riggerrob

FAA TSO standards require reserves to prove minimum performance standards. Those MPS include surviving opening shock with 254 pounds suspended weight. However, wiser manufacturers know that most customers' ankles won't survive landing tiny (sub 150 square foot) reserves with 254 pounds, so they post lighter recommended suspended weights. Manufacturers' MSW are legal limits because federal air regulations always loop back to "in accordance with manufacturers' instructions." Ever since Micro Ravens debuted, I have been sarcastic comments about "stupid, fat white men jumping tiny reserves." The scariest thing is how few SFWM understand how differently (even the best of reserves) flare compared with smaller, modern mains.

.......................................... Do they have an extra mark a few inches down from the top? ... about where the old lines are sewn to stabilizers? Are the extra marks on the C1 lines symmetrical? Hint: before I cut off the old lines, I always examine them for a few minutes and note things like the distance from the C-line attachment points to the bottom edge of the stabilizer. I sometimes lay the new lines alongside the old lines ....

Sounds about right. Mullins is too proud to let anyone beat him to altitude. Skytrucks have so much excess power, that if an engine quits the pilot should immediately reduce power - on the good engine - before as symmetrical thrust exceeds the rudder authority.

Many factors can contribute to motion-sickness, including dehydration, poor sleep, anxiety, nutrition, residual alcohol .... Oh! Wait a minute! I just described a hangover! It so helps if you keep your eyes outside the airplane and watch the horizon. I can count on one hand the number of my tandem students who have vomited and most of them skipped breakfast. I have never understood that logic????? Fear generates adrenaline and adrenaline rapidly burns through blood sugar. Once they run out of blood sugar, their stomach gets upset . Far wiser to limit alcohol consumption, get a good night's sleep, eat a decent breakfast, sip water during the day and nibble small snacks throughout the day.

Try reading Clotaire Rapaille's "Culture Code" to understand how public alcohol consumption patters vary from one culture to the next. I have even seen law enforcement change during my lifetime. Back in my twenties, everyone drove themselves home after an evening of heavy drinking. I can still remember 3 conversations with cops (while driving my drunken self home) they all let me complete the journey. No way a law enforcement officer would let me drive my drunken self home today!!!!! On another note, another friend was forced to retire from skydiving because he smoked too many doobies and crashed so many BMX bikes that he permanently wrecked his shoulder. Nothing worse that a loud, obnoxious, drunken, red-neck who DEMANDS to know why we won't let his alcohol-soaked self boats the plane. The other issued is that alcohol-induced hypoxia rapidly increases with altitude. Go look up that fancy word.

There are some 2 or 3 year old videos of Skytruck exits posted by Polish civilian skydivers. Skytruck tail ramplooks like a narrower version of a Shorts Skyvan (my all time favourite jump-plane.) American sneaky-pesky Special Forces soldiers fly a few Skytrucks, but they don't like to publish video.

Over the last 35 years, I have taught at a lot of different DZs, both big and small. Training is quickest and most satisfying when a student makes 2 or 3 jumps per day and completes all the levels within a week. It just makes ground school to so much quicker when I can remind the student of something he did this morning and mold that skill to perfection. Much easier when the last jump is still fresh in their mind, when they can still remember colours, how the wind felt on their arms and so on ..... Go to a desert drop zone and crank out most of your AFF jumps during a single week. Even better if the DZ has a wind tunnel nearby. Second best is visiting a wind tunnel (for one day) a week or two before your AFF course. Ideally the wind tunnel has AFF Instructors on staff who will coach you on basic freefall skills.

Dear John Mitchell, Don't you remember Meteorology 101 saying that jet streams tend to occurr at 30,000 feet .... um .... airliner cruising altitude ... instead of the 1,000 feet where these military static-lines prefer to exit. Hee! Hee! Maybe you spent too many years controlling IFR traffic and the stuffy air in your dimly-lot cubicle "stuffier" your brain. Hee! Hee!

