pchapman

For all the good teaching he does, if he wants something to really go viral... he'll have to nearly kill a student on video, or share any private collection of goriest swoop accidents...

That scene never gets old. The show is out there on public torrents, just in case someone "misplaced their personal VHS copies"....

Stick to one thread in one forum please! [ref: a thread in General Discussion]

Really depends on what you want. I really don't know the jumpsuit market in detail but anyway: A hugely baggy freefly suit made out of cotton, with alternating colour patches (Joker design)? An actual 70s balloon suit with ram air vents? Those aren't that practical to fly with others, although if you go hunting, you may find one in the closet of a long time DZ or jumper. A simple RW suit with no booties and small grips? You may be able to get a suit without booties, while unobtrusively small grippers tend to be available only on freefly suits as an option. That niche of a simple bit-of-everything suit is covered more by the simpler non skin tight freefly suits these days. Want a double zipper suit of all one colour and material, that's a step up from coveralls and looks neater for a hop and pop at a demo? That's still available in ParaGear. Or are you just looking for a visual design like the old days, such as accents of angled wedges splayed outwards? (See pic of an early 80s RW suit I picked up free and sometimes use for camera work. With swoop cords added it effectively has camera wings.) Custom designs are always available at a cost on suits, so one should be able to achieve that look on some new suits, although fancy accents that tend to be seen more on freefly suit than RW suits - which usually stick with different coloured panels (For example, I don't ever recall seeing an RW suit with a flame design...)

Yeah, but the relative wind would dry the clay tablet sketches pretty quick, as long as they didn't get dropped on opening shock.

If it was an instructor, ops mgr and a DZO with the same opinion, it does look like they had some strong opinions. Threads here on dz about students with problems do suggest cutting a student some slack and giving it time, before any bowling speech, if it is mainly a performance issue. And switch instructors if there's a personality conflict. A DZ shouldn't string a student along and just take their money, but if the student is willing to keep working on things and are still safe, there's no arbitrary limit on how many jumps it should take to get AFF or a license done. Wonder what got the DZ so bothered. Presumably it didn't take 20 jumps to get to C1. Did you blow a couple AAD cutters, do something they saw as grossly unsafe, have an attitude they didn't like, have no clue during the debrief what was happening in the air?? Unless there was one stunningly dangerous or incompetent act, one would expect a "think about it carefully and shape up" speech (& discussion!) before ever escalating to the bowling speech. In any case it sounds like things are going smoother elsewhere.

The idea of feeling turbulence in freefall is going to be generally discounted, and not something we are usually looking for, but I wouldn't rule the possibility out entirely. One thing is that with an effectively high wing loading or ballistic coefficient, a skydiver will be affected less by turbulence or wind shear. A light aircraft will feel every bump, a heavier one will be less affected. Wings however are a bit of a different case because they are far more aerodynamically efficient than a blunt body and thus will be more affected by small changes in airflow. For wingsuits, although not all the efficient compared to real wings, I think the BASE guys really notice it if they are in turbulent air. Turbulence tends to be higher lower down, but one certainly has thermally summer days where in temperate climes one may have cumulus cloud at 3 to 6 thousand feet, so updrafts (and associated shears and downdrafts) are present up to at least that level. While these are generally vertical they aren't perfectly straight columns (within the air mass) so one could hit areas of different airflow during a largely vertical skydive. The question really becomes, whether say hitting the edge of a 600 fpm thermal boiling off in some direction is going to cause enough acceleration to be noticeable to a skydiver, with a drag coefficient somewhere around 1. One could plug numbers into the basic drag equation to find the drag (Drag = 1/2*rho*V^2*S*Cd), and then with mass calculate acceleration, for some small change in airspeed. But whatever number we come up with, I don't know how noticeable that value is. It will tend to be more noticeable the less other physical activity and body sensations are going on -- better if there is not a lot of body movement, or taking grips on others, or having a flapping loose jumpsuit etc. A slight change in acceleration in an elevator, for example, will be easier to notice if standing perfectly still in the elevator, not moving around and focusing on a conversation. One may also need for the jumper to be in a region of changed airflow long enough for the acceleration to be noticed -- e.g, half a second's worth of disturbed airflow might not be enough to notice easily. Although I think all these factors have to be considered, in the end I don't know for sure what the answer is. But I figure that although we're usually not paying attention to subtle things like it, and are usually in relatively smooth air up high, it is quite possible that we would feel turbulence and wind shear in freefall.

