pchapman

Yes, one wonders about the nature of the mal and how clear it was to the student, whether it was major (eg, lineover induced by asymmetric opening) or more minor (eg, closed end cells, popped toggle) -- fixable by pumping the toggles. @Loren: Limbs caught in the risers or lines happens occasionally with bad body position on a static line jump, such as if one rotates backwards so that the feet up are pointing up at the sky during opening. Bad exits are common, getting snagged is uncommon but happens. Depending on the aircraft, you'll probably need to work on stepping off the aircraft evenly without pushing off too much with the hands.

Lots of issues brought up in that post; but since I'm bored late at night I'll touch on a few of the issues. Some aspects of student gear are not about safety but are there just to accommodate multiple users -- like the extra weight & bulk of harness adjustment hardware. Some features apply to particular student training choices -- like ripcord gear (not very common these days), or a static line setup. Some things are 'safer' in a given context. A static line system will be safer for a complete novice who would tumble on an unassisted freefall, but be unnecessary for someone who knows how to fall stable. So it can have its place if other training methods are not available. It is also assumed that freefall is a very desirable part of the sport, so one wants to go beyond static lines. There can be different ways to achieve similar training goals, such as IAD vs. static line. The debate on which is better has continued over the years as there is no clear answer. IAD has in some areas won out as it allows for less specialized gear, and being able to use the same gear for different student experience levels. IAD has more potential dangers if the jumpmaster staff are less experienced, but it can also be said that training can compensate for that. There are always lots of tradeoffs. So it can be difficult to make a linear scale of the level of safety of a particular design. After being a student, you would generally get away from student gear with extra adjustment hardware, or specialized systems for particular training types like static line. Still, you can choose to use an RSL (as some experienced jumpers do), or use fairly big canopies. Maybe not as big as ab initio students, for that would get very boring very quickly, and maybe take more force to fly, and be more difficult to fly to one's target in high winds. Basically you don't want student gear. But you could still be conservative in your choices -- particularly in the size & design of canopies. A fair number of canopies can be ordered with dacron lines, if you don't care about a little bulk and want slightly improved openings. F-111 style canopies do still exist, but not many, and most modern student canopies are also ZP, at least for the top skin (hybrid). ZP is just superior for flying characteristics, and longevity, especially for anything except light wing loadings. F-111 designs have traditionally had harder openings than modern ZP canopies, but also tend not to have the very occasional slammers like ZP designs can. Still, the disadvantages of F-111 usually outdo whatever advantages they might have. You can also improve your safety a lot through choices in how to jump. That's not to say "never sitfly" or something like that, but more like, "avoid the temptation to allow a planned 2 way sitfly turn into a 6 way sitfly zoo load when your and the others' experience suggest that both safety and learning would be improved by doing a 2 way sitfly". No need to go swooping hard either. One can learn a variety of skills including mildly accelerated landings, without aggressively getting into swooping. While new jumpers often express complete satisfaction with some large canopy they are now flying, realistically, most people will get bored with them and find not quite so huge canopies much more enjoyable to fly, navigate, and land. Doesn't mean one has to get into swooping, but some degree of downsizing from student days is normal. So in the end there's a lot of gear available between the extremes of tiny swooping rigs and bulky student gear.

That's starting to be a list of questions best answered over a beer at the DZ! Or talk to the company and they can make recommendations based on your experience, desired type of jumping, body size, etc Edit: It is true that many skydiving gear websites are maddeningly vague about the details of their gear, even if in this case the O.P. is just new to jumpsuit buying so some standard terms are unknown.

Good question. My french is crappy, but in looking over french language articles on the web about the history of skydiving, they always talk about "parachutisme" -- I just don't see any equivalent to "sky diving". In the 1954 Ray Young article, he did put a fair bit of emphasis on how that newfangled stable freefall body position resembled that of a diver.

No CSPA restrictions or recommendations that I know of. (in PIM 1 or 2A)

In any case, one wonders, whatever became of Ray Young?

But be warned that the violence in it isn't cartoonish Hollywood stuff, but includes slow torture. I remember seeing girls exit the theatre nearly in tears. On the other hand, the comedy aspects of it were really good -- none of the criminals wanted the code name Mr. Pink as opposed to Mr. Black.

A hand held vacuum is really handy for cleaning out reserve trays, instead of shaking the rig out in the packing area or trying to sweep dirt out by hand. The question is, how much worse the dirt gets for a Seven than other rigs. I'd like to know what riggers in sandy areas find. It's an nice rig, but everything has its little tradeoffs.

