faulknerwn

3 of the young jumpers at my dz work at spacex in tx. In fact I gave the a license oral quiz today to the guy who was in charge of signing off on the thrusters :). I was joking about photoshopping a skydive temple bumper sticker onto one of the photos, and he assured me once it lands it will be coming back to Texas and he can put one on for real :). So look for skydiving stickers the next launch !! Laugh It is cool - I drove up to their location a couple times and got to watch test fires of their engines from a couple hundred yards away. Saw the rocket before it launched. Was told I could come up once it's back and check it out and I definitely will. It's very cool. We are going to have to work on them on implementing an emergency bailout systems for which they will need test jumpers:)

Who else is thinking that instead of ponds for swoopers we should just get piles of boxes? Would make the occasional too low turn better eh? Or maybe fill the student landing area with boxes?

I play all 3:). I like the drawing game best. Faulknerwn or if you are a Facebook friend play from there. :)

And you can't hear or speak as well in a full face helmet as in an open face. Being able to yell to get attention to someone near you under canopy who is otherwise oblivious can be a a life saver. And ditto on the fogging issue. I believe England requires at least a hundred jumps to jump a full face.

I voted no as well. These instructors have to be able to talk students down on radio as well. How many 200 jump wonders do you see who can do that?

I agree you can have a very nice soft opening in 500 feet - but some modern canopies take upward of 1000 feet to open. I prefer the 500 foot soft openings myself.

I was quite a bad student in my day :). Took me 48 jumps to get off student status. Now, 8000 jumps later, I think I've figured it out :). You can read my student logbook herehttp://crwdog.servebeer.com/CRWdog/HowCRW.html Biggest tip is relax and arch. Believe me I know that's easier said than done but just don't forget to breathe !!!!

We have several jumpers at my dz who work for spacex in tx. I've been up to their location and watched several testf fires. It's very cool being able to watch from a couple hundred feet away. Can't wait to find out the scoop on what went wrong

The wind tunnel should help you tons. Read my student logbook - I was less than stellar myself :) http://crwdog.servebeer.com/CRWdog/HowCRW.html

EVery time I've ever been to eloy I've gotten sick I feel your pan!!

I am sad to share that long time Texas skydiver Mike Ware passed away today from lung cancer. I have many fond memories of Mike, from his stories of buying his first rig back in the 60s for $30 and having Mike McGowan cut holes in it to make it high performance, to doing my first demo with him and following him in downwind into a high school football stadium. I had my first reserve ride on his nice pink PD 143 reserve as well ( me and at least 3 other people he loaned his rig too! It was a good reserve ). I'm sorry I didn't have time to get down to see him one last time. BSBD Mike. See you on the other side Wendy

I have heard the crw storms land better than the Freefall storms. A few years ago when storms first came out, a friend had a demo Freefall storm 170. She was loading it at about .8. I tried to go up with her on my Lightning loaded at 1.4. I couldn't stay down with her. She fell out of the sky so fast that even at that light wing-loading compared to mine I couldn't catch her descent rate.

All of at my dz use Somy cx series cameras and they work just fine with (the latest) iMovie. And the version before that actually. I don't drag and drop - a window just pops up in iMovie when I plug in the card and I import from there. Perhaps you are using an old version of iMovie?

I can see night and day difference between a kit lens on an slr and a good lens. The go pro quality is clearly worse. We print out one still for every customer ( they love that and it sells more ) and I would wince When just looking at photos that came from someone shooting with just the kit lens. You can see the blurriness in the print easily. And the go pro is even worse quality. When you can get a good camera for the price of a go pro, i don't get why you would to the worse option. Plus you can take a ton more picture with the slr. Our dropzone would not allow anyone working in the video rotation to use a go pro for sure. And I would suspect that the vast majority of larger dropzones would say the same. I think where they would get the most use is handycam dropzones because you don't have much of a choice if you want stills. And I do think people still print at least one out to hang on their wall.

