riggerrob

................................................................ A quart of gripper fluid sounds about right for refilling a competition suit. The OP is lucky his suit was made in America. OTOH if his suit was sewn in Europe, he would struggle to find litre bottles of gripper fluid.

Good for you even if "lap fees" sound like a tip-off to me. What about the opposite scenario, when the person is "wider than the seat" and overflows onto the person beside them? For example, the last time I flew from Calgary to Vancouver, the woman sitting beside me (considerably) out-weighed me and jammed me against the window for the entire 2 hour flight. Hint: I weigh less than 200 pounds.

Rear-facing car seats are the best option for protecting infants during plane crashes. Car seats are manly designed to absorb the forward impacts of car crashes, but the only survivable airplane forced landings are wings-level, shallow descent angle, near the stalling speed ... pretty much the same vectors as sliding off the runway.

I say: sue the teenager for damages and whack the aircrews' pee-pees for not turning off the fuel shut-off valves. Inflicting lawyers on the teen will make his life far more miserable than any beating delivered by his father or his prison cellmates.

Caution: some people might read my post as racist. TYPICAL! Canada got first choice of immigrants while California was forced to take the left-overs. Judging by that (rude driver's) family name, size and skin colour, he comes from the Punjab region of Northern India and Pakistan. Punjab means: 5 rivers, so for centuries the Punjab was the bread basket of the Indian subcontinent. Punjabis tend to be farmers: better fed, bigger, stronger, brighter and more ambitious than the average Indian or Pakistani. About 400 years ago, Punjabis tired of oppressive moslem rule and revolted by creating their own Sikh religion. IOW Sikhs have been fighting Al Queda, for the past 4 centuries. From a distance Sikh values are almost identical to the Scottish Protestant work ethic. Much of the British Empire (e.g. Canada) was built by Scots. Those long agricultural and military traditions mean that Sikhs make great soldiers, policemen and drivers. Sikhs comprise an unusually large proportion of the ranks of the Indian Army, Air Force, etc. Sikhs have been immigrating ot Canada for more than a century now. Initially they worked in logging and farming, but started driving professionally shortly after the automobile was invented. Large numbers of Sikhs drive commercially in Vancouver. 3/4 of Vancouver taxi drivers are Sikhs, along with 20 or 30 percent of the bus drivers. When I say that Vancouver Sikhs drive professionally, I mean that they know the rules, are aware of other traffic and rarely cut off other drivers. IOW sounds like the good Sikh drivers moved to Vancouver, while the dregs moved to California. To the OP, this rude driver needs to be "outed" in court, newspapers, etc. His skin colour is irrelevant.

Sorry, but in the short run, I could only find the Eclipse Solo manual on www.parachute manuals.com. Look under containers, Stunts. In practice, the Eclipse Tandem is a 95 percent copy of Vector 2 Tandem.

Canada's Transportation Safety Board announced that holding children in your arms does not protect them during airliner crashes. TSB spokes-person Kathy Fox said that G-forces generated during crashes far exceed parents' arm strength. If this becomes policy, who will pay for the extra airline seat? The skydiving connection is that Kathy Fox was President of CSPA (circa 1980) before she went on to a career as an air traffic controller, initially with Transport Canada and later with Nav Canada before transferring to her current position with the TSB.

Recent news has a 6-year old child starting a med-evac helicopter at a Minnesota airshow. He climbed in an open door and flipped two switches. The helicopter only suffered minor damage because crew members shut it down within 90 seconds. Mayo Clinic was able to continue med-evac flights with their second helicopter. The crying child was last seen running towards his father. "Everything is okay son. I will sue the big, mean pilot for hurting your feelings." I wonder why aircrew did not pull a bunch of circuit-breakers before putting the helicopter on static-display within reach of the general public.

Will widespread cameras make for a more polite society?

Astronaut Roberta Bondar was one of my IAD students. I have packed reserves for (retired) President George Bush Senior, and seven-time world champion Dale .... I have packed pilot emergency parachutes for: NASA test pilots, Scaled Composites test pilots, Red Bull Air Racer Mike Mangold, Grand Champion Warbird at Oshkosh and multiple Reno Air Race winners and too many air show performers to list.

