brettski74

You can probably find a lot of comments on this by doing a search, but here's my observations. 1. When you barrel roll, your forward speed slows down significantly and your vertical speed increases significantly so you're no longer doing your job of moving away from the formation. This is true of every person I've ever witnessed do a barrel roll during track-off and creates less room for the break-off waves behind you. 2. The changes in trajectory induced by the barrel roll make you less predictable during track-off, which makes you more of a hazard to other jumpers who may have multiple adjacent people to keep track of. 3. Everyone I've seen barrel roll completes the maneauvre in about 1 second. That's insufficient time to adequately identify and evaluate a potential hazard. Basically, if you think you're adequately clearing any airspace at all during such a maneauvre, you're kidding yourself. 4. While you're playing around with your barrel roll, you're not clearing the air below and in front of you, which is where you should be going. If someone is above and behind you, and you're both looking where you're going, the high guy can see the low guy and be able to avoid him accordingly. If the high guy is busy rolling around on his back, however, the low guy waving off might be the last thing he doesn't see. 5. In my opinion, I get more useful information about what's above and behind me by looking over both shoulders while flaring at the end of my track and prior to the wave off.

What if that pilot, regardless of how experienced or otherwise they were, told you something that was wrong? Where did I patronize anyone? I totally agree. However, if someone makes a comment that I believe is wrong and warrants correcting, then I will say something. If this thread is anything to go by, there are other people who feel similarly. Nobody said anything about Will's level of experience until he he brought it up and nobody started talking down to Will until he suggested they were and that he'd said nothing wrong.

Refer to my post above. There are many people who will tell you to buy used for your first rig, but as far as the container is concerned, the reasons for buying used first has nothing to do with downsizing, which is the reason you gave. Back to the original comment which prompted skybytch's reply, she was right on the money. You made a comment about containers that was incorrect. She corrected you. She then went on to explain further why some of what you said may not be applicable. She did not make any comment about what you said about body position in the harness. There was no judging there, but you seem to have taken it that way. Seriously, chill.

Experienced denotes time spent engaged in or working on a subject. Talent typically denotes a natural ability to learn a particular skill. Either way, you haven't really defined anything. What you're asking is vague and highly subjective, so people are not all answering the same question and the results of your poll will be largely meaningless as a result. Again, how do you compare progress in things that have entirely different goals. If I asked you, "Which is faster, running or walking?", the question is clear. Both running and walking are ways of moving from place to place and running is generally a faster way to move from point A to point B along the same path. There's a clear and easy comparison here. Freefall skills and canopy skills do not have any common, objectively measurable result, so how do you compare them? I understand your question. I suspect it is you that does not. Define "better".

There are a couple of things to think about. Body position and/or positioning of the leg straps whilst under canopy may help and on the upside, this doesn't require you to change anything about the gear. Given that these are rental rigs, this may be the only option available to you. Aside from that, I can tell you a couple of gear related things that can make a difference. Modern rigs generally have a good amount of padding around the leg straps. This prevents the load-bearing webbing from cutting into you so harshly. Older rigs may have less padding, or the padding may be worn through normal wear and tear. I have an old Vector 2 which I still use as a backup rig in a pinch. The first time I jumped it after getting my Vector 3, I found it extremely uncomfortable. As a result, I had a rigger sew new foam padding into the leg straps. After that, it was much more comfortable. Perhaps not quite as good as my new V3, but at least in the same ball park. Another thing that may make a difference is how well the harness fits you. I've test jumped my girlfriend's rig. She's shorter and smaller than I am, so while I can fit into her rig, I have to adjust the leg straps much longer to do so. This leads to more webbing directly exposed to my body without padding underneath it. Again, this made for a less comfortable jump. If the harness is not an ideal fit for you, then it may be that the padding just isn't long enough to make the canopy ride comfortable for you. Selecting a rig with a larger harness may improve the situation for you.

