SkymonkeyONE

Working with Joey? Joey Jones and Doug Park are up here right now doing contract work in the tunnel with a unit. They leave Friday.

For that matter, Ian, I fly my Sabre2 97 almost identically to my Velo 84. Hell, it's nearly the same wingload. The riser pressure is just less on the Sabre2. Any canopy loaded heavilly is going to come out of the sky like a bomb when thrown into a 270 degree turn. Let me put it into a bit more perspective: When I got tired of Stillettos; I owned a 107 and a 97 for six years; I didn't want to step up to a crossbrace due to their ground-hungriness which I felt would be too "busy" in the huge amount of student traffic we had a Raeford. The brand new "inbetween" canopy was the Vengeance. I bought one sight unseen and it arrived one month later in my colors. Already having a ton of jumps on the ST's and few jumps on a couple of sizes of VE's, I thought I knew what to expect. What I got was a Vengeance 97 that flew "mushy", but at the same time was as ground hungry as a Velo 90. I put a week's worth of jumps on the canopy and immediately sold it. What was the point in owning a canopy that dived like a crossbrace, but only swooped as far as my Stilletto? None, that's what. I immediately ordered a crossbraced canopy (a VX 74) and an Alpha 84. Those were the two canopies winning all the swoop meets back then, so that's what I bought. Ultimately, I found I liked the Velo better than my VX or the other canopies I used to compete with and went back to PD. Still, I don't have any use for a Katana in my tool bag. It is a very-agressive nine-cell, much in the Vengeance tradition, only with better openings. I guess I could get away with one in my wingsuit rig, but it would be dumb to replace my fantastic little Sabre2, which IS the right tool for the job. Katanas dive VERY hard and are very ground hungry in full flight. I consider the Katana to be a good substitute for a crossbrace for those jumpers who have to make 1000 jumps a year and just can't risk hard/bad openings on occasion and who can't stand the larger pack volume of the braced canopies. The Katana is ABSOLUTELY NOT a good, first elliptical canopy for ANYONE. The fact of the matter is that there are very, very few skydivers out there that need to be jumping anything more agressive than a Sabre2 or a Pilot, or something similar. Seriously. I don't know how many times I am going to have to say that. Any of you young jumpers out there need a lesson in how bad a guy can smoke your ass under a Sabre2, come to Raeford. If you are qualified, I might even let you try to smoke me under my own velo. The bottom line here is that if the pilot can not wring the max out of a "lesser", more manageable canopy, then he or she has no business making that vanity Katana (or Velo) purchase. Chuck

Nice one, Slappie! I was thinking exactly the same thing.

My electric cart hauls ass, bro.

All the military clubs in the USA used to let dependants jump from whatever plane or helo was available that weekend. That regularly meant UH-1's, UH-60's, CH-47's. In Alabama it meant UH-1's and CH-54 SkyCranes. I have made a lot of "skydives" with sport gear out of C-130's and a few out of C-141's. I have a lot of sport jumps out of a Guatemalan Airforce DC-3 and an Arava. I have one sport gear jump out of a C-17 and one out of a C-5. I have a lot of MFF jumps out of C-130's, C-141's, CASA's, and all the other aircraft I listed. Chuck

I have only been in the tunnel one time in the last year, but it was for the entire day (training pre-MFF students). Back in the day, you would have had no problem getting in the tunnel so long as you wanted to get butt naked in there. One case of Miller Light was all it took to get Alsee to open up early or stay late for "the regulars." Those times are long, long gone. Chuck

Sure, no problem. Transfer to any of the miltary units that have bonafide access to the tunnel and then get a slot to HALO school. Wait, first get qualified in a relevant MOS that will get you an assignment to one of those units. You will get around 30 minutes in the cone in the basic MFF course. Once you pass the course, you can return home to your unit and, if you are filling an MFF billet, your S3 can request time at the facility for train-up purposes. Eligible units generally get the tunnel for one or more entire days at a time depending on what their needs are. The schedule is controlled by the S3 shop of 2nd Bn, 1st Special Warfare Training Group (ABN) which is the office I worked in my last five years in the army. The DSN number to the shop is 239-4011/4420. Ask for Stu or Sonny. "Oppurtunity" scheduling for local units (like the Golden Knights) is heavilly restricted and never a given. Tunnel time at the Matos facility for skydivers without MFF qualifications is incredibly rare these days. Strap hanging on with a scheduled unit is generally the only way non-MFF "skydivers" get in. If you have the quals, are in a SPECOPS unit on Bragg or Pope, and know the OIC or NCOIC of that unit then you might be able to sneak in. You may get some time in the tunnel if you go to GK tryouts as well, but that's not a given. Good luck, Chuck

That was a good post.

Was it Keiko? I saw her at not less than four events last year. She spends a LOT of money on coaching with Max Cohn and a couple of other people. A very nice lady.

