riggerrob

Amazing how a canopy formation thread drifts onto the subject of packing Racer reserves. The under-lying problem was packing with the minimum of canopy volume between the two closing loops ... er ... under the pilot-chute. A molar-strap helps minimize the amount of volume in the middle. Since I always use my molar=strap in the last stage of closing, I never lost it. Hint: I route the molar-strap through an old B-12 snap and tie the pull-up cord to the hook. I use that instead of a crank. I can count on one hand the number of times that I have used a crank, Hint: I have not used a crank in this century. Fortunately, later versions of Racers have more volume towards the bottom end of the container 0 to make more room for the Cypres battery box, so you can pack with the center-cell between the battery-box and lower closing loop. A final point about packing Racers: I cannot count high enough to use the factory method, so I had to invent a simplified tool before I was comfortable packing Racers with square reserves, Cypres, etc. My tool is an adjustable version of the soft bodkin. It gets installed on the ripcord side early in the pack-job and is routed up through all the grommets, cutters, etc. I also finger-trapped 2 pull-up cords to the soft bodkins, further reducing tool-count.

First off the Canadian Army Parachute Demonstration Team (aka. Skyhawks) did a 4-way down-plane without straps. They just built a pair of two-ways, then dove them. The pair of 170s were above and docked on the pair wearing 190 canopies. They held the formation for 20 seconds or so.

The current fighting in Gaza is unlikely to escalate because few people care what happens to Palestinians. None of their Araba neighbors want to accept refugees from Gaza. They tried that a half-century ago and it ended miserably. In the lead up to various Arab-Israeli wars, some Palestinians voluntarily left Palestine based upon promises of free land after the Jews were crushed. Come 1970, Palestinians plotted to kill off the Jordanian Royal family, so they were deported. Some of those Palestinian rabble-rousers went to Lebanon. Lebanon has been in an on-again-off-again civil war ever since. Egypt tried governing the Gaza Strip, but soon concluded that was impossible. Israel briefly tried governing the Gaza Strip but soon gave it up as a lost cause. Since the Arab Spring, the Sinai Peninsula has been over-run by smugglers. Some of those smugglers dug tunnels under the Egyptian/Gaza border. Hamas charges a 20 percent tax on all imports to the Gaza Strip. Gaza has hardly any farmland left, no factories and little value-added economy. Gazans mostly depend upon hand-outs from charitable organizations. None of their Arab neighbors want to accept refugees from Gaza. Gaza's only product seems to be angry young men because their birth rate remains well above the rest of the world. Gaza birth-rates rival those of Orthodox Jews and Nigerians ... also troublesome populations. Hezbollah are just meat-puppets ... er ... cannon-fodder doing the bidding of Iran to destabilize the Middle East.

General question: Why do people vote for bullies? My theory is that they hope that if they stay close enough to bullies, that all of the out-going hatred and viltriole will miss them as it goes over their heads. Early in life, I learned that the best way to handle bullies is to distance myself from them. As a child, I was always picked on by gangs of bullies. Two of those gang leaders were the son and daughter of the local Pentecostal Minister. I have never set foot in a Pentecostal Church in this lifetime. As to why some people are bullies .. my I suggest that they have given up on ever improving themselves beyond their current status, so resort to putting down others who might appear brighter or stronger or faster or ... My challenge to bullies is to re-devoted their energies to improving themselves. We will all be better off if bullies try to improve themselves. On a Canadian level, the more Pierre Polievre drags up dirty politics on the Liberals, the less likely I am to vote for him and his Conservatives. Just to be clear, as soon as any politicians stoops to muck-raking, he loses my vote. IOW If a politicians cannot act like an adult, I do not want him/her leading my country.

Agreed and I grew up in a small town in southern Quebec. The small pox had killed off most of the indigenous Abenaki Indians before white men settled there around 1800. I was probably 10 years old the first time (mid 1960s) I met a black man who was a refugee from the war between Biafra and Nigeria. A few years later one of the professors - at Bishop's University - adopted a small African-American boy. The first wave of Afro-Americans to land in Canada were slaves owned by the (British) United Empire Loyalists. UEL had backed the wrong side in the American Revolutionary War and were forced to re-locate after the war. Some of them moved up the Atlantic Coast to Nova Scotia, but soon learned that Nova Scotia had far too little soil and and growing season was far too short to support plantation-style agriculture, so they freed their dark-skinned slaves and they got land grants in places like East Preston, Nova Scotia. East Preston borders on useless for farming because the soil is so thin, hence many Nova Scotia blacks migrated to the big city of Halifax. See "Africaville" for how well they were treated in Halifax.. Bottom line, there were few dark-skinned people in Canada outside of major cities. That only changed when the British revised immigration laws in 1962. After that, major cities saw an influx of immigrants from British colonies like Jamaica.