That April '54 issue: choose page 26 for the article "The Free-Fall French" by Ray Young: http://books.google.ca/books?id=2GOUY9ILm1cC&lpg=PA10&dq=flying%20magazine%20april%201954&pg=PA26#v=snippet&q=parachute&f=false Curiously, I don't see him actually using the term "skydiving" or "sky diving" -- but he does write about how the free-fall parachuting isn't just falling but diving, because of the body position used for stability. He compares it to a swan dive but it could be more of a spread eagle depending on how far out arms and legs are. For most of the article, he writes about parachutists or jumpers -- just that they dive through the air. The term "skydiving" gets used a regularly in the occasional parachuting article written in popular magazines by the end of the '50s, including by Istel who tended to write articles about the sport. The earlier references are all about "sky diving" as two separate words. If Young wrote about the concept of diving through the sky, Istel was someone who pinned down the phrase: Istel wrote in the April '56 issue of Flying magazine that "Sky diving refers to the technique of maintaining absolute control of one's body during free fall before the parachute is opened." He goes on to state that not one American knew how to skydive, but the Russians and French did, so he learned from the latter in 1955. He doesn't however mention Ray Young, whatever his exact nationality. It is a little surprising since Young had published in the same magazine so shouldn't have been unknown. (Certainly a few lone individuals had figured out some form of stable fall earlier. Young had learned at a state-sponsored French school.) I only learned this stuff from using Google Books to look at some 1950's magazines, being curious about this thread. Was Ray Young at a World Meet? Or Jerry were you thinking of Fred Mason, who is in the standard histories as the first American at a Worlds, in '54. Sgt. Mason apparently died in a gliding accident not much later, so never passed on much of what he had learned.

Italy, chest strap failure, Racer: 2003 http://www.dropzone.com/cgi-bin/forum/gforum.cgi?post=512835 Short description on skydivingfatalities.info can be found by searching for this date range only: "6/7/2003". Details hazy but with a slack pilot chute pocket, it may have been a premature opening during head down, with a hard asymmetric opening. (Eg, 4 front lines on one side broken, burn marks in a riser.) Those unusual forces broke the chest strap. I don't know the type of strap, but Racers long used a single type 8 layer, which is uncommon these days, although rigs used to do that all the time (eg Vector 2). [Edit:] Still unclear to me what exactly broke - the stitching where the short (buckle) end of the strap wraps around the MLW? Ukrainian harness failure: 2006 http://www.dropzone.com/cgi-bin/forum/gforum.cgi?post=2408922; Related to an unusual and massively [Edit] possibly somewhat substandard harness design as I recall. [edit:] Having re-read the thread, the reserve riser construction is unusual and less fail safe than normal designs, but it isn't clear that the design was technically too weak, nor is it clear why the stitching at the big junction around the harness 3-ring blew in the first place. More info might be in the Russian language forum referenced in the thread. Talka Also found one case, 6/5/1999 Tomsk, Russia, in skydivingfatalities, where reserve risers broke but the gear was unusual - a Russian Talka rig with a PZ-81 canopy. I don't think those were uncommon at one time , but the report says the risers and rig were in poor condition.

Wow, I hadn't heard your name for 10 years, since the accident at SWOOP. Sorry to hear that you're still messed up from it. (For others, another thread on the incident is http://www.dropzone.com/cgi-bin/forum/gforum.cgi?post=204675, although a lot of it is a debate about helmets.) You never know how people will react in an emergency, and it can take time for the nature of the emergency to become apparent. So I can understand if the other jumpers just jumped and freefell to normal opening altitudes, leaving nobody under canopy up high to watch you. And the pilot, who knows, likely he was focused more on his own aircraft issues, and not wanting to go skydiving himself that day. Pilots aren't primed to the idea of chasing jumpers, especially non students, although a radio call would make sense. (Even if just to the other aircraft on ATC frequency up high. I certainly don't know either way whether the manifest radio would have been on, listened to, and whether it was tuned to ATC or a local area frequency.) The other aircraft might have been the party most able to keep an eye on you if alerted in time. What did the jumpers in the other aircraft in the formation load do? Did they jump when others climbing out on your aircraft jump? What size was the main you descended under? You ended up in the big gravel pits to the west of the DZ? [Edit:] So the main was undamaged, and it was just your body that hit the tail, or what was the situation?

