riggerrob

***.... did you mean Cookie's roller mount? .....

I am in a similar position. I gained 30 pounds (mostly flab) when I sat out a year for knee surgery. Now I weigh over 200 pounds. I lost 3 pounds last week, but clearly need to eat less and exercise more. Before surgery, I was loading my Stiletto at the heavy edge of the chart. I have only done a few jumps on my Stiletto 135 since returning. Even my Ariel 150 flies too fast for comfort. First step is re-lining my Ariel because it has 1,000 plus jumps on the original lines. The second step is trading my 135 for a 170 or 190.

First priority: the fewer snag opportunities the better. Cookie Revolve looks the least likely to snag. I need to replace my 8-year-old helmet but having a hard time justifying $$$$ for a Cookie. May be I need to compare the cost of a Cookie with the cost of an ambulance ride.

Triathlon is the closest modern canopy to your old Cruislite. I put a few hundred jumps on a Cruislite, back during the 1980s and a handful of jumps on various sizes of Triathlons and liked them all. Most other modern 7-cells are slightly tapered (slightly elliptical) and are aimed at weekend jumpers, canopy formation competitors or BASE jumpers. PD Spectre and Storm are among the better modern 7-cells, but most manufacturers make competing 7-cell canopies with zero-porosity fabric and no-stretch lines. The newest canopies are made with ZP top-skins and low-bulk, slightly porous fabric similar to the F-111 fabric that your Cruislite was made of. A ZP top skin means that the canopy will fly well for thousands of jumps, while low-porosity bottom skins make it easy to compress into the bag. A couple of 7-cells to avoid are PD Lightning and Aerdyne Diablo. Lightnings are specialized for canopy formations and often flare like bag-locks! Hah! Hah! Meanwhile, Diablos have an oddly-tapered planform and have a bad habit of twisting up so badly that the only cure is cutting away! I have cutaway one Diablo.

How far down was your slider? How fast was your canopy turning? How far did you need to pull the opposite toggle to keep it flying straight?

Binder knot with an extra locking knot to replace the metal ring. Any large, ugly knot will prevent the link from opening.

Ask Jerry Baumchen because Jerry sent me instructions on how to tie a similar link a few years ago. I made a set for my 150 and they lasted hundreds of jumps. Now all the suspension lines are due for replacement, but with no signs of significant wear on the soft links.

To the OP: the best way to avoid hitting your head on the step is getting your head outboard of the step. Not exactly sure which exit your club teaches, but most Canadian schools teach hanging exits where the student slides his right hand all the way out to the outboard end of the wing strut and steps - gently - off the step and hangs completely outboard of the step. As for over-thinking emergency procedures ...... reviewing EPs once a week is enough ... ideally with an instructor. Then shift your thoughts to: right hand on door-frame, right foot on step, etc. Tandems are a great way to get past door-fear. Everyone is afraid of the door during their first few skydives. But every jump (S/L, tandems, etc.) reduces fear by 10 or 20 percent. Fear should never go away because the long-term goal is slightly reducing fear each jump. Think of fear as a logarhythmic curve: steep at the start, curving towards horizontal, but never reaching zero. A little fear keeps you alert and keeps you alive. With experience, you will learn to channel fear into gear checks, dive-planning, spotting, etc. Moving towards the door gets easier with a tandem instructor strapped to your backside. I disagree with an earlier poster, because I routinely tell my tandem students to grab steering toggles, then talk them through a series of turns and we practice landing flares several times. IOW a tandem student harness is the best training aid for learning the basics of canopy control.

...................................................................................... Cabin width makes a huge difference. In the old, narrow-bodied Cessnas (170, 180, 182 and 185) I avoid the co-pilot's position because it is too tight to hook side-straps when the door is closed. OTOH when doing tandems from wide-bodied Cessnas (172, 182, 205, 206, 207 and 210) I have enough elbow room to hook (and tighten) side-straps easily. I am also 6 feet tall and ..... um ........ er ........ slightly over 200 pounds.

Islanders use to be popular jump-planes in the UK, but I suspect that most are worn-out now. Britten-Norman Islanders are basically twin-engined versions of Cessna U206 with a big cargo door, room for 10 or 12 jumpers and a pair of flat-6 engines. The door is popular with TIs, but a it awkward for AFF. Like 206s, some Islanders have turbo-charged engines and a few have even been converted to turbo-props. Lower maintenance and insurance costs - compared to other light twins - because they have fixed undercarriage.

............................................................................................ Agreed. Physio-therapy helps strengthen muscles, ligaments and tendons around the injury. During the 1980s, I sprained my left ankle three times. A physio-therapist taught me a bunch of exercises with giant rubber bands. That ankle has not hurt in many years. 8 years ago I dislocated a shoulder, tore three ligaments in my left knee and bruised every muscle in my body during a plane crash. Three different physio-therapists taught me a variety of exercises to strengthen soft tissue around the injuries. For a couple of months I could only lift 2 pounds with my right arm, then another month of lifting 5 pound jugs ...... 5 months after the accident my bruised ribs no longer hurt and I resumed solo jumping. After 8 months I resumed tandems, but my dislocated shoulder still hurt for a full year after the accident. To this day, my right shoulder aches to a week after carrying a sewing machine! 6 years after the accident, I had bone surgery to straighten out my left knee, but it still has 3 fewer ligaments than most people, every second day, I do a series of exercises to strengthen my knee muscles. In conclusion, after soft tissue damage, you have 2 options: first, you can regularly exercise the muscles around the injury or ....... you will not enjoy the second option.

