brettski74

So is a DC-9 jet or climbing a television broadcast antenna tower, but a lot of people want to do that, too.

Also flew Canada->US return, returning about a week ago. Similar experince to the others - namely that at the time, flights into the US were not permitted any carry on bag, although a personal item such as a purse or laptop was permitted. Flights originating in the US had normal carry on rules applied. According to the media, the rule changes were dropped about a week ago, and flights into the US should be under normal carry on baggage rules. That said, from previous experience, never assume that you'll be permitted to carry anything on and be prepared to have to check it should anyone require it - ie. carry it on inside a bag of some sort so that if anything happens and you are required to check it, you're not stressing about whether it gets damaged or handles pulled during handling.

If I'm understanding correctly, you routinely run intentional cutaway training for skydivers at your dropzone who have never before had to cut away their main. If that's true, how can they know whether the training really made their first real cutaway less stressful. I've cutaway twice. Neither was intentional. Before I had my first cutaway I imagined that it would be a very stressful situation, that things would be happening so fast and wondered in the far corners of my mind as to whether I would react appropriately under pressure. When it happened, it wasn't stressful. If anything, my perception of things seemed to make everything slow down, so it didn't feel fast or rushed. It wasn't scary and I was back up on the next load. Basically, it was the opposite of almost everything I'd imagined before the actual event. My second cutaway experience was similar to my first and to be honest, neither then nor now do I feel that my first cutaway made me any more capable or confident to deal with my second one than I was for my first. I'll accept that every single one of your intentional cutaway students who have later gone on to have a real malfunction and cut away found the experience to be much less stressful than they'd imagined, but then again, so does virtually everyone I know who has had to cut away, so I don't think you can attribute that to the intentional cutaway training.

A lot of whuffos and newbie skydivers have exciting, fanciful and even romantic ideas about what it means to be a skydiver. After you've been in the sport for a while you start to realize that: your friends don't really care whether you're a skydiver or not. They only really care about who you are, that you treat them with the respect they deserve and that you enjoy each other's company people you meet are not so much impressed by your status as a skydiver, but mostly are just curious about something that they don't know much about and possible have romanticized in their minds. After you've spoken to a dozen or more non-skydivers about skydiving, you start to realize that most of them ask much the same questions, which can make it become a tedious topic at times. Really, why do you want to be called a skydiver? Know thy self. Being a skydiver is a lot like being in love. No one needs to tell you that you're in love. You just know it, through and through.

I have an Oxygen, which is similar - especially since as a general rule I try really hard to avoid opening the visor, as the mechanism on the Oxygen is a pain in the arse to close again. The best advice I can give is breathe in through your nose and out through your mouth. When breathing out, try to purse your lips toward the vent so as to avoid exhaled air being deflected back into the helmet. What you're trying to do is bring dry(-ish) fresh air in past the visor and through your nose and then pass the moist exhaled air as much as possible outside the helmet. The in through the nose part is just as important as you need to keep fresh air coming into the helmet to remove the moisture that will otherwise build up from evaporation on the skin and eyes, and from the portion of exhaled air that will inevitably remain inside the helmet. I've had this work quite well for me on quite a few climbs to altitude on oxygen where the helmet was on and closed for a considerable period of time. That said, it's not perfect, and every now and then, you may experience some fogging under more adverse conditions. If you have time, breathing as described will clear it if you have some time, otherwise you're back to removal of either the visor or helmet. I've also tried a few homebrew anti-fogging suggestions. I've tried various soaps which all seem to have zero effect, but didn't really seem any worse than the performance of a brand new visor. I also recently found this article but I've not yet tried it or given much thought to the chemistry that may be at work. I may try it once the weather warms up a little up here, but if anyone else tries it, I'd be curious to hear how effective it was or wasn't.

3-point 30-ish ways for the first couple of days with 3 groups of about 32 people. Today we were doing 3 point 50-ish ways with two groups of 47 and 48 people. We start on 100-way sequentials tomorrow. One of the 50-ish way groups today actually did some really pretty skydives, including a full 3 points completed. There were more completions during the 30-ways, but if I'm not mistaken, there were only ever 2 points completed. There always seemed to be somebody out by the 3rd point or we hit break off.