I published an article about smoke brackets "Wowing the Crowd" (CANPARA Magazine circa 1984). All ankle smoke brackets start with cylindrical smoke cannisters (about the same size as a Coke can.) Wrap two pipe clamps around the smoke cannister, then wrap the clamps around a metal plate. The metal plate (aluminum or steel) wraps around your boot and is secured with a strap. Various smoke brackets mount cannister(s) on top of your toes, alongside your foot or on the back of your heel. Wingsuit booties are not compatible with toe- mounted canisters, so wing-suiters tend to prefer side-mounted smoke cannisters. Please ensure that your suit will not rub on the smoke cannister, because they can get hot enough to burn expensive holes in your expensive suit. The metal plate/frame wraps 2/3 of the way around your foot. My first smoke bracket (courtesy of the Canadian Forces Parachute Demonstration Team: Skyhawks) wraps over my instep and is secured with a pack-opening-band. My second smoke bracket has an aluminum toe pocket, with a strap that wraps around my heel. My third smoke bracket looks like the "spurs" worn by CF-104 pilots and is secured by a strap that wraps over my instep. All those straps can be quickly released by tugging on a loose end or Fastex buckle. The strap should be about a metre long, with an ankle strap on the top. The ankle strap stays attached to the jumper for the entire jump. The extra metre prevents dropping a hot smoke cannister in the crowd.

Hint: look at your jeans. The belt loops are probably sewn on with bar-tack stitch patterns. Bar-tacks are just zig-zag stitch patterns. Bar-tack length and width are defined by steel cams inside older bar-tack machines. Newer electronic bar-trackers have digital gremlins that run around inside the sewing machines pushing needles, pulling thread and jabbering away at each other in "gremlin-speak!" Hah! Hah!

Adding to Mcordell's posting ... it also depends on the colour of your binding tape and even the colour of thread your rig requires. For example, many factories like to sew all the black threaded rigs on Monday. Tuesday morning, they switch to grey thread, until all the grey rigs are done. Then they switch to blue thread, etc. So if your your rig is number 112, but it is sewn with black thread, it might get pushed closer to Monday. Meanwhile, rig number 88 needs green thread, so it gets delayed until Thursday afternoon when 6 other green rigs are scheduled for production.

Climbing harnesses use barracks and less hardware to reduce weight. Computerized bar-tacks allow manufacturers to more precisely align stitch patterns to loads. For example, the corner stitch (on an old-school, MIL SPEC rectangular stitch pattern) is usually the first to break. But if you bar-tack a rounded corner the load is more evenly shared by multiple stitches. Bar-tacks normally use lighter thread (e.g. 8 pound E-Thread versus 40 pound 5-cord) so they have to design more precisely. Computerized bar-trackers also allow precisely repeating an exotic stitch pattern (e.g. Crescent) that only the best sewers can do on their best day and only a few times per day. All bar-tacked harnesses are not new technology. Back in 1991, Rigging Innovations certified (FAA TSO C23C) the Flexon harness mostly sewn with bar-tacks. Flexon harnesses passed all the heavy-weight, high-speed drop-tests. Since most of the Flexon harness joints were loaded in shear, bar-cracks worked fine and used less-expensive E-thread. The problem was that 1991-vintage bar-tack machines were not durable enough for long-term production, so R.I. reverted to old-school Class 7 machines running 5-cord.

May I suggest that the best cutaway footage will come from looping your left thumb (camera hand) through the reserve ripcord and pointing the camera towards the mess spinning overhead?

Left knee: torn PCL and two torn lateral ligaments during a (airplane) forced landing. Resumed jumping 8 months later, but 5 years later it dis-located. Eventually had surgery to re-align the tibia, but I still have to be careful not to dis-locate it. Lots of exercises to keep knee muscles strong and wear a brace when doing tandems.

If you want mountain scenery, go jump at Skydive Whistler. Cessnas go up to 10,000 feet, so you exit just below local peaks. A turbine will take you above all the (hundreds) of snow-capped mountains. You don't need an altimeter, just pull after you pass the V-shaped glacier on the south side of the valley. They land at Pemberton Airport, just a few miles northeast of the 2010 Winter Olympics slopes. Better be good at spotting or else you land on the Indian reservation on the north side of the River ... and that River flows fast! If you spot too far south, you will hit a heavily-wooded, steep slope. Spot too Far East? No big deal. Spot too far west and you land on a golf course.

