brettski74

This is not entirely true. Rigging Innovations are still saying on their website that the Argus is not approved for use in any of their harness/container systems. There also seems to be some confusion surrounding Vector containers, also. There used to be a news item on the old Relative Workshop website. It's not on the new UPT website, but there's also nothing rescinding that earlier statement, so I'd check before installing one in a Vector container, if I was you. For reference, the statement from RWS was quoted here. Maybe someone from UPT can comment?

I agree pretty much with what you're saying. What interest rate are you using? It seems around 8%. For the purposes of a simple discussion, it's good enough to illustrate the point, but I'm curious as to what are you basing this rate on. In terms of downward pressure on prices, again, I think you're right. It will take external pressures to force prices lower. This may happen as more tunnels are built, but I'm not sure how fast that will happen, if at all. I wouldn't expect any great change anytime soon, though.

Wow! You still don't know how to do that?

I guess I have a lot of free time to fill in when I'm between contracts...

I thought this one had to be bullshit, but I found this FDA link, so maybe...

And the right hand side looks like the base of the Eiffel Tower. I wonder if the clouds often look down at the streets and try to find shapes in them?

What size Nuclear Weapon? I'm guessing something considerably less powerful than Tsar Bomba.

You didn't try hard enough. I moved to the other side of the world. She's threatened to visit once or twice, but never underestimate the power of several thousand miles of ocean as a barrier to invasion. If they ever build a trans-pacific tunnel, though, I'm screwed.

...while not yet conclusive, there is research suggesting a link between reduced exposure to germs during childhood development and the increased incidence of allergies? The thought is that more exposure to germs while a child leads to a greater development of the immune system cells that fight germs and that this happens at the expense of cells which are responsible for dealing with non-infectious substances. It's thought that a lack of such exposure may cause over-development of these other cells and lead to hypersensitivity to some substances, hence - allergies.

I call bullshit on this one. Antarctica is an obvious hole, but even if we allow you to exclude Antarctica, show me where in Australia there is a city called Rome. There is a Roma, but that's not Rome, nor was it named after the city in Italy. It was named after a woman, so it doesn't count.

Do you want an Automatic Activation Device, or Attention Deficit Disorder? It's AAD - two As and one D. You'll sound cooler if you get the terminology right.

Shania is not in the same league as Celine. At least Shania is hot, and I do recall reading somewhere that 54% of heterosexual men feels like a woman at least once per day or more.

A DC-9 is 27 feet tall. I've seen that typo floating around a bit lately. I think whoever wrote the original article for AP or wherever misquoted the specs and everyone else is just copying it. So much for journalistic integrity and checking your facts. Did anybody printing this crap think of how ridiculous this sounds? Who's seen a jet airliner that's got a wingspan that's more than 3 times its length?

It's not quite as simple as that, but yes - learning to jump in the US where it is cheaper would be a very smart move if this is something you're sure you want to do. I'm not sure whether Switzerland has it's own national skydiving organisation or not, however, if you obtain a USPA A licence, you should be fine almost anywhere with it. My licence is CSPA, and like the USPA licences, will generally be recognized in any FAI member country. Exact procedures when you visit vary from place to place, so you really need to talk to the staff at the dropzone at which you plan to jump to find out what they will require. Generally, when you go to a country other than the one that licensed you, take your log book and your licence, making sure all is in order and show it when you turn up. They may be happy to let you start jumping straight away, or maybe they will require you to purchase a temporary membership in the local organisation for insurance purposes, or maybe they will want you to do a coach jump so they can see that you actually can fly safely, but nobody's going to make you go through a course again if you can already fly.

You won't really know until you try it, but from playing around with freefall body positions in the pool myself, I think you'll find that bouyancy will have a hugely different effect on things than you get in the air. As you breath in, your lungs expand and become considerably lighter which will make you go head high. As you breath out, this tends to equalize out, but not enough to bring you back to level. You *may* be able to compensate a little by the placement of your weights, but unless they move around as you breath, I doubt you'll be able to maintain stability in the waterstream using freefall moves alone unless you're practising head down, standing or any other position you can think of where the centre of balance of your lungs is aligned vertically with your body's centre of balance. What I have found to be possibly useful in a pool is practising the sitfly position. Put your calves on the deck, thighs 90 degrees down the side of the pool and your back floating on top of the water. Then concentrate on feeling what the 90 degree angles at hips, knees and feet feels like, arch your back, keep the head back and the arms out to the side. It's not exactly the same feeling as the sky, but it feels a lot closer than trying to practice against a wall or something. Whether it's effective training or not, you'll have to wait until I get to do some freefall again. There's not much going on up here in the frozen north at the moment.