Thanks pchapman. It looks like the original victim snagged on a handle on the inside of the door. It sort of looks like the Cessna-stock window latch. ... difficult to tell exactly because of the lens. Why the window latch was still installed on a jump-door .... is a mystery to me. Opening the window inflight is no longer relevant, but the window handle increases the snag risk. Judging from the original video, the victim climbed out too high and rubbed his reserve container across the underside of the door as he struggled to hang in front of the step. His buddy noticed the problem and tried to clear the snag, but it was too firmly snagged. Trying to blame this malfunction on any single component (e.g. Skyhook) is pointless, because any time you grind a reserve container -that hard -against the underside of a wing - you risk damage or pre-mature deployment. Caveat: lawyers are free to quote my dz.com postings as long as they pay me $100,000 per word.

Anyone should be allowed to park in a handicapped spot. Any police officer should be allowed to challenge anyone parking in a handicapped spot. If they cannot provide proof of disability, the cop whacks them in the calf muscle with his night-stick! "Now you are handi-capped!"

Like dragon2 said: ask your local rigger to inspect it before you jump it again.

Your question sounds suspiciously like those asked by trolls and lawyers. I am allergic to lawyers. Seriously, it is difficult to snag a Skyhook type RSL because only an inch is exposed above the right shoulder. A good rigger can tuck in the RSL so that is invisible. The original video proves that clumsy skydivers are always more inventive that parachute designers, because clumsy skydivers invent malfunctions that never crossed the designer's mind .... in his worst drunken nightmare! If you are a lawyer, you will have to start litigation by admitting "user error" and admitting that your client is clumsier than 99 percent of skydivers. P.S. Skyhook was invented by the "Uninsured Relative Workshop."

Agreed cooser, Maybe de-salination is the answer. DS is easy to install in energy-wealthy oil states, but more challenging for energy-importing states like California. Maybe the answer lies in alternative energy sources like wind, tide, solar and hydr-electric. Only the last option (HE) is adjustable to hourly consumer demand, but the other alternatives are good for de-salinating the billions of gallons needed by a state the size of California. When you are de-salinating billions of gallons of water and storing it in reservoirs the size of the State of Rhode Island, precise time of day ... or time of month ... or time of year is insignificant. I remember the Tehachapi wind turbine farm over-looking the old DZ at California City (Mojave Desert of California) ... every time they cranked up those wind turbines, with da got too gusty to jump, so POPS sipped iced tea while watching the young bucks drag through cactus. Hah! Hah! On another note, I wonder why Calfornia builds their water reservoirs so shallow (e.g. the reservoirs north and east of Perris Valley). Shallow reservoirs risk re-salivation by evaporation. If they dug out another hundred feet of soil, they could vastly increase storage capacity while not increasing surface area. Digging out soil is not cheap, but it is decent agricultural soil that could be spread on nearby farms to rejuvenate them. Another solution is to float hundreds of rafts (on reservoirs) to reduce surface area. If those rafts held solar panels, they could pay pumping costs with zero load on the state grid. There I go again .... asking embarrassing questions.

Good perspective Wendy. Like your family, my family came (400 years ago) from all over Western Europe and settled in New England. After the American Revolutionary War, we followed the Crown's promise of free land (the last arable land East of the Mississippi River) and settled in Southern Quebec (200 years ago) Some of my ancestors moved from hard-scrabble, Inverness County on Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia and a few of my ancestors led the Irish invasion of North America, just before the great potato famine. My ancestors cleared farms, built roads and churches and a semblance of New England society. When Quebec Separatists grew obnoxious (1970s) my high school class graduated and moved on, some to Montreal, many to Ontario and the bravest souls moved to the far side of the planet. Because we were born in the North end of the Appalachian Mountain Range, we could easily have become stubborn red-necks (like South Carolinans), but we chose to forget our defeats and move on. Perhaps it is time for South Carolina to move on.

Those soft links resemble the soft links sold by Hyper USA or Flight Concepts. They are made of 1,000 pound aspect tar with a large ugly knot at the end. When installing them, use a Lark's head knot like most other soft links and hand-tack the end inside the riser. Soft links are not a new concept. Tiny Broadwick's dad made his own soft links back before World War 1. Fast forward to the early 1980s and Dacron soft-links were fashionable at the hippest DZs in Florida and California. But it was not until 1996 that Parachutes de France invented reusable soft links. In the end, it does not matter if soft-links have a lump of metal, folded tape or a large ugly knot, because they all install the same way.