I generally advise new jumpers against buying new for both the harness/container and the canopy, but the reasons for each are different. The reasoning you've stated is one of the reasons why I would suggest against buying a new canopy for your first rig. On the other hand, if you make a smart decision on the container size, your first container can should last you through two downsizes, so you will get a lot of jumps and/or years out of it. The reason that I suggest against a new container purchase for your first rig is that you don't know what you don't know which can come into play in at least two ways: Everyone has their own brand preferences. No one preference is right or wrong, it's just an opinion. Few people have enough gear knowledge and experience to make a well-informed decision on what they really like when they have perhaps 100 or less jumps. I've seen enough people come into the sport, buy gear and then give it all up within a year or two that to me it doesn't make financial sense to buy your first container new. None of those people thought they would be over it within a year. They were all just as much into it as I was at the time. If you buy a new container, in addition to the higher initial purchase price, expect to take a bigger loss when you sell than you would on a well maintained used container. New gear will always be there and if you wait a few hundred jumps, you'll be in a much better position to figure out whether you're here to stay or just passing through and you'll also have a much better idea of what things in a rig might matter to you, as opposed to everyone else.

But these are apples/oranges or skydiving/driving comparisons. For every reason you can come up with why one is easier of harder than the other, I can come up with an opposing reason. For example, you stated that you have more time under canopy than in freefall. Great, but freefall maneauvres can be done much faster than canopy maneauvres, so while I may have 3 or 4 minutes to play under canopy and only one minute of freefall, I can do many freefall maneauvres more times in 60 seconds than I can do canopy maneauvres in 4 minutes. Practising a maneauvre 15 times on a jump is probably going to help me progress faster than practising a maneauvre 5 times on a jump. So then you mention that freefall happens a lot faster, so therefore it requires faster reaction times and precise inputs to achieve good results. I can say that canopy maneauvres have much larger closing distances and therefore require greater spatial awareness and precise inputs to achieve good results... wrt hop and pops vs freefall skydives, if you're choosing to concentrate on canopy skills and are therefore doing predominantly hop and pops, again that doesn't make it easier. It just makes it the skills you've chosen to concentrate on. By the same token, I can choose to concentrate on freefall, get out at full altitude, deploy as low as I feel safe doing and then fly straight back to the DZ using my canopy as nothing more than a brake to avoid an otherwise fatal impact at the end.

That doesn't make it easier to master. Most people with 100 jumps haven't ever tried any kind of high performance landing. I'm not suggesting that they should, but just because most skydivers typically concentrate more on freefall skills first doesn't make it the easier thing to learn. As for the original question, I think this is a lot like asking which is safer, driving or skydiving? There is not really a good or relevant comparison between the two, so it's not really a valid question in the first place. Define "easy" and "master". When you do, you'll probably find a much bigger debate on whether your definitions are accurate representations of what is "easy" and what is "mastery" and whether they're reasonable parallels between any two disciplines.

Sure it is. Log books can easily be faked to show higher amounts of freefall time than has actually been acquired. The only barrier you've added is ethics, but if someone thinks that doing 500 H+P with virtually no freefall experience is perfectly fine to enable them to control a whuffo passenger in freefall, then I suspect that ethics isn't too much of an issue for them.

I'm not confused, but perhaps you are. Maybe you should go back and read the thread again.

We already have all the facts needed. As Kallend said, Newtonian physics have withstood the test of time well. The law of inertia states that unless acted upon by a non-zero net force, an object at rest will remain at rest and an object in motion with continue to move in a straight line at a constant velocity. Prior to exit, you are travelling with the plane. For simplicity, let's say that the plane is travelling straight and level as the lift provided by the wings is exactly countering the force of gravity and the thrust from the prop/s is exactly countering the drag experienced by the plane as it passes through the air. Let's also say you're floating on the outside of the plane or hanging on the strut of a cessna. You let go of the plane. The plane continues on jump run, flying straight and level at constant speed. The path that your body moves along as it moves away from the airplane will be the net result your initial velocity with respect to the observer and the cumulative effect of the forces which act upon your body and of those which act upon the plane. We've already stated that the plane is not changing direction or speed. From the law of inertia we know that the net force acting on the plane is zero. Up until the time that you let go of the plane, you were traveling with the plane, not moving towards it or away from it, so for an observer in the plane your initial velocity is also zero. What forces are acting on your body at this time? What determines the magnitude and direction of those forces? If the upper winds are to have an effect on the path your body takes as it moves away from the plane, as observed from the plane, one of two things must be true. Either there is some force acting upon your body that is dependent on the upper winds, or the law of inertia is wrong. Which is it?

