cpoxon

Maybe. At the centre I was refering to, a SL round jump is approximately half the price of a tandem (£110 vs. £210) with a SL square jump halfway between the two, but I would still expect a charity jumper to raise approximately twice the cost of the jump as a minimum. Skydiving Fatalities - Cease not to learn 'til thou cease to live

Perth is 16 miles from one of the only centres (of 2?) in the country still doing round S/L jumps. Skydiving Fatalities - Cease not to learn 'til thou cease to live

From BPA Statistics 2000-2004 Injury rate per 1000 jumps Year 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 -------------------------------------------- Experienced 0.3 0.3 0.3 0.3 0.4 1st jump round 17.7 16.8 12.8 16.2 17.1 1st jump square 6.8 5.0 6.9 5.9 4.9 1st jump AFF -- -- -- 7.0 4.9 1st jump tandem 1.8 1.1 1.4 1.3 1.6 All 1st jumps 5.1 3.0 3.5 2.9 2.7 These days, most charity jumps are tandem. I would say hardly anyone does 1 AFF level for charity. You can see SL round jumps fell 90% between 2000/2004, SL square dropped 40% and tandem )with the lowest rate of injury to the student) increased 25%. Skydiving Fatalities - Cease not to learn 'til thou cease to live

Eric, can you provide a reference to your source? What was the scope of the study (duration and when)? If I get a chance I may do more research (the BPA's medical advisor Dr. John Carter regularly monitors and publicises information such as this) but these numbers seem off. Overweight females doing static-line round parachute jumps are statistically most likely to suffer and injury but round jumping is practically non-existant these days. The way most (official) charity jumping works in the UK is that the jumper has to typically raise double the cost of the jump (approximately £200) to cover the cost and raise a decent amount for the charity to make it worthwhile so I don't know where the £30 figure comes from, and if that figure is wrong, can the others be trusted? But you know what they say about statistics! Reminds me of the attached "advert" that was once published in Viz (a UK puerile adult comic)... Skydiving Fatalities - Cease not to learn 'til thou cease to live

I find a tent peg through the three rings to be a secure, handy and portable packing aid when on grass, similiar to the Triax stake, but much cheaper, although it can't open beer (well, maybe ring-pulls) Skydiving Fatalities - Cease not to learn 'til thou cease to live

I found out it is Everything is Alright by Four Tet. Skydiving Fatalities - Cease not to learn 'til thou cease to live

Ahh! Can that be shared on skydivingmovies.com Plastic? Cool! Skydiving Fatalities - Cease not to learn 'til thou cease to live

I guess you are talking about the cameraman's footage and I know wearing camera in a CRW formation is a big no-no due to snag hazards but bullet cameras are readily available these days. I wonder if any in the stack would be willing to wear one? (Bear in mind that it would make you more of a target! :-P) Skydiving Fatalities - Cease not to learn 'til thou cease to live

Yes, as Plastic said, I did show up on video but there wasn't a lot to see. Due to PD (cameraman) having to swing the canopy about to stay down with the rapidly descending 8 stack as well as concentrating on the formation I was almost missed. Also PDs video made it look like I was really sinking out on it (obviously I wasn't! :-P). So it wasn't great. I usually love to see myself on video but I didn't bother getting a copy of it although I should have done for completeness and will do so next time I see PD. I have some Motorola walkie-talkies with some cheap throat mikes and ear pieces. Gus and I tried them out a couple of times whilst flying our wingsuits and they just about worked if we kept to very simple one word communications. Next time, I'm going to give one to one of the CRW dogs (probably the stack pilot) so we can have a bit more communication eg when I'm leaving the aircraft and when I am approaching. They should just about work for that. Skydiving Fatalities - Cease not to learn 'til thou cease to live

Yes, even a couple of the CRW dogs asked me why I didn't do that! I didn't even think about it! D'oh! We didn't get another chance to try it again due to the weather, but next time I will do it. Besides, didn't want to spoil the cool fly-by with my flailing on my back! Yeah, it's weird - although I had my eye on him and the camerman the whole time, he didn't seem that close. With a wide-angle lens he would have seemed miles away. I wonder if the lack of lens actually makes him appear closer (camera was zoomed all the way out)? Skydiving Fatalities - Cease not to learn 'til thou cease to live

Please see this post in the Wingsuit forum! Skydiving Fatalities - Cease not to learn 'til thou cease to live