Yes, I saw an FXC 8000 fire in my lap back when I was a freefall student .... back when chest-mounted reserves were still fashionable ... back when FXC 8000s were still in production. We climbed above clouds, then could not find the DZ. After twenty minutes of rafting about, the pilot dove through a small hole in the cloud layer. My reserve dumped into my lap. Good thing the door was closed. Wphhhhhew! A few young, hot-shot pilots enjoy exceeding the red-line as they dive through pattern altitude (1,000 feet above ground level). If they survive exceeding the red-line in new airplanes, they learn the wrong lesson, because they will not survive exceeding the red-line in airplanes older than themselves. Those hot-dog pilots don't last. Either they break airplanes or get fired. Lucky pilots move on to boring jobs flying airliners. Properly-trained pilots know to descend gently when they have skydivers on board. Properly-trained pilots also fly predictable landing patterns slower than the red-line.

Troll? .......................................................... Lawyer? What is the difference?

Good point! Time for that treasonous and dis-honoured flag of a failed state to retire. Commemorating lost battles is a collective form of Prolonged Traumatic Stress Disorder. As for anvil brother claiming that the Confederate Flag has "evolved" away from what it originally symbolized ..... nobody told the outsiders. Historians - like me - are as uncomfortable around Confederate Flags as we are around Nazi flags. Nazi Germany was another racist state that started a war it could not win and was deservedly ground into the dust of history. Now the only reason we mention Nazi Germany or the Confederate States of America is to illustrate bad decisions in hopes that our children will not repeat the same mistakes.

Now to the OP. Was your neighbor hurt? ..... Do they want to sue? .... ............................................................................... All skydivers sign waivers to prevent frivolous law suits. Frivolous law suits are exhausting for the wounded. Sure, personal injury lawyers are all sweetness and love and hale fellow well met and promise to fight for the rights of victims and get them the money they deserve, but behind that glib facade, lawyers love the wounded the same way Afghan drug lords love their tea boys. Lawyers' primary goal is drag out law suits for the maximum number of billable hours. Wounded are lucky if they see half of a settlement at the end of many years of legal misery. The worst part about personal injury lawsuits is the number of times that wounded are forced to recall their accidents over many years. Repeatedly being forced to recall an accident guarantees Prolonged Traumatic Stress Disorder. After lengthy and emotionally-exhausting litigation, no amount of dollars can erase the emotional trauma. Bottom line: write it off the bad winds and get on with your life. The sooner you allow this awkward jump to fade from your memory, the better.

......... I agree. If that TI worked for me he'd be getting his DCM award... ......... Did not complete mission?

Good luck retraining old sailors during the first jump course. During basic seamans' training, "port wine is red" was beaten into them too many times. Starboard running lights (on ships and airplanes) are always green.

In comparison, CSPA BSRs allow school rigs (tandem, student and rental) to go without red seal thread (MBS 4.75 pounds) as long as there is a written record in the DZ office. I usually do not bother sealing school rigs because seal thread is so FRAGILE that it often breaks half-way through the summer. Everyone screams and shouts and runs about until the rigger drops everything to replace the broken seal. IOW fragile seal thread - that breaks at 4.75 pounds when new - is too little to worry about in the long run.

The wreckage is at Pitt Meadows Airport in Kanuckistan. White guys are in the minority in this corner of Kanuckistan, so we pretend to care about other peoples' feelings. I have been trying to "get over" this crash for the last 7 years. A year afteer the crash, I complained to the DZO about too many "boys" pointing out where the wreckage lay in a farmer's field near CYPK. When they moved the wreckage near the airport gate, I quit ... because I refused to look at the wreckage every day on my way to work. 4 years after the crash, lawyers started asking me questions about the crash. Lawyers love the wounded, the same way that Afghan drug lords love their tea boys. If the lawyers have their way, litigation will drag on for 8 or more years. 5 years after the crash I was formally diagnosed with Prolonged Traumatic Stress Disorder. I have attended a bunch of psychiatric counselling sessions sponsored by the Royal Canadian Legion. Trust me! I have been trying to "get over it" for the last 7 years, but seeing that wreckage makes my chest tighten up, blood pressure rise, etc.