The reason the Storm has so much rear riser recovery is because it has such an insanely steep angle of attack. You can use the rears the same way on the lightning, but it won't go up as fast because the attack angle isn't as steep to begin with. Storms have such a high descent rate they wouldn't work very well for big ways because your working time would be so short. And, I know others who think the opposite, but I find the lightning far easier to land than the storm. As for descent rate - a little bit of front risers on a lightning will make you drive horizontally faster, deeper front risers will make you sink. And the front riser pressure on lightnings is way way lighter than on the storm. The rapid rear riser ascent can definitely help you if you screw up and end up low and behind. Proper response is don't screw up and end up there :). The openings were the only thing I preferred about the storm over the lightning. But I'm manly a big way person, and a small way person, but the competition teams all seem to like storms so there must be a reason. I've got 8000 jumps, a really large number on small 7-cells and a thousand on 75-85 square foot ellipticals. I almost never fall down on landing. Of my half dozen jumps on the storm 97 the best I managed to pull off was just going down to a knee. To this day I don't have a clue what the trick is to get any kind of flare out of it.

The vast majority of serious crwdogs don't take downplanes that low. We lost two highly experienced crwdogs about 5 years back when they were doing a low downplane and had trouble releasing their grip. There have been other deaths and serious injuries also over the years from them - even two at Spaceland within the past year or so. Low downplanes are like toggle whipping hook turns. You can get away with them for a while but one tiny thing goes wrong and it can kill you. I would have no problem doing crw with someone with 39 jumps. I would do a downplane with them. But my downplane would be at 3-4 thousand feet Taking it low is basically a low pull contest. Catfish has done a lot of extremely extremely low downplanes and low pulls over the years and is well known for it. I would never ever recommend him as a crw mentor however because of his recklessness with safety. There are a lot of experienced safe people in Texas who would not be taking people on downplanes ridiculously low. It's not safe and it's especially not safe fora beginner I've got 3000 crw jumps and will do all sorts of crazy stuff up high - but I respect mother earth because it has stolen a lot of my friends - several of which were from low downplanes.

I had the same problem on both the Nikon and the tokina 11-16. ThE tokina didn't have image stabilization I want to get some sort of flat top helmet this summer - wonder whether that will help. Right now it's mounted on top but not quite as protected as on a flat top.

I have done tons of those jumps and never noticed anything different between drag planes and down planes as far as tension. I wouldn't worry about your risers breaking. My guess is that the storms have such an extreme angle of attack that it makes for more pressure? Almost all of mine were done on Lightnings which are more mellow..

21 in 8200 jumps :). Some were crw, most of the rest were spinning ellipticals.

I've one from jumping a 75 to mainly jumping 120s. Iprer my 135 and 150 on no wind days!!

Yes. I can't foresee Mark Mark ever making such a rule at Temple. He started skydiving in 1976 so he's been around long before modern AADS

It's lucky the crw camp I'm holding there is among before the mandate takes effect. I'm not going to spend $1500 on an aad for my dedicated crw rig. It will definitely be the last crw camp I ever hold there if the mandate stands.

Yeah I sucked when learning :). Could land the parachute on a dime but sucked I'm Freefall. Tunnel time can definitely help. The relaxation skydive as well.. Someone else mentioned going out during the week - if that is possible usually the pace is quite a bit slower which might help you. Also make sure you know the skydive like the back of our hand. Practice it hundreds of time at home - and even more importantly close your eyes and visualize yourself doing it perfectly. It took me 50 plus jumps before I relaxed in Freefall. Static line was slightly easier for me because the money cost of repeating AFF jumps was a huge stress for me. If you are at a location where you might can do some static lime program jumps it might help you. They cost less and there is less to do on the Skydives. Read my logbook - its highly entertaining. FYI I am now an AFF instructor and have been on multiple world records - but I used to tr to time my pull on blue green blue green and try to pull on green :)

I can get out a DVD from iMovie in 15 minutes. And that is on a 4-5 year old computer. Probably 3-4 minutes of that is actual editing and the rest is just the computer doing its thing. I'll use the time when I am waiting to burn the stills on a cd or print out a picture. I can be burning a DVD in iDVD while editing in iMovie and burning stills. ( we keep an external burner on our macs ). The individual software can't have multiple copies open, but you can be burning in iDVD and editing in iMovie without a problem. I can get 2 videos normally burned in the time it takes the tandem master to get the next set of students dressed. ( we normally do back to back loads and then a break to get the next students ready ). I'm pretty confident that with a newer machine with more memory I could get that time down even less.

It just surprised me because everyone here with canons ( whether 18/55 sigma 10-20 or canon 10-22) all use similar settings. I need to use dramatically different on the Nikon ( on several different lenses even ) I had just never realized there was such a large difference between the brands.