I had the opportunity to buzz a CRW formation this weekend and it was a lot of fun. There is a reasonably large CRW contingent at my dropzone including national and international competitor as well as 3 members of the 85-way diamond record. I'd been thinking/talking about flying past a CRW formation since watching Loic do it in Soulflyers, but this weekend the opportunity finally arose. My biggest concern was timing/positioning the exit. I'd watched a few videos of the guys building their 8-way stack and they were getting a lot of it together within a minute, so including another 30 seconds to get to them after exit I wouldn't need to wait long before chasing them. Since the stack would be descending faster, especially the bigger it got, I wouldn't really need any extra altitude but I did consider both getting the plane to continue flying on line of flight before exit or whether to get it to do a tight circuit. I can cover a fair bit of distance quite quickly on a wingsuit but after discussing it with the CRWdogs and some other wingsuit pilots I elected to get the plane to circle around above the formation. I gave it a minute before getting out pretty much over the top of them. I flew a carving flight down to them. I originally wanted to pass to the right of them since my camera is mounted on the left side of the helmet but the number 8 was having a bit of trouble getting on and had gone back out that side to try again so I kept it to the left. The canopy with the yellow stripe is the camerman and you can see him swinging it about in order to keep down with the large stack. I passed as close as I wanted to to the formation. I think I could have got closer but I wanted to be conservative initially. I passed the formation a little lower than I wanted to as I would have liked to have been half-way down the stack when crossing it. I actually wasn't flying the suit very well as I passed them; I was so busy enjoying the view that I practically stalled the suit out! You can see the video on Skydivingmovies.com I know this has been done before but we all still had a lot of fun and experienced something new. Not bad for a pre-second effort I thought! Any comments? I wasn't sure if I was going to get anywhere near them so I took my wide angle (0.45x) off my camera before jumping. Does anyone think I should have left it on? Thanks to Dave my CCI for letting me try this. Thanks to the pilot for helping me play. And thanks to the CRW dogs: Plastic, Doug, Maria, Taz, Gavin, Martin, Karen, Gordon and PD for trusting me not to kill them! Skydiving Fatalities - Cease not to learn 'til thou cease to live

Blue skies Patrick Skydiving Fatalities - Cease not to learn 'til thou cease to live

Saw this on the BBC national news the other day and just had a text from a friend who is flying to Girona with Ryanair who got sent back to check his rig in which reminded me to search for a reference and post it. I see the days of flying away to dropzones with rigs on budget airlines (without any special sporting allowances) as very limited. My friend has now switched his phone off so I don't know yet whether he got charged excess baggage or not. From http://www.e-tid.com/pm.aspx?article_id=24973 (requires registration) Skydiving Fatalities - Cease not to learn 'til thou cease to live

From http://english.people.com.cn/200604/10/eng20060410_257319.html Skydiving Fatalities - Cease not to learn 'til thou cease to live

Wot no deployment? :-P Skydiving Fatalities - Cease not to learn 'til thou cease to live

I don't know how many of you dogs have been reading the World Team forum (there should be at least four of you! :-P Hey Shaun and Rusty, I still need your slots) or seen my post in there, but I've been playing around with an annotated slot map of the 400 way Kevin and I both had the idea to do one for the 85-way diamond. Move your mouse over the image to bring up a box detailing the jumper and their country of origin: 85-way world record annotated slot map Thanks to Kevin for providing the slot details! I believe he is also working on jump numbers? Skydiving Fatalities - Cease not to learn 'til thou cease to live

The DNS provider for Skydivingmovies.com is suffering a DDOS attack at the moment, which may prevent accees to the site for some of you. You can use sdm.crocker.com in the meantime. Skydiving Fatalities - Cease not to learn 'til thou cease to live

What were the weather conditions when you climbed down? Skydiving Fatalities - Cease not to learn 'til thou cease to live

Nice haze! :-P Skydiving Fatalities - Cease not to learn 'til thou cease to live

For some skysurfing? :-P Skydiving Fatalities - Cease not to learn 'til thou cease to live