Yes. ... and I wrote that back when F-111 canopies were the norm. More recent (since 1990) zero-porosity fabric allows you to load canopies heavier, but heavier wing-loadings also require more skill to land softly.

i agree with Jerry B.'s statement that squares are best landed fully flared. I also believe that it was silly of the FAA to grant PD a waiver for PD113R that descend too fast without precisely flared landings. Obscure side-note ... The only square canopy that I have landed without control input is the P124A-290 canopy installed in the Aviator pilot emergency parachutes made by Rigging Innovations. I weighed 190 pounds (naked) so was only loading them at 0.74 pounds per square foot ... the same as modern student canopies. P124As deploy with the brakes set at 3/4. That is the highest that the brakes will ever go. Even with the brakes set that deep, they still have enough forward speed to avoid medium-sized obstacles. You can pull the toggles enough to steer them, but turns are slow. One day I did 6 jumps on a P124A. By the fourth jump, I was bored with testing turn rates, so I did the last 3 landings down-wing with my hand off the toggles. Vertical descent rate was slow, so most of the remaining velocity was horizontal I slid a few meters int he toulie (sp?) bushes but was otherwise unscathed. P124A touched down softer than most of the rounds that I have jumped. I think the improvement was primarily the difference in angle of arrival. Again, the P124A ws designed primarily for pilots making their first parachute jump while suffering a lot of stress ... e.g. just dis-mantled an airplane in mid-air.

For the same reason that public health nurses care about whether prostitutes suffer sexually transmitted diseases, because they worry that customers might take STDs home to their wives and children..

Dear Deyan, I disagree because we still need minimum standards for reserve opening times, distances and descent rates. As for your confusion over certified weights on PD reserves …. There are really two issues here. The first is whether a reserve will survive a high-speed opening with 254 pounds suspended weight. The second question is about whether your ankles will survive landing a PD113R with a suspended weight of 254 pounds. I doubt it. And please remember that docile 7-cell reserves do not flare as well as the latest 21-cell, Schumann planform mains.

Summarizing wolfriverjoe’s post number 5: the decision can be condensed to one number: wing-loading. Students, BASE jumpers and precision landing competitors use wing-loadings around 0.7 pounds per square foot. Large, docile canopies provide wide margins of error for poorly timed flares, landing in tall grass, etc. You will walk away from poorly-timed landings on docile canopies. Remember that suspended weight includes your parachutes, cloths, helmet, etc. so add another 25 pounds to your naked weight. After doing a couple dozen jumps on lightly-loaded student canopies, most people buy a first main canopy that they load around 1 pound per square foot. The decision to down-size is best made after discussions with local instructors. At the extreme end of the scale, some highly-experienced canopy pilots load their pond-swooping canopies at 4 pounds per square foot. Keep in mind that even a tiny miss-calculation can kill you at those wing-loadings. For a more detailed explanation, look at Poynter’s manual volume 2 circa 1990. He quoted an article - entitled “Wing-Loading” that I wrote for SKYDIVING Magazine.

They are mainly referring to the size of the back-pad. “Small” or “narrow”‘compared with other containers from the same factory. It is all relative. It sounds much like marketing. Take those claims with a grain of salt. Mind you, if you are 2 meters tall, but only weight 80 kilograms, then you want the “long and narrow” version. Ask the factory for details.

Westwind converted several Beech 182 to single fins. I think that they just rotated an old horizontal stabilizer 90 degrees and bolted it to the top of the aft fuselage. The last time I saw a single-tailed Beech 18 was behind the museum at Victoria International Airport, B.C. Canada. It also had a pair of P&WC PT6A turboprop engines ... the same engines as King Airs.

Back in 1977, I did mu first skydive from a straight-tailed Cessna 182 airplane that was built the same year as me: 1957. Last month I did a few jumps from its brother. I am now 67 years old. Similarly, World War 2 surplus Beech 182 and Douglas DC-3s hauled skydivers until they wore out during the 199s, meaning that they were 50 years old by the time they retired.

One example is the "Gays for Palestine" who love to parade on North American streets. Are they truly naive enough to believe that they are helping? Do they understand that homosexuality if against the law in most Muslim nations? The Koran prohibits love between a man and another man. Do they understand that if they profess their "gayness" in Palestine, that they will be beaten by the mob, then arrested, beaten again by the police and thrown in jail for a few years? What is the logic behind supporting a movement that publicly states that it wants to kill you and your type ... in this case homosexuals ... ?

Perhaps the problem is that so many minorities have hijacked the "woke" agenda that the original meaning ahs been lost in all the propaganda. A quick way to confuse old-farts is to change vocabulary. When I learned that the legal definition of "soon" as vastly different than the common definition, I lost respect for lawyers.