But it is placing a load on the canopy. Your canopy is made of nylon, which is quite thin and light for the amount of wing area it provides. Even if you took all of the lines off of it and everything else so that nothing is "hanging" from the canopy, spread it out in the air, and dropped it from some height, you'd still expect it to fall to the ground, right? What is providing the load to bring the wing down? It's own weight. If you made the same size and shape canopy out of heavy canvas, would you expect it to fall faster, slower or the same speed? Why?

Where is that from!? I need to know now. It was a running joke in a movie I saw that one of the characters kept doing a really bad impression of some supposed TV show that sounded just like that, but nobody ever could work out what he was talking about - and neither did I...

I'm lost. Were you jumping from a helicopter or did those headwinds suddenly drop off 10 feet below exit altitude? Strong headwinds has no effect on the angle on which you fall away from the plane. The only things that matter there are weight, body position and airspeed. Watching the path of skydivers exiting the plane will give you no indication of the ground speed or the strength of the uppers. You'll need to look at the ground to get some idea of that. But yes - you're right in saying that low ground speeds generally need longer exit separation. Before you go debating exit separation with your jumpmaster, make sure you're looking at the right things, first.

A person with a rigging ticket is not permitted to maintain their own main canopy? Or not allowed to maintain your main canopy? Either way, colour me confused, cos this doesn't make sense to me. What does a rigging ticket allow you to do, then?

Umm ... I'm a little confused here. Are you saying "yes" it encourages them or "no" it doesn't or are you saying, like a few others, there are many different things to consider?? [Crazy][Crazy] Let's restructure that last sentence a little... The following things are separate issues: - do you like your kids having sex? - is giving kids birth control a good thing? - is providing them birth control encouraging their sex life? The original poster was asking the third question. Many of us are confusing this issue with the other two.

Well, apparently it is against the law to mispronounce the name of the State of Arkansas in that state. Now, if they had just spelled it the way it sounds, they wouldn't have needed that law! Then again, I saw that on the internet, where we know that everything is absolutely true.

How did you get to the edge? Did you just walk up and sit down like a park bench or something, or did you climb up from the bottom, so you never really had to stand on top, or did you crawl out there? I was at the Cliffs of Moher in Ireland a couple of years ago where the winds rip in straight off the North Atlantic. It wasn't so much a problem that the winds were strong, but that they were strong and very gusty. One moment you'd be pushing against the wind pretty hard, and then they'd drop off, and it takes you an extra step or two forward to restabilise with that resistance gone, then it picks up again and pushes you back a step. It was winds like that that scared the shit out of me on that cliff. I crawled up to the edge.

Alpha mechanical are the guys behind the L1 design, right? There seems to be a lot of information about buying an L1 tunnel at http://www.bodyflightconcepts.com/. You might also consider an Aerodium design. It's much older, simpler and the airflow is not as good, but it still works ok, and is probably a lot cheaper. The rights and blueprints to this design seem to now be held by http://www.bodyflight.com/.

I think you on the right track there. Someone else suggested a fear of falling, which might be partly true, too. I'd actually explain it as a fear of injury. I am now able to trust my skills and my gear to deal with at leat 99% of situations that may arise when I exit the aircraft without serious injury. So I don't really worry about that on exits. On the other hand, I don't trust a step ladder to the same degree, nor do I trust a ricketty bridge, but I haven't used them as much or as often as I've skydived in the last 18 months. However, I do know that if I fall, it'll probably hurt. Try looking over that 300 foot cliff when the winds are gusting up to 40mph. You'll probably be a little more apprehensive. A 300 foot cliff I'm fine with. A windy 300 foot cliff scared the shit out of me!

From the main page... Dropzones -> Europe -> Croatia You can take it from there. Blue skies.