Thanks for the good wishes from everyone. I was worried someone was going to pick a hole (or worse) in something that I hadn't considered. :-o Phew! but wouldn't like to count on it! That sort of CRW I can do without! Good point. I'm pretty sure the grabbing of the reserve, due to getting a thumb in the loop, was instantaneous and unconcious, whereas the gripping action on the pad took longer and some thought. If they were both loops I think I would have had them both at the same time. Of course, I wouldn't rely on the RSL or the Cypres, but the priority, in this situation, above the hard deck, is to cutaway the main, so maybe a little more attention could be paid to that handle, at first anyway. This system is used regularly at the dropzone by a tandem instructor (who is also the DZM and an AFFI), who is a little bit smaller than me, and as such, it is adjusted for him, so if anything this particular harness is a little bit small for me but I don't think that was a factor. Doesn't everyone find outboard tandem pads difficult to grab? Or is it just me? If the handle was in board or even on the main lift web (over the pectoral) it would be a lot easier, but having bend the arm at the elbow as far as it will go whilst pushing the arm back to grab the outboard handle whilst having the strength and dexterity to pull it does not feel natural for me! I'm not saying I don't think I can do it (as I've proved) but it is awkward, no? Like I say, crooking a thumb in a loop (that is also proud from the harness lessening the effect of the geometry on one's arm) seems a lot easy hence my favouring two loops. I suspect it will be a lot easier to grab and pull (although maybe not initially located due to the change in position and depending on the severity of the malfunction). When a load is applied to the harness it tends to exacerbate any slack in the system creating space that would again lessen the geometry of the pull. Assuming a generally vertical pull from the risers, the harness may also be lifted a little from the body, although the attached student woul dgreatly diminish this. I will do it again. I wouldn't know about that! Do you mean the metal reserve cable (or even the cutaway on a Strong)? I never noticed. If you mean the drogue release then because I was still at terminal, I didn't take the time to move the drogue release before locating (or at least trying to!) my handles. :-) I did offer but he elected for just a pint (or two)! Skydiving Fatalities - Cease not to learn 'til thou cease to live