Ken, You are talking about the market for used, second-hand gear. OTOH I worked for major gear dealers (e.g. Square One) and factories at the peak of my rigging career. Yes, PIA published a list of components that are supposed to be supplied by the harness/container manufacturer: pilot-chutes, bridles, d-bags, main risers, etc. Half the time second-hand rigs are sold without all those components because they wore out. Sometimes those missing components were a blessing in disguise for junior jumpers as the last hassle they needed was sloppy openings caused by a worn-out main pilot-chute. Finding all the missing components and evaluating them for compatibility can be daunting for a junior rigger at the end of a long supply chain. Forget about a first-time buyer understanding the subtlety of whether main canopy "A" is compatible with container "B."

Go back and read about the Weimar Republic and how chaotic German politics were during the 1920s and 1930s. They had armed gangs of communist ex-soldiers trading bullets with fascist gangs of ex-soldiers on the streets of major cities in Germany. Adolf Hitler took advantage of this chaotic situation to seized control of the German Workers' Party and he transformed it into the hard-right, Nazi Party. Hitler promised his followers the world, but 12 years later left them a smoldering rubble. By the same token, I fear both the hard-right and the hard-left. I fear the "woke" crowd as much as I fear MAGA. I fear Hamas as much as I fear ultra-Orthodox Jews.

Jakee, I suspect Marxism because they are trying to de-stabilize our current society and reduce faith in our political systems. Look at how Russian society was destabilized by World War 1 ... destabilized so badly that the old Tsarist regime collapsed to be replaced by a Marxist/Leninist gov't that only lasted 70-ish years before it too collapsed. Mainland China had an even shorter experiment with Marxism/Leninism/Maoism that took power in 1949, but has largely disappearred by now. China may be ruled by the totalitarian Chinese Communist Party, but their economy is a long way from traditional Marxism. My question is: if Marxism and Maoism have both failed, why do we need them in Western society? As a self-identifying member of the lumpen proletariat, I fear the whole "dictatorship of the proletariat" phase.

Joe ... Perhaps I adopted "when in doubt, be polite" so many decades ago that it is my standard practice and I just do not understand why anyone would waster time chewing out others for ......... For a few years I relished the thought of chewing out lawyers, but now understand that lawyers are beyond hope ... er ... lawyers are too narrow-minded to understand the bigger picture. Lawyers are not bright enough to learn from experience. Lawyers are far too self-centered to care whether the wounded live or die. Me chewing out a lawyer would no change their world-view .... BUT ... it might cause me to "stroke out."

“Woke” people have had many years to explain their objectives. They have forced me to listen to thousands of hours of pro-woke propaganda, but they have done a poor job of explaining their objectives. Why should I care about gays when they do not invite me into their beds? Why should I care about lesbians when they do not invite me into their beds? Why should I care about trans-people when I have only met two and neither of them invited me into their beds? Please be clear that I do not want a return to “the good old days” of bullying gays. But I am waiting for “woke” people to explain why I should care.

The Europeans set a 20 year life for skydiving equipment. If used on a regular basis, that is about the service life of most skydiving equipment. Various manufacturers have set lives of skydiving equipment. Performance Designs said that their reserves are only good for 20 deployments or 40 repacks. Strong Enterprises said that their first-generation Dual Hawk Tandems were only good for 8 years or 20-25 reserve deployments. Those limits were imllace for two reasons. First they wanted to get the first-generation back to the factory for a variety of updates. Before you criticize Strong too loudly, remember that everyone’s first-generation is crude. Secondly, first-generation String tandem mains - made of F-111 fabric only lasted 800 to 1,000 jumps in the salty Southern California desert. If you made less than 800 jumps during an 8 year period, you were in the wrong business. These life limits get confusing when you jump at a DZ that is only open 6 months out of the year … say Wisconsin. There a rig might only make 50 or 150 jumps per year and still be airworthy more than 20 years after manufacture. Closet Queens can really complicate the equation when junior riggers cannot find all the Service Bulletins that were published before the inter-net became available to the masses circa 1995.

Agreed! Since no-one has taken the time to explain “woke” ideology to me. I remain confused. From a distance, “woke” ideology resembles Marxism. As a self-identifying member of the “lumpen proletariat” I fear the “dictatorship of the proletariat” that is an integral stage of Marxist/Leninist Revolutions.

I have sewn pockets onto a variety of sliders for Sabre 1 - 135, 150 and 170. The easiest is Weird Wayne's pattern that starts with a strip of PD slider tape folded almost in half - perhaps 2/3. It gets a small strap at the middle (to prevent inversion). Wayne recommended installing sails on both the front and rear edges of the slide. I attempted sewing sails on all 4 edges of my Sabre 1-170, but soon removed that foolishness after a ridiculously slow opening during a hop-and-pop.

79 ... 80 ... 81 ... what difference does it make? Both Biden and Trump are old men ... more than 2 decades older than me.

Amusing how just last week Trump was making disparaging remarks about Biden's age (80). Now Trump is the oldest man in the race at age 79. Mr. Pot may I introduce you to Mr. Kettle? Hah! Hah!