That's funny, your English grammar, vocabulary, and general writing skills are far better than many native English speakers one encounters on the web these days... Plenty of skydivers have had to deal with shoulder dislocation injuries in the past, so there are a few threads out there on dz.com about dealing with it. I don't know enough about it, but bad shoulders have caused some experienced jumpers to quit the sport. It seems to be a vulnerable part of the body, especially to some of the motions used in skydiving. So even if your shoulder is fine in the short run, take whatever care is necessary to maintain it in the long run. You are understandably stressed about being fit enough to skydive safely, while still a novice with limited skills to fall back on. There are tricks to flaring with one hand (& two toggles) that you can learn as a backup, just in case. Perhaps spend the money on a tandem jump or two, and make sure the instructor plans to fully involve you (& your arms), in flying the freefall, pulling, steering, and flaring. That can't take the place of the advice of doctors, but if you want to try to prove to yourself that the shoulder is indeed better, a tandem jump is a safer environment to test that shoulder out.

Yay, new stuff from Twardo! Demos and instant openings, eh? In that case: I'm on a 3-way RW jump a few years ago. One guy wanted to play higher with his canopy so the plan is for him to pull out of the formation at breakoff while the other two of us track. I'm backing off and starting to turn as he pulls. Out of the corner of my eye I see him while his body is only ten feet above my level, yet his canopy seems fully inflated above his head. I don't have time to really ponder this while I deal with tracking and pulling. Turns out he had an explosive opening on his bigger Triathlon, that sounded like a gunshot on the ground. He blew one brake line and one brake line attachment at the canopy. He tries to land the canopy on rears, but stalls it out at 5 feet and he thumps in, tumbling. All of us were going to be on a demo jump a few hours later, and he still wants in on it, the bruising, limp, and sore neck be damned. And he wanted to use his own canopy. Nobody else is available to help him, so I find an out of adjustment sewing machine that runs long enough to sew the a new attachment tape back to the canopy. No time or materials to replace the lower brake line, which unusually broke in the middle not at the eye or at the end of a finger trap. So I finger trap a piece of line into the two fuzzy ends of the broken line, manage to sew some stitches to hold the finger trap at one side before the sewing machine jams, and then the jumper hand tacks the other end. The result may theoretically be somewhat structurally sound but is extremely messy, a bit of a rigging nightmare (see attached pic). Two of us rush to pack the canopy back up and the jumper just makes it onto one last load on the DZ to test the canopy ... and it works fine. He also wanted to test a new flag setup, with container on his belly from which to drop it down after opening. When he lands, I don't see him trailing any flag. I guess something wasn't hooked up right, because the flag and lead weight separated from the harness and fell off into the woods somewhere. Oops. The demo itself into a smaller stadium for a national league football game worked out just fine.

Bringing back an old thread. We need a place for random jump stories that don't deserve a whole thread, and aren't old enough for the Scary Stories from the Old Days thread. This is a minor tale of a couple students (& the DZ) getting very lucky: On the weekend a first jump student doing a static line jump doesn't check for line twists before yanking down his toggles. He's jumping at a generous 4000'. A brake line presumably hangs up in the line twists, and he starts spiralling, and does nothing else useful. By the time I run out of the hangar to see, the guy is in a full on spiral, horizontal to the horizon, under his modern student canopy of 250 or 270 square feet. He's at about 800', has visible line twists, and seems to be doing nothing. He's not twisting or untwisting as far as I could see, just hanging there. The descent rate with the big student canopy doesn't actually look that fast even in the hard spiral, and the FXC AAD isn't set off. (To simplify slightly, it should fire at 44 mph). Luckily the guy doesn't decide to chop with the SOS system when he gets super low and gets ground rush. The student disappears out of sight behind a nearby tree line at maybe 150-200' height. This doesn't look good. With the relatively slow descent rate maybe the guy has some chance of survival. Still, I would think that belly flopping at even 20-30 mph into a grassy field is typically going to leave a person pretty broken. Emergency procedures are set in motion, but then we hear from the aircraft that the student is seen walking. WTF? Turns out the line twists came out on their own, presumably at 100' or less, the canopy popped out of the spiral, the student flared and PLFed, and was totally unhurt. Mr. Clueless was really calm about things a couple hours later. He admitted he didn't look up on opening before flaring with the toggles. I'm not sure to what degree he really realized what had happened. Apparently in the first jump class a couple weeks before, he had been a bit of a know it all, trying to finish the instructor's sentences. So the student and DZO got really lucky. But this wasn't the first time. Just the previous year another student did spiral right into the ground at the DZ with a mal, and was unhurt except for a sprained or perhaps broken ankle. In that case the guy did start to pull the SOS handle, but either in the wrong direction or not very far. He hit the the ditch at the end of the DZ next to the paved road, skimming the side of the ditch and ending up in the soft ground at the bottom. When a local jumper / firefighter gave the student a medical check at the accident site, the student told the jumper not to worry about his one pupil not focusing -- because he had a head injury from before, a plate in his head, and limited vision in one eye. Well, so much for the student's medical declaration of fitness to jump. That's some pretty good luck on the part of the students, and the DZO.

