DO take the time to write out educated answers. If you want a question answered in a timely manner then ask it here. Want to wait a week? Ask over there. It's not going to hurt my feelings one way or another. What I will continue to do here on my end is try to keep the "noise" to a minimum. It HAS gotten a little too loose in here over the past year or so. It was never the intent of the owner of this site (Sangiro) that this be "bonfire for swoopers." I have made repeated attempts to get some of you (not talking to you, Ian) to cut it out with the one-liners. I have also done my best to keep the nonsense responses from unqualified/underqualified canopy pilots out of the serious thread; it's a full time job. So, ultimately, if you want less bullshit in this forum, then stop posting bullshit. Jim does not allow such stuff in his forum at all, but then again he gets no traffic on his site. Also, those of you super-qualified guys out there lurking could really make my life easier by posting to the serious, information-needed threads. Please do us all a favor and sound off! It will make my life a lot easier and take away some of the grief I keep hearing people bitch about that "this site is just full of 100-jump wonders giving bad advice." Be a part of the solution, not the problem. Now, back to the topic of the thread. I think it's great that Jim is putting together another competition team. One thing I do have to say about what was cut and pasted from his response from his site is this: I really don't understand Jim calling his demonstration group the "world parabatic team." Unless Jason Peters and his guys are involved, or Charles Bryan and the RedBull guys who used to do it all the time, or Lyle and the guys he is putting together all have fought it out, then the "world" moniker just makes me giggle. That's just me though. Sincerely, Chuck Blue, your unpaid moderator -freely giving valid, educated advice on this forum since it's inception.

Kris, I am glad you got the suit flying. Still, this comment: got me to wondering where you picked up that habit. Our school has always been one that taught "freefly tight" chest straps. That for several reasons: first, your deployment forces are to the rear; and second, the closer-in MLW prevented your vents from becoming covered on other-than-phantom-vented-type suits. Still, I don't see how that last bit would have mattered with the "phantom vents." They are very slick designs, as are the Acro top vents. There was another post in this thread where someone quoted James as saying he had to "relearn" his V2 after making many Phantom flights. He's not the only one I know that has said that. In fact, Scotty Burns found it difficult to find the sweet spot in his V2 after so many V1 flights and now all the jumps he has on his big Tony suit. Ultimately, I think that if you are going to own and operate several different types of equipment, you might as well stay current on all of them. If not, then just go ahead and sell the stuff you don't want to jump anymore. There a ton of folks out there looking for newer, high-end suits. I swap back and forth between my S6 and Vampire (V1) with regularity as I have still not decided that either is the best tool for the job. I like them both very much. Chuck

it's 9:30 and there are seven birds present.... Don't be the guy who is "sick at home" like Matt. Chuck

It's been done. It was done at The Ranch one time (as a demo) during the PSN in 2001 (unless I am mixing up venues) and it was done at WFFC in 2003. In 2003 it was Howard Adams swooping the pond with Rosalyn Trach under a Firebolt 298; quite impressive. Back on topic though: I would really love, just for shits and grins, to have a crossbraced tandem main in the 260 foot range.

I ditched the thread. I am going to go back through it and cut out all the ads, cross-posting from Jim's site and other stuff and will then put it back up. Feel free to discuss gear in gear and rigging and feel free to defend your friends in bonfire.

Hey, it's 8:17 am and nobody is milling around outside. Where be the flockies?

I should caveat my response by saying that my S3 is filthy! It's so dirty it can almost stand up! I should actually wash the thing before I sell it. Chuck

Please don't advertise in this, or any of our other forums.

My most-worn suit is my very-early-production S3. It's got way over 500 flights on it and the only thing I have fucked up on it are the booties. I have blown the toes out of both of them several times. I blew out nearly every zipper on my old GTi (which saw at least four owners), but it's still flying too out in California.

I just got back to Z-hills. I haven't even unloaded my truck. Beat on my camper door prior to the first load, please.

Then why is it marketed as their "training" suit? Likewise, if you are intoning that it's actually a BASE-specific suit, who in their right mind would want to jump a suit in that environment which has several, for whatever reason, documented cases where at least one wing has released in freefall? I am not Robi bashing at all. I really, really like all the rest of his suits (wait, is that a Vampire hanging on a rack in my camper three feet from me? Yes, it is). I just don't agree with that suit. YMMV. Sorry for the tangent, but what I just brought up is what I consider the only reason that I would potentially pull my wing cutaways. That said, I have been on wingsuit jumps where I have blown out, on different skydives, every single type of zipper, but managed to keep the suit flying straight. I have blown out an arm zipper, a leg zipper, blown out both booties, and blown out a main body zipper. On each of those jumps, the act of simply tensioning the suit, modifying my body position to fly straight, or collapsing all my wings and falling straight down to a safe opening altitude led to safe, on-heading openings. Chuck

As far as tats go in this final five, the most misguided one of the lot is Storm Large (clearly a stage name). What the fuck was THAT girl thinking when she got those tattoos? Truly pointless.