Riddle: Why do Brits drink warm beer? Answer: they have Lucas refrigerators!!!! Lucas: the Prince of Darkness

A long time ago most North American DZs adopted the "no drinking during jumping operations" rule. That was because DZOs learned the hard way not to trust skydivers to limit themselves to 1 or 2 beers during the skydiving day. Then North American DZs started celebrating the sunset load by turning on the "beer light." The system has worked well for decades. Why mess with success? Now the hard part is convincing non-jumping friends of tandem students to keep their beer under the (picnic bench) table. If you cannot get through the skydiving day without drinking, find another sport.

Just be mindful that "doable" doesn't always mean "safe" or "a good idea". ........................................................ How much rigger-profanity can you tolerate? How slowly will it get repacked?

................... In a perfect world, both cables would release at the same time. However there are so many variables that we err on the side of the RSL side cable being the LONGEST to ensure that it releases LAST. Best to measure with cables inserted into housings, main risers attached attached, etc. pull the release handle slowly and watch which main riser releases LAST.

As long as the new owner loads that Firelite 176 at less than 1 pound per square foot ... no big deal. The original objection to reserves more than 20 years old was trying to get gutter-gear off the DZ. The worst gutter-gear were round reserves - with acid mesh - sewn during the 1980s. The second objection to reserves more than 20 years old was trying to eliminate round reserves a decade or so after round mains disappeared from skydiving schools. Why buy a reserve that flies radically different than any canopy you have seen before? Thirdly, the "20 year rule" helped eliminate first-generation square reserves (Safety-Fliers, Safety-Star, SOS, etc) which were crude 5-cells made of LoPo fabric. Then the "20 year rule" chased off square reserves with odd steering line configurations (Para-Flite 5-cell Swift). Then it helped chase off third generation (e.g. Firelite) that were never intended to be loaded more than 1 pound per square foot. In the future, the 20 year rule will be applied to those "ridiculously bulky canopies made of old-fashioned F-111 fabric." Hah! Hah! On a practical note, now that acid mesh has (thankfully) disappeared, I can relax my standards to 25 years. Since PD started selling reserves intended to be loaded more than 1 pound per square foot around 1990 (25 years ago) I can worry less about customers over-loading reserves.

Careful what you wish for ..... I have made a lot of money sewing patches on frayed jumpsuit booties$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$ My shoes are 90 percent exposed when I wear my Phoenix-Fly Prodigy wing suit. The front edge of the legs have straps that loop through my shoe laces. This creates great "footing" and a long-lasting suit. Footing is especially important when climbing towards awkward BASE exit points. The Profidy is aimed at beginning wing-suiters who feel claustrophobic in the huge suits now fashionable for BASE wing suit proximity-flying. Phoenix-Fly's marketing campaign encourages learning the basics (of wing suiting) in a Prodigy, then later buying one of their larger wing suits.

Yes! Every new type of skydiving presents new ways to hurt yourself, so riggers invent new gadgets to prevent injuries. Ultimately, those inventions find their way into mainstream skydiving gear. For example, the first form of competitive skydiving was precision landing. In the beginning, jumpers were happy if they landed on the correct field, soon added drive windows and steering slots to allow them to steer towards a target smaller than an acre. This let to highly-modified round canopies like Para-Commanders. After Domina Jalbert invented the square canopy, precision landing competitors quickly adopted squares and refined them to the point that world level competitors consistently stomped a 3 centimetre target 8 out of 10 times! By 1980, square canopies had been perfected to the point that they were reliable enough for BASE jumping and have dominated BASE jumping ever since. More chapters to follow.

Your liver needs an hour or two (per beer) to filter alcohol out of your system. Any more than that and your ability to control is reduced. Yes "8 hours between bottle and throttle" is rigidly enforced for airline pilots, but is just common sense for skydivers. Attitudes vary from one country to the next. In North America we cannot trust young men to limit themselves to one or two beers mid-day. Back when I taught at Strassboug, France the city imposed a 2 hour curfew at noon. Students were allowed a glass of wine with lunch. We figured they would be sober by the time we resumed jumping in the afternoon. Meanwhile, we instructors preferred to lead by example, so we did not touch alcohol until sunset. People who try to split hairs too finely annoy me.

Time changes permeability ridiculously slowly. Wrinkling fabric changes permeability ridiculously fast. Ergo number of pack jobs is more important than calendar age.

Last year I jumped Strong Dual Hawk, Vector 2 and Sigma. Last year I worked at 3 different DZs and trained a pair of new TIs. ........ just refuse to jump two different rigs on the same day.