Being a fairly active tandem instructor (for a UK based, weekend warrior at least), I suspected that my next malfunction would be on a tandem, and this weekend, that came true. I had my first tandem malfunction on Saturday (10th March 2006) and yes, I bought beer. It was the second of 3 tandems performed that day. After an uneventful free fall from 12,000 feet, I pulled the drogue release at around 5,500 feet or just below. The drogue released normally and I felt the bag leave the container but I soon felt an awful sick feeling when I didn't get the usual sensation of being pulled upright. I looked over my right shoulder. During this brief glance I could see that the lines were at full stretch but it appeared that the canopy hadn't left the bag. From the angle I was looking from and the short time I spent doing so, I couldn't see exactly what was wrong but I was pretty sure it wasn't going to resolve itself. I did very briefly consider giving the risers as tug but quickly decided against that idea as being fairly futile in a high speed situation. I elected to cutaway and deploy the reserve. I had no problem locating the reserve loop but had trouble grasping the cutaway pad. I became slightly alarmed by the fact that the aging Velcro on the reserve handle parted and the handle detached, albeit in my hand, before I had managed to grasp the cutaway. I was wearing three layers on my hands (silk liners, summer gloves and winter gloves) but I don't feel that my dexterity was greatly diminished or that this was the biggest factor in my ability to grab the pad. I was also worried about the amount of time it seemed to take to grab the cutaway handle and pull it. It crossed my mind how embarrassing it would be to have the Cypes fire, not to mention the possibility of a main-reserve entanglement! After what seemed an eternity, I was able to pull the cutaway, followed by the reserve, as my 3k alarm on my Neptune was going off in my ear. My altimeter showed that I was just below three thousand feet. The reserve opened quickly and uneventfully although it was bucking as tandem reserves are won’t to do before the brakes have been released. I had held on to the drogue release whilst pulling the reserve. I wanted to get the brakes off to stop the canopy for surging but felt I had my hands full and for some reason passed the drogue release to my student with the instruction, "Hold onto that!" I placed the cutaway and reserve cables between my teeth (why didn't I do that with the drogue release as well?). As I unzipped my jumpsuit to secure the handles, I watched my student casually drop the drogue release! D'oh! At least it was a £5 handle and not a £50 one! As I was stuffing the handles away the bagged main canopy whistled past us about 6 feet to the right! :-o (Has anyone ever been hit by one of those?!) I performed a quick control check on the canopy, got a bearing on where I was and tried to keep an eye on the main for recovery and then headed back to the dropzone. A cameraman from another tandem came and flew by me to check me out and see if the main was still in the container. I landed back on the dropzone and stood it up as well. When we landed I asked my student if he wanted to know a secret? He said yes so I told him what had happened. He said it felt a bit weird towards then end. I'm not sure whether he really did notice. Yes it did get a bit wobbly when I was trying to get the reserve out but how much is a first time jumper really going to notice? Once I got inside that I started to think about things, I was a little shaken, but I soon recovered and went and did another tandem! The main was recovered fairly quickly and was bought back pretty intact. The two mouth locks were still stowed (although one of the rubber bands had snapped, there was enough integrity still left to hold the stow). There was a line over the bag and partly around the drogue bridle (although this could have happened after cutaway). An experienced Tandem Instructor/Examiner as well as reserve packer speculated that there may have been some line dump, a line got loose and went around enough to prevent the canopy from coming out of the bag. I'm pretty careful about stowing my lines in the container and I'm pretty sure that I didn't pack that in. Who knows? The main was an Aerodyne A2 384 with around 40 jumps on it (although it was no trouble to pack). The freebag was recovered a little later and the safety stow had gone. Due to the glorious English winter, as well as going to Thailand for three weeks, I am fairly uncurrent tandem wise. In the UK we are required to demonstrate our emergency drills to another instructor every sixty days, whether we have jumped with a live student or not. If we don't take at least one student every 90 days we are required to take a C licensed skydiver on the front which I did last weekend (thanks Zoter!). I also took a real student after that. The second one following those is the one I had the mal on. Due to my lack of currency, I did practice locating my handles in during freefall on all jumps. However, I realise I have been doing something a bit foolish, something which I've been doing since I did my first bag jump on my tandem course; I've been locating handles, in freefall, individually whilst stabilising myself with the other hand out in front of me. This is not a realistic drill since during a real (main canopy) emergency it is my intention to locate both the cutaway and the reserve at the same time, therefore not having a spare hand to counteract the manoeuvre. With the drogue collapsed, and the bag locked, I would estimate that the drag was about the same as a fully inflated drogue; it certainly didn't feel any faster, albeit the centre of the drag was located much higher than normal above my shoulders from the risers (but not enough to sit me up at all). Flying without using my arms whilst locating the handles felt unnatural and may have accounted for the student being aware that something was wrong. From now on, when I locate my handles in the air, it will be done simultaneously. More foolish is that this discrepancy had occurred to me before, and I’d even seen other instructors doing their drills in the air, on video, locating both handles at the same time and yet I still didn’t change mine. I’m not sure why; I guess because it’s the way I’ve always done it, and it is easier. I’ve just had a look at the DVD from my tandem course and I am not the only one doing it this way. It was never noticed or picked up, either on my course or since. I’ve also had a look through the Vector 2 tandem manual and the Sigma manual and can find no recommendation for locating the handles in freefall. Secondly, due to the high, outboard location of the handles and my trouble grabbing the cutaway pad, I will favour containers that have two loops from now on, such as the Next or the Atom. To me the ease of pulling that handle is more important than having different looking/feeling handles, especially when there is minimal snag risk (or is the reason to make it more difficult for a confused student to reach back and cutaway?) The jump was not videoed, which has its pros and cons. It would have been nice to have video to perhaps see if the reason for the bag lock was apparent as well as the ability to analyse how I reacted and dealt with the emergency. Having said that, it might have been embarrassing to see how much I was flailing! If the student is being videoed I tend to wave off at 6,000 feet to be releasing the drogue at 5,500. If I don’t have video I tend to take it a little lower, down to about 5,000 feet. I deployed the reserve at about 3000 feet, with approximately 5 seconds to spare before the Cypres fired. I am still considering these altitude choices. Some facts and figures: this jump was my 1660th, and it was my 335th tandem since I qualified in July 2003. My previous malfunction was on the 13th of April 2002, 1008 jumps ago (you can read about it here). I had one malfunction prior to that, on jump number 28, during my post-AFF consolidation jumps. You can read about that here. In the past twelve months I have done 320 jumps (128 tandems). In the past 6 months I have done 103 jumps (45 tandems). In the past 3 months I have done 25 jumps (4 tandems). I am both happy and disappointed to have had this mal. I’m glad to prove I can do it (not that I didn’t think I could), but it’s a shame my 1000+ jump run without a mal is over. It’s a pity it wasn’t a low speed malfunction so I could say the classic line asking if they enjoyed the jump and if they wanted to do it again! Perversely, I would also have liked to experience the long wait after cutting away before the reserve opens (ok, maybe not!). I mostly pack all of my own tandems (99%) and I mostly PRO pack so I thought the chances would be that this would be the cause of a mal. I’m a little annoyed that I’ll never really know what caused this mal. But I’m annoyed the most at giving the drogue release to the student for him to throw away! Skydiving Fatalities - Cease not to learn 'til thou cease to live

Taz (who was also on the World Team '06 400-way world formation skydiving record and the JFTC 151-way women's formation skydiving record), was recently interviewed by her local radio station. You can download it from Skydivingmovies.com Skydiving Fatalities - Cease not to learn 'til thou cease to live