Baldwin, Ontario. (About an hour north of Toronto.) Bill: Y'all be careful now, hear? Get yourself in shape mentally and physically if you're going to do one more jump after a few years since hanging it up the last time!

I assume it is just European skydivers having fun. Most likely with an experienced jumper passenger. And I bet they laugh and snicker at Americans who get all huffy about manufacturer's rules and lawyers and stuff. They could act totally professional with students, and then go do some crazy stuff on their own. Just because some company doesn't want their gear used in a certain way, that's not their concern. Some will cry about lawyers and possible death of our industry, but a fun jump or stunt has nothing to do with taking up tandem students. Blah blah blah lawyers blah blah blah. While I won't comment on any specific risks with specific tandem systems, skydivers do all sorts of stuff where a premature deployment might kill someone, even if we try to keep that kind of exposure down.

While you have good contributions on DZ, the question posed now seems overly specific and I'm not sure how well it captures things Lodi-granny related. Expected more on Memorial Day weekend compared to the weekend before, or last year's M.D. weekend? And do you mean did the actual numbers compare to what you expected? The video did seem to surface about the 22nd, but it was just before the weekend that it really went viral. I did start to get questions about it from a couple whuffo friends on the weekend. But I think for those planning ahead for a first jump, it'll only be next weekend onwards (June 2 +) where there's any chance for a change to happen. It would be instructive to chat with DZ staff who answer phones in the next weeks, to see whether it comes up in conversation at all. Who knows, but I did tell manifest at the DZ I'm at, that maybe they should know what answers to give if harness related questions start to be asked. (I was once at a small DZ that had just had a triple fatality involving a friend. Although everyone was in a somber mood, we still joked about what to say on the phone. "Only lost 3 last month!")

Don't know about your unit specifically but: Weird "maximum" numbers do show up on different devices. I trust average speeds much more than maxima. Even with some internal averaging, changes in airflow can cause weird effects. (Eg, the trace from my Protrack, mounted outside a helmet, shows say 160 mph maximum every time I track off from an RW jump -- something that clearly isn't true or I would have been kicked off bigways long ago.)

I know there's debate about line deployment methods and so on. And I jump a semi-stowless bag of my own design, and felt no real change from elastics to stow pouch. But we're not talking here about a couple pounds more pressure on tight elastics vs. a freebag, over say 1 second of deployment. Here we're talking about 25 FEET of extra distance for the pilot chute to slow the bag down. (Again, this isn't going back to the original post about 1" different risers, but about someone's quip about adding 25 FOOT risers. Maybe there's confusion over what we're referring to??) As for personal experience, I remember when the DZ switched to new pilot chutes when I was a student, and all of the opening suddenly felt a lot harder and snappier -- the difference in snatch force was appreciable.

Why harder? One reason: You're going 120mph. Pilot chute pulls bag off your back, and by the time everything is at line stretch, the bag 10' away, the pilot chute has had time to slow the bag say to 80 mph (I'm making numbers up). You feel the snatch force as a 5+ lb bag going 40 mph away from you hits "the end of the rope". Do the same with 35' of line and riser, and whamo, you get hit with the snatch of the same bag going, who knows, only 40 mph downwards, or 80 mph away from your shoulders, thus 4 times the kinetic energy (using the made up numbers). The canopy opening itself might not change all that much. Haven't thought about that much and won't go into the various issues since it isn't the main point of the thread.

Can you comment why? I haven't heard safety complaints lately. Sure, there's the tricky RSL design, and 30+ years ago there may have been some sketchy pack jobs. Maybe some tightly bent reserve housings at the shoulder in the early days inhibiting the pull, but that was long ago too, I thought. Not sure what would be an issue more recently.