You said it, Chris! I am just glad that we made it to the funeral. "Does THIS bother you?!" Chuck

My "not working my real job" schedule: I wake up at least two times per night and either squirt the neighbor's dogs with a water hose or shoot them with a BB gun to get them to SHUT THE FUCK UP! I then wake up not less than three times as the clock first goes off and then gets snoozed repeatedly by my lovely wife. Eventually, I can't stand the dogs anymore so I get my still-tired body out of bed. If Katie is back from PT I will make some coffee, if not I will come downstairs and logon and check e-mail and PM's while my cat walks back and forth across the keyboard or sits on my arms. I normally forget to eat breakfast. At some point I get up and wash my ass (or not) and put some clothes on. I will then generally drive to the dropzone and putz around wishing I had something better to do, like skydive. If someone DOES show up for a tandem or a mid-week AFF, I will do the work. If not, I will continue to dick around and eventually just start drinking in SkyCAT with Larry and Rob. Eventually, I go home and sit around on the computer some more and wait for Katie to get home. I grill a lot of our food and we always eat dinner together. If the mood strikes me Katie and I get on the skoot and tool around for a while. We are always home early during the week because we would not want to miss something important on TV like American Idol or The Amazing Race or Survivor. I am generally in bed at ten o'clock and asleep by eleven.

Negative. They are not all photoshop. There are some people out there with some very, very odd fetishes. I am not one of them, thank God.

That's the exact same color pattern as GK Andy Leake's Velo.

Hey, we may have gotten winded out, but man, that chicken was FANTASTIC!

If you vertical a gate you get the worst possible score for the round. That would be a "zero" in distance.

Unless things have changed since last season, the PST still uses video cameras to time the Speed runs and to validate clean runs (and verticals). The Dutch are the only people who use a ski-race-style timer/validator and it was their system that was used at the IPC event at Lake Wales. Henny Wiggers brought it over with him for the meet.

I have jumped with a lot of relatives and was happy to do so.

I got my ticket from Billy Rhodes and, comically, he was the one that drove the last nail in the coffin the first time I took the course over a decade earlier (when I failed)! Billy runs a tight ship when it comes to eval dives. He is not about to "give you a ticket" and that's what I like about him. Likewise, we paid for him to arrive early and run a pre-course for us which I found to be very beneficial. There is simply no substitude for doing full-speed workup dives with the guy that is ultimately going to pass or fail you. I passed the course (my second time around) "three up and three down" and I attribute that to many things. First, realizing that I had better really have the requisite mindset prior to spending that $800 (my total cost). Second, that I had never stopped doing SL instruction and had lots of practice chasing zooming students around the sky. Lastly, that I had spent well over 100 hours in the wind tunnel doing instructor drills. I had about 600 jumps when I went the first time and failed. I "took the short course" because I was too locked into a four-way mindset and simply was not keeping my eyes on the hips and was not quick enough to react when the evaluator went to hose me vertically. My bad. I went the second time when I had just at 2000 skydives and had been primarilly instructing for the past several years. The course was incredibly simple for me the second time because I was completely turned on mentally. "Real" AFF can be tremendously challenging; much more so than what even the hardest evaluator/course director will throw at you. You really need to have your shit together if you intend to do AFF for real. Currency with real AFF students is of paramount importance and it is not something that a person ought to feel comfortable doing only a few times a year. I find it incredibly rewarding, but sometimes a total drain. We stay very busy with AFF students at Raeford. Good luck in the course! Chuck Blue, D-12501 AFF-I (among other things)

Lyle and I drove over to your normal beach landing area near the pier and checked it out for a possible site of a future meet. While it's a bit narrow, even at low tide, we thought that all three classic events could be run there. Chuck

My wife Katie will be there as well with her S3.

Well, we were totally winded out for the entire weekend so there was no competition. Rain date for this event will be at The Cinco De Mayo Boogie at Chester, SC (Skydive Carolina) unless Danny won't let me run it then. On a positive note, Lyle showed up with our brand new course (20 IPC/PST markers) and we got to practice assembling the parts and putting up a course. Lyle and I ran an "intro to competition canopy piloting" seminar which drew quite a crowd on Saturday afternoon after the day was called for wind. Skydive Coastal Carolinas is a beautiful dropzone. Great new building, nice landing area, beautiful view of the ocean and the intracoastal waterway. Hopefully we can put something together down there on the beach in the near future. Chuck

Six to eight seconds is a LONG time to be spending in a turn. The average turn, regardless of degree of rotation, is four seconds with some competitors banging them out even quicker. If you jump a canopy with a very-long recovery arc, it is entirely possible to throw a hard turn and then settle into an incredibly steep dive for many hundreds of feet. Still, I think we are dealing with a simple play on words here. A "hook turn" is simply an agressive, HP turn executed prior to landing. There are plenty of people that refer to tall, carving HP turns as "hook turns" for the simple fact that they are speed inducing.

Amazingly, the three week contract I was due to start today fell through. That means I will actually be present for my own first meet! See you all there. Chuck

there are several BirdMan instructors at Deland: Ray Dutch, Pine Pinear, Louey (Sic) from the Relative Workshop. Perry Trowbridge gets by there quite often as well and does freelance stuff there.

Yeah, she told us she had to put the P-raff on you: "we ain't fucking, Jake"