Mile High Parachuting at Arnprior might be an option, also. They list their maximumm student weight for tandems as 230lb, although there's nothing about solo student weight limits, but you can always call them and ask. That said, there may not be too many dropzones that can answer your questions at this time of year, being that it's winter and most people don't like to jump when it's this cold.

No musical farting?

http://www.chutingstar.com/archives/00000139.html Clicky!!!

Michael, I don't think people are trying to beat you up over your specific canopy progression - well at least some of them aren't. It may have been aggressive. It may have worked out ok for you so far and may continue to work out well. That's great. The message you're giving about talking to an instructor rather than learning to skydive on the intertubes is also great. What's not great is the message you're giving about what is an appropriate wing loading or canopy size for a jumper with limited experience and almost no currency. The problem is that many people will not read/hear your disclaimer about how that may not be a great idea for many people. All they will read that some guy jumped this canopy at this number of jumps and it worked out great and that's a message that gives many coaches and instructors cause for concern.

Picton, perhaps? I've not jumped there, but there's gotta be some decent instructors there. As far as your answer, I like the fact that you mentioned altitude awareness in your answer, but I'd want to hear that if you really are that low that cutting away is not an option and that you have the presence of mind to realize this and try to make the best of it, that you're only going to touch the rear risers to land that sucker.

I don't think anyone is commenting on whether or not it is valid to express a ratio in n:m form, however, he has made a very valid and correct point in that the OP is expressing the ratio backwards. If we're understanding him correctly, his suspended weight in pounds is roughly 1.18 times the square footage of the canopy he is contemplating - around 200 pounds. This gives a wing loading of 1.18:1, which may be spoken as 1.18 to 1. Note the order of the two numbers as this is important. A ratio of 1:1.18 is the inverse of this number, or roughly 0.85:1, which would indicate that his suspended weight was closer to 144 pounds. It's also common when the ratio has been normalised such that the second number in the ratio is 1 to simply drop the second number and refer to it as the first number only, which is why most people simple state that they have a wing loading of 1.18. I disagree. Put the numbers backwards in a discussion, then have a newbie come along and you will probably confuse them about wing loading, how it's calculated and what an appropriate wing loading for a given person might be. If skydiving was the only place in modern society where one might deal with ratios and they were always written/spoken backwards like that, I'd agree that this is not confusing, however, since ratio notation has a clearly defined and specific meaning in mathematics, that this is widely used in a number of areas of society and that people in skydiving may come from any of these backgrounds, I think it's somewhat important that people use correct terminology so that not only do we understand each other correctly, but we can also more easily teach these things to newcomers to the sport. As for the original question, I'd also agree that a wing loading around 1.2 may be a little ambitious for someone with that level of experience and currency.

Defining what is a newbie and when they are no longer a newbie can be tricky. Is a guy with 1000 jumps and been wearing a camera on his head for the past 4 years a newbie or is he experienced? I'd say that if those jumps were all freefly zoo dives with his mates, then while he may have adequate flying skills and control over the camera, he's still a newbie when it comes to 4-way video, but explaining that to a guy with 1000 jumps can be tough. In the end, we reached a compromise, but at out first real competition, there were still a couple of camera busts and by that time he had close to 100 training jumps with us, so it's not as easy as people think. I don't entirely agree with that. If you're one of the better known videographers from one of the larger dropzones, for sure, however, there are a lot of people who don't fit into this category. Take the camera guy from my four-way team as an example. When he started flying camera for us, he was a reasonable freeflyer with about 1000 jumps to his name. He'd been flying casual camera on freefly jumps for a while, but hadn't really done any "serious" camera flying. After a little over a year with us and probably around 120 jumps with us, he started flying tandem video at our dropzone. On a good weekend, he can make $300-400 or more. Would he have been able to fly tandem video without having jumped with us? Maybe, but I'm sure that the four-way experience has made him a better videographer than he would have been otherwise. He's also started to play around more on bigway belly jumps, since his 4-way camera experience has helped refresh his belly skills. I don't have a problem with any of this. He's made sure that he's always available for team commitments and we paid his slot after the first 5 jumps as everyone agreed up front. He was also great at helping with administrivia between jumps at training camps and competitions. To say that he did not get any training benefit when we were paying his slot, however, is just not true. This is true in some locations, but of all the 4-way team jumps I've done, only 3 of them ever got a free camera slot. The place where we normally train gives us a few dollars off the camera slot, but that's about it. We're still splitting 95% of a full slot between the 4 team members.

