brettski74

It's definitely not safe to jump out of planes. I don't think you're using this definition correctly. If you look at the example given, then it suggests that skiing is not an extreme sport, but extreme skiing is. What exactly constitutes extreme skiing, I can't say, but I assume that it would be any skiing of a character or kind farthest removed from the ordinary or average, such as backcountry skiing and/or steep, technical terrain. So skydiving is not an extreme sport, but perhaps extreme skydiving is. The original question was, however, is skydiving an extreme sport. Interesting how everyone concentrated on the extreme part of the question. Personally, I say down with labels. If the thread on rockclimbing.com is anything to go by, such labels are of most use in pissing contests or having a laugh. So far this thread isn't too funny. Skydiving is skydiving. Who cares about the rest, so let's forget the labels and figure out some way to improve the climate up here in the frozen north so I can go jump!

Relax! The article was written 7 years ago. Judging by your number of jumps you were not even close to being in the sport by then, so how do you know that this comment wasn't justified back then? When I was taught to pack, I was shown how to lay my lines in the packing tray to reduce the chance of snags during deployment. I would guess that we only have this knowledge today because of past experience - ie. I'm suggesting that people probably did have mals due to packing problems at some time in the past which drove someone else to figure out how to avoid it and show us newbies today. With our number of years in the sport, who are we to say that this wasn't the case 7 years ago?

Recipe ideas for the curious like yourself!

I thought you and stitch were a shoe-in. I was distraught when you missed the final cut.

Don't they grow them for meat and wool? I saw cat-herding on TV, once, so it must be true. I think they do it in Texas.

They shouldn't stand near the runway when the plane is coming in to land.

There are actually two people in the world working towards breaking both Kittingers record and the sound barrier during freefall. From the article, the balloons that Stearns is planning to use will cost around $3.1 million. At that price, someone else will definitely need to foot the bill. If you do a search on here, you may even find existing discussion about Fournier and Stearns.

Yours and Chuck's responses are great, but it does raise a few questions in me. Firstly, with the bailout bottle, how do you travel with that? I'm sure it's empty when you travel, but given that compressed gas is considered dangerous goods, does anybody ask questions when they see a gas bottle in your luggage? Do you declare it when you travel? Have you travelled with it? With regard to pre-breathing, are you actually breathing pure oxygen? For those not aware, oxygen is toxic. This is why when applying oxygen to trauma patients, we generally use a fairly low flow-rate. I'm not totally qualified to give oxygen, so I don't know all the ins and outs, but I have some knowledge from my prior work as a ski patroller. I was taught to never give pure oxygen (ie. high flow rate), as this will damage the lungs and can produce oxygen toxicity. So is it really pure oxygen in the system, or is it mixed with something else to reduce the partial pressure of oxygen? Is oxygen toxicity something that is considered during this pre-breathing time you talk about?

Rare earth magnets are permanent magnets. Under normal circumstances, they will not lose their magnetism ever - ie. you have to try pretty hard to demagnetize them. Given the strength of their magnetic properties and the nature of the material, it's easier to physically destroy the magnets than it is to demagnetize them.

What codec is the file you're trying to play? What codecs have you got installed? I have seen problems with some MPEG-4 codecs (xvid, divx, ffdshow) doing stupid shit before. I used to have all of them installed. Then I removed them all and just reinstalled ffdshow alone and things worked better. I've since re-installed xvid, as I used it for re-encoding edited video in Vegas. Another thing you can try is use a self-contained video player such as either MPlayer or VideoLANClient VLC is probably the easier one to use if you don't like command-lines. MPlayer does have a GUI, but I've never used it on Windows. On the other hand, mplayer does come bundled with it's own encoder, which is sometimes useful for transcoding material.

West Edmonton Mall is not the largest in the world any more. It's been surpassed in size by several other malls, most of which are in Asia. I believe that it's still the largest in North America. It's bigger than anything in Australia and worth a look if you do happen to pass through Edmonton. With regards to skiing or snowboarding, I'm going to assume since you've never seen snow, you've never skied or snowboarded before. That being the case, you don't need to spend big dollars going to Whistler and you don't really want to waste your time hitting big powder hills like Red. Skiing/riding in powder takes more skill and is hard work. You want to start on nice, gentle groomed runs. I'd probably suggest either trying it out on a smaller hill in town somewhere. I haven't been to Vancouver, but I'm assuming that something like Grouse mountain would be a better place to give it a try. Smaller, more economical. If you really want to try somewhere with big hills, then I'd suggest perhaps Lake Louise. It's near Banff, which has a number of other attractions worth seeing. I never really got into the BC Rockies, so perhaps someone can suggest somewhere that's more cost-effective to a beginner skier. I'd highly recommend that you get out east. I've only been to Halifax out there, so far, but it's a great town with a very fun atmosphere and lots of good local beers. If you like sports at all, try to go and see a hockey game, live. I would suggest trying to catch a game in Edmonton or Calgary. They're passionate about their hockey out there, and ticket prices are much more reasonable than Toronto. Most of my friends from here travel to Montreal to see live hockey if they need their fix, so that might be another option. Not sure about Vancouver or Ottawa as far as hockey goes. You don't need to understand the game, I didn't have much of a clue my first time around, but it was still a great game to watch. I hope that helps. I think other people have give you a lot of good ideas, though.