Actually his comment wasn't that specific at all. If someone tells me that they're looking to buy a complete system and that they only prefer to buy new, that to me sounds like they're planning to buy all new kit. You're right. If you're smart about what you buy, a container could last through two downsizes on the main canopy, but nowhere has anyone suggested that you'll need a new container after 100 jumps. The comment has been made, however, to get a couple hundred jumps under your belt before you buy new. There's a significant difference there. Getting a couple hundred jumps before you splash out and get new gear give you the chance to figure out a few things, first. Are you here for the long haul, or are you just a tourist passing through. I've seen a bunch of people go through the student program in the past 4 years. None of them thought they'd be done with it within a year, yet a significant number of those people are no longer skydiving. After a couple hundred jumps, you should have a little better idea of whether or not you're a tourist. What gear do you really want/need? When I had 19 jumps, I barely knew all the options that there were for me in the sport, let alone what options I wanted to pursue. I also had no real knowledge of gear from experience. Until you get out there and start wearing, flying and packing the gear, you're really just guessing what you really want and as you do start to get some experience, you may figure out that your early guesses at the right gear really don't fit what you want as well as you thought it would back when you didn't know what you wanted. Basically, at 19 jumps, you don't even know what you don't know. You're not even in a position to guess with any real confidence. A couple hundred jumps is nothing to do with the first downsize or any need for new gear. It's about developing the knowledge and experience required to start making a more informed decision on what gear you really want or need. If you buy used now and it turns out that what you thought you wanted really is you, it's no big deal. New gear will always be there and since you bought used and looked after your gear, you can sell it to recover most of your money once your new gear arrives. If you buy new now and then 6 months from now discover that skydiving is not for you, or that a Storm really isn't well suited to the kind of canopy flying that you want to do, you can still sell the gear, but you're going to take a much bigger loss when you do so.

How big is the pilot? What is he/she wearing? You said no inputs, so I won't ask about his/her body position. What's the elevation of the landing area? What is the temperature and humidity? And about the canopy, I still don't know enough about the canopy. What fabric is it? What model is it? In what condition is the fabric? In case it's not clear to you yet, you're not going to find an answer here. All other things being equal, a smaller canopy should be faster than a larger canopy and a 9-cell is usually quicker than a 7-cell, but there are far too many variables that will affect the forward speed of a canopy in flight for there to be any single useful equation to calculate the forward speed of a canopy in flight. If you're really keen to get a number, I'd suggest finding someone with a radar or using a GPS - assuming that you have a reasonably accurate measure of the ground winds at the time. Descent rate can be measured with a GPS or a digital altimeter. Bear in mind that even then, those values will still vary depending on all of the non-canopy related factors mentioned above, including temperature, altitude, clothing, humidity and body position.

I'm sure that this sounds like a perfectly good plan to you, and I'm not saying it's a bad plan, but it's certainly not the best plan. With your proposed plan, either one of two things will happen. You'll either rush to downsize so that you can save money on rental fees, or you'll spend more money in rental fees than it would have cost you to buy a complete system with a 190 main, and if you bought that complete system and looked after it, you should be able to recoup 90% of that money when you sell it to the next person. Rental fees you will never recoup and depending on where you jump and what is included in the gear rental, you may not pack the rental gear, either, so you'll be missing out on the potential gear knowledge from packing your own gear for those jumps. The other point I would make is that for someone with 19 jumps and very little experience with different gear, you seem very set on a container that you've probably never jumped or packed and on a canopy that I'm sure you've never flown. Couple that with the fact that you very likely know little about the sport at this stage or what you really want to do. For most people at 19 jumps, they don't know what they like or what's possible in the sport, so they don't start developing a really good picture of where they want to go until they've done a couple hundred jumps and figured out that there here to stay, at least for a while. A 190 square foot square or lightly tapered canopy like a Sabre2, Safire2, Pilot, Spectre or Storm would be a great first canopy for you. Buy one used. Put a couple hundred jumps on it. In the meantime, you're learning about the sport, about gear, about why you might want to choose one canopy or container system over another and how that might fit into the goals you start to develop in the sport. As has been said, you can probably pick up a good complete system for somewhere in the $3000 dollar range and when you're done, sell it for, at worst, $2500, although probably more like $2700-2900. Alternatively, you can disregard the advice of a number of people who've been there and done that and spend a bunch more money doing your own thing and learning less in the process.