Sabre 2 competes for the same market sector as Safire and Pilot.

CSPA and your gut tell you to buy a 230 ..... but local sky-gods are telling you to buy something faster. The other problem is that the local sky-gods' advice is so "passe'" Now most young jumpers get bored with regular skydiving after 200 jumps and they want to try wing-suiting or camera-flying or BASE. With the all that extra equipment, you will be glad to wear a boring main canopy. BASE requires even bigger and more boring canopies .... more than 300 square feet for a lad your size. .... Not that exciting for skydiving, but if you buy a 230 you can practice he precision landing skills that are vital to BASE jumpers. Finally, remember that medium to large canopies cost much less than ambulance rides.

First off, ask a buddy to video your landing. Bribe him/her with lemonade midday. Wait until there is a pause, then invite a local coach or instructor to review the video with you. Ask him-her what you could do differently to improve your next landing. Thank the instructor with a beer in the evening. Write the instructor's advice in your logbook. Talk yourself through the new dive-flow as you fly final approach (the last 300 feet). Please report back what advice your instructor gave. Good luck and soft landings.

Yes, it is creepy asking students to sit in my lap, so I only sit them in my lap long enough to tighten sides-straps. And I skip that step when I can spread my knees wide enough (straddle benches or the "old mans' seat in a Cessna). On another point, the only times that I attach side-straps before take-off is if I am cramped or the door has been removed. When sitting beside the pilot in the front of a narrow-bodied Cessna 180, 182 or 185 I can only attach side-hooks before the door closes. The last time I for without a door was a day of jumping from a Bell 206 Jetranger Helicopter. I wonder why another poster sits his students against the rear bulkhead. Are they not wearing seat-belts? Does he want the student hurtling forward during a forced landing - mashing the pilot's face into the instrument panel? Does he realize that seating jumpers against the rear bulkhead un--balances the airplane? Does he realize that the baggage compartment is placarded for only 100 pounds?

Speaking of historical inaccuracies ...... I read your historical outline on CSPA's website and wonder why you omitted. Mr. Larsen's jump in September 1888, from a hot air balloon flying over a county fair in Sherbrooke, Quebed. Larsen's jump is documented in Molson's about "firsts" in Canadian aviation and le Pioneer newspaper.

Yes, that early HALO gear looks like early skydiving gear because both are derived from Korean War vintage pilot emergency parachutes. During the 1960s, skydivers could buy military surplus parachutes for dimes on the dollar. Sadly - circa 1960 - the US military quit selling parachutes with lines intact. The first sport-specific skydiving containers (e.g. Strong Stylemaster) looked like military pattern containers made with brightly-coloured fabrics. Civilian manufacturers experimented with a variety of new patterns (Racer and Wonderhog) during the 1970s, but recreational skydivers only got serious about replacing their (military surplus) fore-and-aft containers with piggybacks when the supply of military-surplus containers dried up during the early 1980s.

The "Pegasus and X210" thread includes a link to the Django flat-packing manual.

.............................. Sorry dude, but you are too heavy to jump any 220 square foot canopy made of F-111 fabric. I tried a few jumps on a 176 square foot Firelite, back when I only weighed 180 pounds. Even though all my landings were stand-ups in the bowl, my feet still stung. It was obvious that if I made many more jumps on that Firelite, that I would break a leg bone. Most people only load F-111 canopies at 0.7 or 0.8 pounds per square foot.

Yes, I have dropped WDIs and spotted for students jumping round parachutes. One day we were on a wind-hold all afternoon. Winds finally dropped as the sun sank towards the horizon. I tossed a WRI, but it disintegrated, so I guessed the spot. My first S/L student landed in a large field south of the runway. I shortened the spot and my second student landed in the grass just short of the runway. My last student landed beside the bowl (north of the runway). Another instructor chewed me out in the packing area. He took a load of students up and all his students landed a long way south of the runway. The chief instructor took up a load of students and they landed so far south that I worried about them landing in the forest (south of the airport). I quietly finished packing and drove home.

Hospitals and medical offices should be under the Geneva Convention with all patients and visitors (temporarily) surrendering weapons at the door. On their way out, they could retrieve their weapons from a lock-box. Only a handful of police and "well regulated" security guards would be allowed to openly carry weapons inside hospitals.

To be precise, the Dual Hawk manual says to - sort of - roll pack the front of the canopy but flat pack the back of the canopy. This is because riggers need to hide the nose of most tandem reserves to make them hesitate a second or two during inflation. Even with "slow" packing methods, you will not want to open at tandem terminal too many times. The older Para-Flite manuals show true flat packing.

Hee! Hee! When we were test-jumping the Aviator PEP, some wag suggested writting on the bottom of the slider: " left turn = pull down left steering handle. Right turn .... To flare for landing pull both handles to crotch level."

How about stuffing your BASE canopy into a student rig, then jump legally?

On another thread, someone suggested adding a "suggestion box" to the rigging forum. To answer his question directly: Oregon Aero has already taken the next step in making Pilot Emergenct Parachutes more comfortable. AO already offers after-market seat cushions that quickly snap into seat PEPs made by Butler and Softie. These seat cushions look more like seats in luxury cars with side bolsters, spine adjusting wedges and multiple layers of foams in multiple densities. Warbird pilots love AO's seat cushions because they ease discomfort on long cross-country flights. Strong already offers fancy padding in their PEPs, though it tends to be a single layer of (carved) astronaut foam. The next step is building back PEPs with side bolsters and lumbar supports, etc.