How long is a piece of string? Gear rental varies from place to place, both in pricing and terms. Some dropzones will rent you gear on a per jump basis. Expect to pay somewhere between 50% to 100% of your jump ticket price in gear rental costs - per jump. For example, at my home DZ in Canadia, a jump ticket is $35 and student gear rental is around $28 (I think) in addition to that. Basically, renting student gear comes close to doubling the cost of your jump. This kind of deal is more common for student gear. In general you're renting a complete system and the price probably includes the pack job when you're done, since it's student gear and you may not know how to pack, yet. Some dropzones also/alternatively rent gear by the day. This would be more typical for sport gear and most likely you'd be packing it yourself. The container may or may not have the main already hooked up, so you may need to do it yourself of pay someone at the shop/loft to do it for you if you're not able to do that yourself. I've never rented a complete system on such terms, although I have rented a main canopy this way to try it out. This will probably work out cheaper than student gear rentals, but it's still going to be more expensive than owning your own. Off-hand, I can't recall what I paid for a rental main canopy for the day. Either way, if you want to know what gear rental costs, your best bet is to contact the dropzone where you plan to jump and ask them. That way, you'll know whether they have much available and what they charge. Bear in mind that many dropzones may only have student gear for rental, that they may only have a limited number of rigs, and that this may mean waiting while someone else is using the rig that you want. Given the limited number of rigs that may be available, some dropzones may be unkeen on you continuing to use their student gear ad infinitum when they have students wanting to use the gear. If you think you're really serious about getting into skydiving, you will want to buy your own gear at some point. It's just so much cheaper and easier that way. If you're jumping reasonably often, your gear will pay for itself within the first year or two. If you're not jumping often enough for this to be true, then I would suggest waiting until you finish law school and can afford to buy your own gear and jump a little more often. You'll get a lot more out of the sport that way.

I had to bump this in light of my recent interaction with L&B. My 3 year old Alti-Track was starting to have some major issues, being the screen on the back ceasing to work properly and then about a week later, it refused to even turn on for a day. I contacted L&B and Mads responded telling me to send it to them for repair. I did so, and a couple of weeks later, they sent me a brand new Alti-Track free of charge! I have no words for how impressed I am at this level of customer service. The unit was over two years out of warranty and had seen good use over those 3 years, yet, they still replaced it at no cost. To Mads Larsen and the rest of your team over there at L&B, enormous thanks. You guys really do rock!

I was unable to log in using OpenID. I entered my openID username and got Error Using OpenID. The OpenID was invalid. I am currently logged in to OpenID. Also note that I created the OpenID about 5 minutes before going to your website, so not sure if that may be a factor.

I'm wondering where the suggested dropzones on the first page comes from. I'm assuming you're using my IP address to determine my approximate location and then listing dropzones that are close to that location. I would suggest that you display the apparent location on the page, though - something like "You appear to be located in Toronto, Ontario. The closest dropzones to you are:" Location information obtained from an IP address may not always be accurate, especially if someone is connected via a corporate network or VPN connection. I'm assuming that you got the location information for dropzones from the dropzone database here? I was initially curious why Frontier Skydivers showed up as being close to Toronto when Skydive Burnaby didn't (or Niagara Skydive for that matter), since they are closer than Frontier, but I'm guessing it's because you don't have the location information. I've contacted the DZO at Burnaby to suggest that they update their listing, however, in the meantime, if you wanted to update your own database, Burnaby's location information is 42.877088, -79.35505. That said, Niagara Skydive do have their location listed on DZ.com, so not sure why they didn't show up. Other possible reason might be straight line distance to Frontier is shorter, but there's that big lake in the way which makes Frontier a longer drive than either Burnaby or Niagara. Edit: I just noticed why Niagara Skydive doesn't show up. It looks like they've entered their longitude incorrectly (positive rather than negtive) so they show up as somewhere in central asia...