I suspect that Sangi's point was that our attitude toward what is "safe" or at least a reasonable level of risk will change over time, not that we all develop a death wish. For example, my first canopy was a PD 9-cell 210. I was loading that at about 0.95:1. When I first started, I never used front risers as part of landing because diving at the ground and increasing my speed during landing was a more advanced and riskier move. I also said that I had no interest in swooping or high performance landings. As I gained skill and experience I started to experiment with double fronts. Today, I jump a Sabre2 150 loaded at about 1.36:1. I often do 90 or 180 front risers turns to land and find such landings fun. I'm no swoop jock just yet, nor is it on my immediate list of goals in the sport, but at the same time, I can see myself transitioning to a Katana at some point, downsizing further and perhaps one day even flying a cross-braced canopy.

You're deluding yourself. The only way an exiting jumper will stay directly below you is if the aircraft from which you launch is horizontally stationary within the air mass. Untethered balloons are excellent at this. You could also get this situation if you exit from a helicopter that is hovering stationary within the air. Despite your post, New Zealand is not the only place in the world to experience strong upper winds, nor are you the only person to have jumped in strong uppers. The upper winds tell you how fast the air mass at a particular altitude is moving with respect to the ground. Since neither you nor the aircraft are tethered to or pushing off the ground in any way, this has absolutely no effect on your trajectory with respect to the aircraft once you leave. If I exit from a Twin Otter doing 85 knots IAS, it will look pretty much the same from the door of the aircraft whether the upper winds are doing 10 knots, 50 knots or -200 knots. It will look different to an observer on the ground, for sure, but that's because they are tethered to the ground and the body of air through which I'm falling is moving with respect to them and therefore pushing me horizontally with respect to them. But you jump from slower flying aircraft, you say. Great! Finally something that *will* make a difference to what you observe in the door. If you jump from a slower moving aircraft, you will appear to fall away from the plane more steeply, but again, absolutely nothing to do with the upper winds and everything to do with the aircraft's indicated air speed.

It certainly sounds like you got a bad deal, but there's at least two sides to any story, so I can understand the reasoning behind disallowing negative reviews from ex-employees. I don't know where to find the review submission guidelines, but I'm thinking that the message that you're wanting to send may not be out of place in the Instructors forum and that would be a better place. It would allow the DZO a right of reply as well as allowing other instructors who worked their to comment on their experience. Multiple people posting similar experiences with an employer will have a lot more credibility. If you're just one guy who's worked there and didn't like something, it's difficult to determine whether what you're saying is a reasonable account of what happened or whether there's more than you're telling us and you're just some guy with an axe to grind.

Or... get some short, low profile nuts and bolts. Rivets are a pain in the arse when you realize that you need to change something, or if you decide that you want to get yet another box sometime later.

Why? Used gear is a much better choice for your first rig. The wait time for a harness/container system from UPT is currently 9 weeks. At times it's been much higher than this. Other manufacturers have varying delivery times, but expect a couple of months at least. Used gear is ready to go now. Assuming that you're in a rush, you could have gear shipped to you overnight for a few hundred dollars if you're in that much of a rush. New gear will set you back in excess of US$6000 for a complete system including AAD. You should be able to find decent used gear for half that price. Your profile doesn't tell me where you're from, but assuming you're in the US and can jump for something like $25, that's 120 more jumps worth. While you're waiting for your new gear, you'll probably have to rent, which in many places will double the cost of your jumps while you wait as compared to the cost of your jumping if you bought new gear right now. When it comes time to sell your gear, providing you've looked after it, you'll get a good chunk of your money back from used gear, whereas if you're selling new gear, even though it's newer, you'll be competing in a market where there's a lot of other used gear in good condition. You can probably get a higher price for a newer rig, but you'll probably take a hit on the resale in order to compete with the other used gear on the market. Being new, you'll probably go through one or two downsizes in the first 300-400 jumps and then possibly settle on something for a while longer. You'll get fairly limited value out of a new canopy that you only put 100 jumps on. If you've got oodles of money and losing US$6000-7000 is nothing to you, then by all means, go ahead and buy your first rig brand new, but if not, there are a helluva lot of reasons why a lot of people will suggest that you check out used gear for your first rig and save yourself a bunch of moeny to spend on extra jumps, coaching and tunnel time.