I don't know, bro. Do you think that Perry Trowbridge was not qualified to hook up the wings of his own Prodigy demo when he shit came undone at SkyFest last year? Personally, I think that is the only suit that Robi makes that does not make sense. I don't like it at all. I think all the rest of the PF suits are very nice though. I would MUCH rather put a first flight student in an Acro than a Prodigy; that's a clever suit. Chuck flying wingsuits since April 2000. Zero flat-spins.

do you think that? I think she is clownishly-overdone with her "rocker" look. She also looks like her feelings get hurt awfully easy. My guess is that she has a tremendously low self esteem.

Board Of Directors. Are there two Nigel Hollands that are members of the BPA?

Hey Nigel, I was flipping through a copy of the BPA Paramag and saw that you were on the BOD! Fascinating!

The Sabre2 has a pretty long control range. I have the lower control lines set quite long on my personal 97, though, and I still have tons of power starting at around the shoulders. YMMV. Chuck

Well hello to you, Max. I will happilly disable your new username very shortly! pip, pip, and cheerio C. Blue, esq.

There is a kid at Raeford that we call "Fuck Face". He's actually a nice guy, but the nickname kind of stuck.

Carrie, you know Magni has a wife and kid, right? He does not come across as gay at all to me. He was boring on his cover song in my opinion. Lukas is a suicide waiting to happen. I hear you on the "Smashing Pumpkins" shit! I despise that group and Lukas seemed like he was doing everything in his power to sound "more" Canadian and retarded like Billy (formerly of Smashing Pumpkins). I hate whiney songs. Storm just sucks. Her cover was pathetic. I hate the sound of her "regular" singing voice. Dilana's "my calf is torn" display bugged me. I didn't see any indication of banaging under her clothes; did you? That may have been a bit of a ruse. I thought Toby did the best overall last night. I really hope Storm goes home tonight.

Actually, Flock and Dock 2.5 is very close at hand.

Terrve!

If you are ever in Texas, why don't you ask him; it's Eric Butts.

I read Jim's theory on the 450 in his forum and, he's definitely right about one thing: there are a bunch of ways to skin that cat. I used to mainly throw 270's, but have been doing 360's almost exclusively for some time now. I worked on "inside 450's" for a while, though, and like Jim said over on his site, I initiated them from 1000 feet. The first person to do them with any regularity was Jay Moledzski. We were talking about them one day at Deland a couple of years ago after, as a tangent to, a talk we were having about the Phi wingsuit. "Phi", while a letter of the greek alphabet, is also a number: 1.618 0339 887. In terms of diving turns to landing, how that applied (in Jay's mind anyway, at least the way I understood him), was that he wanted to throw perfect, ever-tightening spiral turns that would spit him out at the maximum achievable velocity. What makes a toilet flush is that they are designed so that the water spins in that ever-tightening arc till it jams itself down the drain. That degree of tightening arc is the ratio Phi. Anyway, the intent of that particular turn is to start out with a wider, slowly-building dive that, on the last half rotation is really tight and diving (almost totally on harness at that point). I don't have any problem with accuracy starting out that turn in deep brakes. I also never get into double fronts, unlike Jim, when doing that turn. Just like every other degree of turn you might work on, the key is repetition. Work on the setup and initiation/follow-through on high hop and pops, then average out your altitude lost on each iteration. The average of your last three attempts as your are descending will give you a pretty accurate initiation altitude for your actual landing, leaving you a bit of a buffer zone. Better too high than too low. Those altitude-loss averages from your higher practices will be greater because of the thinner air at altitude. If you want to be accurate, then every practice attempt needs to take the same amount of time to complete. For me, that's four seconds. Four seconds for a 270, four seconds for a 360, and four seconds for that 450. What changes for me is setup altitude and distance back from the gates. Jim talks about his specific distances on his site, but if your turn is not exactly like his, then that's only going to give you a vague baseline. If YOU want to build accuracy skills, then YOU need to put out some gates, some semblance of a straight course (to start with) and put some markers on the ground at about 50 foot intervals back from the gates that you can easilly view from setup altitude. Ultimately, you want as many visual cues as possible for your training. Use every resource available to you. There are a staggering amount of super-proficient pilots around these days. Ask the right questions of the right people. There are no "Svengali's of Swoop" that are unapproachable. Chuck Blue