SkymonkeyONE

How about swooping through the tent/vending area? Is that OK? My heel still hurts from running that one out on the tarmac last year!

Matt: what you are calling a "normal" flat pack is generally called a "stack pack" around here. Angela: I was just talking about how I hold the canopy when I am flaking it prior to laying it on the ground. Once on the ground, the best way I have found to manage small (and extremely small) canopies is to coccoon the canopy to the width of the bag, kneel on the bottom eight inches of the canopy (at the lines), fold the rest of the canopy straight up towards your chest, roll it back down to the ground like a sleeping bag while making sure the coccoon stays tight, clear the bridle while maintaining the tight roll, jam the bag under the roll and stuff the rolled part into the bag, spin around towards your container while holding onto the bagged canopy (to prevent it from slipping back out). Lastly, pull that last eight inches that you were kneeling on up into the bag and do your locking stows. That's the easiest way to manage a PRO pack I have ever seen and it's what I do every single time now. Chuck

Same as I do every year.

Is your Sabre2 so slippery that you cannot contol it when PRO packing it? Sabre2's have packing tabs for a reason. Once again, I regularly switch between two types of side packing (stack and roll) and PRO packing with my Sabre2 97 wingsuit canopy. If a canopy has packing tabs then it is obviously OK to side pack it. I know more than a couple of people who sewed packing tabs on their Stillettos to make side packing even faster.

When I was ten years old that was one big-ass hill! I haven't been back to Denver in a very long time, but I bet it would be a great "learner" hill for ground launching. It is definitely steep enough! Smooth grass, nice run-off, and right in town (on the Littleton/Englewood side if I remember correctly).

Two words: linear editing. We have three identical stations setup with digital boards, DVD burners, and combo VHS/DVD recorders. It takes us exactly the same amount of time to burn a DVD (and a stills DVD) as it does to make a VHS tape. We do vastly more DVD's these days than VHS. No firewire needed with this combo, therefore no need for my PC 109 to ever sit in it's docking cradle except at the end of the day when I sit it there to charge off of my helmet. Chuck

Seriously? I think they are all the same when it comes to actual performance. I have the Xdream .3 and it's identical to Max's Royal lenses. Ultimately, it's what you can get for "the right price at the right time." As to the .3 being too wide for tandems, that's just not correct. I pull my .3 back to about .45 for tandems without it getting out of the focus range. My lens was built for a PC 105 and I found a step ring to fit it to my 109 for $15 at Best Buy, with a filter! Chuck

Come on, Steve. You know you could be busting some cool ten second flights down Ruby Hill. You could launch right next to the ten-year-olds on their sleds.

I have never used a bridle extension with any psycho pack I ever did. Those only seem neccessary on the largest canopies. For what it's worth, I think PRO or psycho packing anything larger than a 120 is dumb. If you can't hold the entire canopy off the ground with your hand at your waist, then you are simply fighting the material. It's very-simply much faster to stack or roll pack larger canopies. And to the 30-jump girl who was misinformed that side packing equals off-heading openings: you might be fascinated at just how many people stack pack and roll pack their Stillettos and Velocities. People like Scott Rhodes, Craig Girard, Chris Wagner, Neal Beverly, and Paul Rafferty (RIP). Ultimately, any packjob you can get into the bag is going to open cleanly so long as you have set both brakes, un-collapsed your slider, cocked your pilot chute, and run the slider cleanly up your lines without any twists. One general method or little packing nuance might change the time it takes to open, but any and all will get the job done so long as you can get it in the bag. Seriously. I regularly switch up packing my wingsuit rig just to see if any one type makes any difference; it doesn't. Chuck

Troy keeps that 74 for windy days, or so he tells me.

The only things I find a Psycho pack beneficial on are brand-new, and I mean BRAND NEW, super-slippery canopies.

I have at least five helmets, but only regularly wear my older 2000-model "pimp" mindwarp and my Optik Illusion. I only very, very rarely wear my factory diver and I hardly ever wear my newer "pimpdaddy" mindwarp.

Huh? Bobby Pritchard, when he regularly jumped wingsuits at Raeford, was 18 years old, about five eight and 140 pounds. He flies helicopters in the army now and is deployed overseas. He regularly jumped a protrac and downloaded all the stuff with jumptrack software; at least I think that's what it's called. I don't use the product. Regardless, Bobby jumped an original classic and ruled the sky.

I traded Jamie Knoop (Z-hills swooper) straight across for his 84. I don't wear weights generally, but will probably put some on to load it up to about 2.2 for speed courses at meets. It's pretty amazing how much more float I get on rears with the extra five square feet over my head. A 90 would be an even better canopy if I regularly wore weight, but I am just not into wearing lead at all as most of the jumps on my Velo are AFF work dives and the occasional non-wingsuit fun jump. Besides, a 90 would not fit into either of my containers. No, I don't have any pics of me under the 84; I just got it put in my rig late last week. I misqouted my wingload earlier; it's actually 2.05.

Bobby Pritchard. He has the jump track data to back it up.

High: I got a "real" job that pays tremendously well for the amount of time I have to spend doing it. Low: It is going to cause me to miss the Dublin Boogie.

We are a Netflix family.

No, you don't have much style JP. Like the "northside" JP, I have been malingering on my pension and sponging off my wife for quite some time. Working most every weekend I was in town last year I still only made $3400 at Raeford, but maybe that's because I don't race to be first in rotation. Ultimately, I decided to get a "real" job to pay off my debt and be able to afford more exotic boogies. Chuck

"Best performing" is totally subjective. What makes one person happy will not impress somone else who is into something completely different. Some people like a quick-turning, twitchy canopy and some people like a "solid" feel. Furthermore, even "same event" comparisons don't work well on the internet. A canopy's turn rate, float across the ground, and shutdown are all heavilly influenced by flying style. Chuck

I just recently upsized to a Velocity 84 (2.04 without any lead; perfect). I jumped a Velocity 79 for two years and had a Velocity 75 for a while as well. I owned a VX 74 for a season (2000), but hated the openings so I sold it to Troy Ketsdever. Chuck

Did you also jump a Blade when you were demoing your Nitro? The increased forward speed and ground hungriness you describe is just like a Blade (as compared to a Nitro).

It's the one or two bad apples that make my job so fucking miserable on these forums. I am incredibly tired of all of it.

Katie posted pics of us in the sombreros right after we got them!

WML?!

Seriously? It happens all the time here at Raeford. "Big" is a relative term, though. The worst offender is a guy that spirals his Stilletto 135 down past guys under Velocity 90's and repeatedly lands right dead in the middle of our swoop lane. The second worse offenders are the entire group of military jumpers from a unit on Fort Bragg who spiral their blue and red Silhouettes down in front of us as we are setting up for final at 1000 feet under our Velos. Chuck