Skydiving can be as risky or as safe as you choose to make it. Nobody's forcing you to jump from planes. Nobody is forcing you to participate in any particular discipline, on any particular jump or to jump with any particular people. The choices you make will determine just how much risk you're taking on. As far as your comments about being conservative, that's great, but you're new. Your attitudes will probably change over time. I'm quite sure that there are a lot of people out there flying a cross-braced canopy loaded at 2:1 or more that once upon a time never thought they'd be flying a canopy at such a wing loading. In fact, at one point in time, the conventional wisdom that such a wing loading was unnecessary, unreasonable and just plain unsafe, and on the canopies of the time, it probably was. The sport will change over time, as will your attitudes toward it. Just keep learning, make sensible choices and there's a good chance you'll be around for a good long while to come.

Why? For sure, you would probably have looked at your altimeter just prior to deciding to cut away, but once you start your emergency procedures, I don't see much useful information to be gained from your altimeter until you're flying under your reserve. What if the webbing over your shoulders has moved? It's not just your handles that may have moved. You may have to look and or feel around just to find the webbing at the shoulder. Why flail around looking for that when you could instead be flailing around looking for the thing you actually want to find? What if the G-forces from your spiralling ball of shit is affecting your freedom of movement? I can look down and see both handles at once. If I'm looking at them, I can grab them faster and with less movement than I can feel around "in the dark", so to speak. There may certainly be circumstances where feeling down the webbing may be a good approach, but wherever possible, I'll be looking at my handles and grabbing them directly.

Talk to the instructors and/or S&TA or equivalent at your dropzone. They're the ones you ultimately have to convince, not some random strangers on the other side of the internet. For one thing, I'm not looking at this chest strap that you're talking about so I can't see how you're planning to wear it, whether it may introduce any issues with your emergency procedures should you experience a malfunction. If it was me, I'm also thinking that even if you have no way to aim it, you could still be distracted by the thought of wanting to protect it during exit, in freefall and/or under canopy. At 34 jumps, you're still a novice and there's still a lot of things that aren't second nature, yet. You need your attention focused on those things, not whether you're going to damage your techie toy.

I've never been comfortable with people describing copyright infringement as theft. There are actually rulings made on record which clearly state that this is an invalid comparison. For me, the main difference is that if you steal my truck, I cannot use it while it remains stolen, whereas if I am listening to an unlicensed copy of a copyrighted work, I'm not affecting the licensee's ability to enjoy the copy or the copyright holder's ability to license the work to anybody. Secondly, theft is a criminal offense. While under ccertain circumstances, copyright infringement may become criminal, Copyright infringement in and of itself, is a civil matter. Even where the infringement fulfills the criteria for one of the criminal copyright infringement acts, it's covered by an entirely separate set of laws to that for theft. I'm not saying that copyright infringement is right or good, but it's not theft and while copyright lobby continue trying to push that analogy, they're going to continue to alienate and/or confuse people. Back to the I think I should be allowed to do ... arguments, if you don't like the terms of an agreement - in this case a license to limited use of a copyrighted work - you're not obliged to buy. If I rented you my car and in the rental agreement we specifically wrote that you were only permitted use of the car within the state of California, would you try to argue that you should be free to drive the car to Mexico even though we agreed up front that this use was not allowed? That said, I think that record companies do a terrible job of identifying exactly what rights are being licensed to the purchaser of a CD. It seems to me that this would come under contract law. Software publishers go to somewhat ridiculous lengths to spell out the terms of the copyright licence when you buy software. All I ever seem to get on my CDs is a statement to the effect of All Rights Reserved. Unauthorized reproduction, copying or rental of this recording if prohibited by law. Nowhere does it actually state what rights were granted when I purchased the CD, however, I think it's clear to everyone involved in the transaction that I am purchasing at the very least, the right to private home listening, so then we are talking about an implied licence. I'll concede that in tandem videos you are still done on the unauthorized copying/reproduction, but many people keep talking about sync rights. If you think it's legal for me to sync a song from a CD with my skydiving videos for my own personal use, then it seems that I must have sync rights. It's the distribution rights that I would need in order to distribute that synced video to others that's lacking. Am I missing something here?

Get a drill. Drill out the rivets.

Start Skydiving in Ohio has something called fast slots. People can manifest themselves using their fast slots card. I'd ask the folks at Start Skydiving if you want to know more.