It also provides the guy with a place to rest his beer.

I don't know. I think a patch that allowed to to fly your body in various attitudes without a requirement for a tunnel or aircraft would be extremely cool. I'll get started on it right away.

What are you getting at? It sounds like you're suggesting that Atair didn't develop the magnetic riser covers. Given the information at hand, that just doesn't seem to be the case. UPT may be the first to incorporate them into sport rigs, but it sounds like Atair had them in their military gear sometime before UPT started playing around with the idea.

Are you planning to compete, ever? All competitive events require some sort of licence, as far as I'm aware, and if it's an event that requires jumping with other people, then you'll probably need your B licence. I never figured I'd be competing when I first started skydiving, but now I'm on my B and thinking that getting a 4-way team together will be a good way to have some fun and develop my skills at the same time, and having something to work towards (ie. the comp) is nice, too.

Nice work. I'm curious as to why the footage from the world meet appears to have been shot off a big screen on the ground. I've not competed, yet, but is it not possible to get the actual direct footage of your jump at such a meet?

By the way, what video editing software are you using?

Actually, I think this has already been discussed in here somewhere. Try a search - maybe in the SKydiving History and Trivia forum.

Whether you get away with that depends on what you do and how trigger happy the copyright owner is. Technically, you're not allowed to make derivative works without permission, but realistically, if it's small potatoes and non-commercial, then nobody will probably care. If you're really wanting to go totally legit, there are several places on the web where you can download creative commons music which is already licenced for use in non-commercial derivative works as long as you give credit to the artist/publisher. You will have to sift through the music to find the good stuff, but there is a reasonable amount of good music there in a huge variety of styles. Check out: PodSafe Music Network Magnatune PodSafe Audio Creative Commons You can also find details of the different creative commons licence types on there, too.

Tried to view the photo, but it required a Yahoo! login and even after I did login it said I was not authorised to view that photo. Maybe you can just attach a copy to a post?

I think that this might be a better idea! [Tongue][Cool] That's what I meant, but I guess it doesn't hurt to be explicit in here.

As I was informed in my recent canopy camp, a front riser dive should be nice and smooth. If the canopy is bucking and fluttering, then maybe you also have some brakes applied. Take a look at the tail of your canopy in full flight and perhaps get a rigger or canopy coach to watch you flying it. If the tail is being pulled down slightly even in full flight, then maybe you need to lengthen your brake lines. Once I did that, my front riser dives were smooth as silk - no more bucking and fluttering.

The front risers are usually harder to hold down. As the speed of the turn increases the load on the riser will increase and it will become even harder to hold down. This has been true on every canopy I've jumped. Shifting weight in the harness will also initiate a turn, but on my 210, I can shift almost all my weight onto one leg strap. If you want to know about gentle turns for lots of effort, try that. I really doubt that I could hold that kind of position in the harness while also trying to hold down a front riser in a spiral. A 210 is a fairly big canopy. Like everything fun in this world, if you really want to give it some, I would suggest using two hands.

Having an AAD doesn't change how I jump. I don't jump out of a plane thinking that I'm covered by my AAD. I jump out of a plane thinking that I'm covered by my skills, my training and my desire to keep breathing for many years to come. If I don't think I can complete a jump with those things alone, I don't do the jump. Given the choice to jump a rig with or without an AAD, I'll choose the one with the AAD, but I'm not above jumping a rig without one if I don't have such a choice. I think you have your facts wrong, there. Both CYPRES and CYPRES-2 units shut down according to the reports that I read. CYPRES-2 merely needed to be turned on again on the ground, so if anyone had jumped, the AAD would not have fired, since it was off. CYPRES needed a factory reset, which is a little annoying. That was the only difference I saw in the reports. Can someone who was there confirm or deny this? What's so bad about 395 people jumping out of a plane without AADs? Do you have any numbers about how many lives were saved by AAD fires during the record camp? Nobody jumped on that load, but if they had, I still feel that having 5 open reserve containers was a bigger safety concern than 395 AADs that had shut down. I'd agree that it may be a good idea to have some user-visible indicator that the AAD is no longer confident of its ability to identify a dangerous freefall scenario. I don't feel a need for such an indicator, but it's certainly not a bad idea. I have no doubt of the technical merit of the Vigil. I think it is probably a very good product and it definitely does have some advantages over the CYPRES-2, but this attitude that whenever something weird happens, it should fire to me seems a very bad idea. As you pointed out, in this case, the air pressure readings suggested something that invalidated at least one assumption used in the design of the AADs. In such a case, the device no longer has any idea where ground is in relation to the jumper nor what else is going on and therefore shouldn't really be making decisions that could potentially endanger the jumper and others. Deploying a canopy at the wrong time can do exactly that.

I jump gear that old and it's been fine for almost 100 jumps. I agree pretty much what everyone else says. Get your instructor and rigger to take a look at it. Note that if this includes a CYPRES, they only have a service life of 12 years. I believe that they just cease to work (ie. refuse to turn on) once the 12 year lifespan has expired. Keep that in mind when shopping, but otherwise, old gear is good for a new new jumper. It's cheaper. It will probably hold it's value better than new gear, and with the money you save, you can go and buy more jumps so you learn to fly better before you splash out on your sexy new custom rig.