Clicky!

IANAL, but I was under the impression that a damages award could include a punitive component - ie. there is a component of a damages award that attempts to quanitify how much business or money you've lost as a result of the damage, however, there may also be an additional component you're ordered to pay in essence to tell you that you've been bad, punish you accordingly and discourage further bad behaviour. IANAL, but I don't think the math is not that simple. Skydive Arizona is a big operation, therefore the potential damage to their business can be larger, which leads to larger potential damages. I don't think that a small mom and pop dropzone with a single C182 and clearing maybe 30,000 a year could claim damages anywhere near that number. Couple that with the fact that many smaller players capitulated because it was much cheaper to accept slyride muscling in on their business than to fight them and yet others who willingly joined them. I've no idea how much money that Slyride has managed to rake in over the past few years, but I am hoping that 6.6m is a huge dent in their finances. I'm also wondering if this judgement, should it make it through appeal, will enbolden other dropzones damaged by slyride's practices to initiate legal proceedings against them - maybe even a mass-action.

To be allowed to punch clouds in Oz, you need to come up with a set of rules and procedures which conform to CASA guidelines and have them approved. This is why some dropzones may be permitted to punch clouds but others are not. That's not to say that some of these other dropzones don't just do it, too, but if they're not approved, I guess they've done a different type of risk analysis. Having jumped at such a dropzone, among the paperwork I had to read and sign when I arrived was the cloud jumping procedures document, a copy of which I was to sign at the bottom indicating that I'd been informed of the rules, had the opportunity to ask questions and that I understood and was willing and able to comply with those procedures.

That, and I think this is a new english soapie skydiving storyline as ridiculous as we would expect the non-skydiving public to concoct...

Having trouble with the skydiving movies link at the moment - perhaps skydivingmovies.com is temporarily having issues? In any case, I also found this on youtube.

Sure, the pilot. You keep a pilot in your rig? That's hardly standard. On a more serious note, I have been asked to check my rig at LAX. On reflection, it was probably my hook knife that caused concern, but I almost never use it, so I forget that it's there and the TSA staff who wanted me to open it up were entirely unhelpful in describing what they saw or where on the rig it was. You would do well to carry your gear on in a gear bag, because if you are forced to check it, you'll wish that you had a bag to check it in.

They were not commenting on you personally. You added that in yourself when you read it. They were commenting on what a typical downsizing progression might be in order to illustrate why your comment on downsizing was misguided. Try here. Clearly it is implied in those messages that a new jumper doesn't know anything and should refrain from giving advice. Again you're reading things into those comments that just aren't there. Neither of those statements suggest that newbies know nothing. They are saying that you would do much better to give advice about things you really know about. Therein lies the problem. You're not speaking about knowledge gained and/or validated by experience. You regurgitating something that you think you heard or read somewhere else. You haven't put this into practice for yourself, so how do you know that this is good advice? How do you know you understood it right? How do you that what you think you heard isn't just a little bit different that what you were actually told and perhaps not as right as you think it is?

For sure. As I said, It goes both ways. There are plenty of examples of poor behaviour in these forums from skydivers of all experience levels, new and experienced, young and old. In this particular circumstance, it was the novice skydiver who acted out first. He was also the first person to play the experience level card. Nobody told him to pull his head in or grow a thicker skin until he started getting out of joint over nothing. I don't think that's patronizing. In different circumstances it may have been, but in this instance, it was a response to earlier actions.