I haven't checked the videos, but I think that's an add-on for when floats are used. Pretty common for planes to get some kludgy little vertical tail surface add-ons when floats are used or may be used. Floats add too much destabilizing vertical surface area ahead of the C of G.

This law has caused people to die? The gun o phobes are getting desperate..... Without arguing for any particular position, I think the poster's intent was that if the repercussions for opening fire are particularly lax and ill-defined (which can be subjective), then people are likely to open fire with little thought or restraint, thus leading to more deaths. The law has thus probably caused people to die. (The increase in numbers due to knowledge of the existence of the law can be debated, as can how many deaths are justified or not.) (And don't get pedantic and claim that the law didn't cause people to die, rather that it was organ damage and circulatory failure from bullet wounds.) It would also be interesting to go through all the SYG cases and determine how "innocent" the victims are. Less so for drug dealers where everyone is gunning for everyone else, maybe more so if there are mistakes about how angry someone is. I wonder if the law has cut down on plain old drunken fights, due to the possibly greater repercussions of trying to beat someone up.

The EAA publications clearly state how automotive fuels have greater vapour pressure and that is why they had to carefully evaluate various different engines or airframes for a fuel that was outside the original design considerations. It also acknowledges that vapour lock can occur earlier with auto gas than avgas in adverse conditions -- and it has happened even with aviation gas. Perhaps this is a "glass half full or half empty" argument. I haven't re-read the thread to figure out why we're talking about this in a Tandem Drogue thread, but I wanted to correct a belief that auto and avgas are basically the same thing. They are not, even if in certain circumstances one can be used safely in place of the other. Hope that's good enough...

To add to that, in the case of a Vigil firing when a door opened, that did prompt changes in the user manual regarding doors during the early parts of the aircraft's climb.

Can't fault them doing a little marketing. In any case, the website is still a one page placeholder with no detail or even a full photo of a suit. So no need to click through yet unless really eager.

On the original topic, I discussed the issue with the O.P. and it was determined that the Vigil 2 was built much earlier than the LCD v2.20 batch. So, without any other evidence, it can be considered basically a random failure. While it isn't great to have a failure, at least Vigil is quickly replacing the controller / LCD unit.

The main thing that will have saved them is that we can't see the speed of movement involved, that the "line inspector" must have dived through fast enough to avoid too much of a body check. Who knows, actually burbling the opening canopy for a split second might have helped too to reduce the deploying jumper's upwards acceleration.

While the forbes site and the other one linked in this thread really trashed the movie, I found the following blog and the very many comments useful :http://cavalorn.livejournal.com/584135.html There the opinions are more mixed, and more importantly, people are trying to makes sense of what the back story is, what the logical connections are that explain what happens in the movie. But it is still unclear to me if they are discovering what Ridley Scott had really planned, or whether it was all a bit of a mess with no logical connection and loose ends -- after which the fans have just worked out some sort of explanation that fits more of the data points from the movie. I don't mind having to think a little after a movie to try to understand things afterwards, but then I want there really to be a logical framework, and not just a bunch of stuff thrown up on screen for which the scriptwriters don't really have a good explanation in the first place. In any case, there's some good work on that link, trying to make some sense of things.

You're right about the consequences, which a paraglider pilot will understand. But in skydiving we don't have specific certifications of maneuvers in certain weight ranges, unlike for paragliders. So if a company suggests a certain minimum loading, there's not telling what that means specifically -- it can be anything from "you're wasting your money on this fancy canopy at such a low loading" to "it might get dangerous in turbulence". We don't have any required testing for collapses and reinflation; relying more on designs for collapse resistance and the concept that on flyable days you don't expect collapses at all. Speculation is that more advanced canopies with smaller inlets will do more poorly at reinflation after a partial collapse, one reason not to lightly load the more high performance canopies (while other designs can be sized for students and used at very light loadings).

Generally pretty rare I bet. But see halojumper.com, West Tennessee Skydiving. Think that is that Mullins guy's place. 30k ft night jumps.