Nobody is arguing against that. That's not the point. The point is that people argue against tunnel time "in general" being substituted. The Canadian PFF rules just got rewritten, largely following the line of thinking of the very experienced instructor who heads the program. A comparison might be useful just to see what others in the world do. We here in Canada have long required 6 hours, 600 jumps. (We don't have any time in sport rules, but one needs to have a C license, some form of instructor rating, and the Coach 2 rating - effectively the advanced coaching rating for teaching relative work skills.) The new rules this year still have 6+ hours & 600 jumps and say "more STRONGLY recommended" for both categories. Also, there's a "recommendation only" of having 2 hours of tunnel time. (In addition to the jumps, not substituting for them.) For course preparation, a "recommendation" is that a candidate do this sort of tunnel work: During the actual course, there are normally 10 practice jumps, before 6 evaluation jumps. If the course conductor is using the tunnel, the practice jumps can be cut down to 5, and there's a detailed list of tunnel exercises to be done. So this is an example of how elsewhere than in the US, updated rules don't substitute tunnel time for freefall time - but suggest adding it on. Also, specific tunnel practice and training is seen as part of the process of becoming a PFFI if a tunnel is available. While sometimes the CSPA manuals really lag the USPA when it comes to developing detailed, up to date info, in this case the USPA might want to have a look at what's being done up north.

Refreshingly low key indeed. There were spectators; various videos came out quickly and weren't being controlled only through one organization; and the scenery wasn't plastered with company logos in every viewing angle. I wouldn't have minded it if there were a logo for the carboard box company -- the boxes were minor stars of the show too!

So you don't have to wear black to do a stunt like that! The BBC video showing him walking out does show that he wore a neck brace. Am curious what rig he wore -- not too much weight on the back would be nice during the deceleration.

Yes, I did in 2007. There's a post out there somewhere. Who knows, others may well have done the same. Back at the time I did learn that at least one round/wingsuit jump was done in BASE: Skyflyer wrote in 2002 on dz.com, As for my jump, Jari Kuosma of BirdMan hadn't heard of any other round/wingsuit skydives with his gear so appreciated the photos. I had a ParaCommander, bag deployed, in a large modified piggyback rig with 3-rings & BOC, and a round reserve. With that rig, you know you are coming down on a round in any case. The suit was my trusty old BirdMan GTi. Very convenient to have a wingsuit to fly oneself to a good opening point for the round. Big long rig also made for a very easy pilot chute reach. And few worries about line twists. The opening was nice, softer than normal, probably from a slower than terminal total velocity on the flight path, and the swing from the horizontal movement was smoothly damped out by the round canopy. Still, I only made it back to the DZ parking lot in the lower evening winds, so had to land the PC on hard packed clay & gravel, and ended tripping and falling down since I had not bothered to undo the leg wing. I want to do a wingsuit jump with a belly mount rig some day too. I know that's been done for a BaseR fore-and-aft rig, for example by Yuribase, but not sure if anyone has used vintage gear as I'd like to do. (Photos: Two landing photos and dull ground video captures since I'm too far to see anything other than gray dots.) As for comments about not seeing any point in it: Fair enough, but that's what others say about jumping out of airplanes in general.

To find a middle ground here: Technically it is easy to refute "If you are afraid to stall your canopy, you are afraid to flare your canopy for landing". Hence someone calling the idea crap. The statement on its own has to be wrong due to being too simplistic. If even one person is afraid to stall their canopy, but knows how to land well, the statement is wrong. Hey, I'm afraid to stall my little crossbrace canopy, although I have done it up high. So the criticism is valid. Still, there is an element of truth to the statement. Some people might be hesitant in their flare due to worry about stalling. So the statement would need to be reworded to get at the true element in it. Teachers always have to work on their wording to better convey information.

Well, I'd agree if the canopy is in a steady state situation. However: 1) If it is twitchy in the stall, then the longer you hold it, the more time you are exposed to having it do something funky, adding risk as the time of exposure goes up. 2) I'm thinking a smaller canopy might not be at its own full "terminal velocity" if only in a stall a few seconds. One might be still accelerating downwards for some time. Recovering a fully stalled, messy canopy, slider down, will be snappier and more sudden at higher speed, making it more likely that one messes up or gets unlucky and into unrecoverable line twists. (I haven't done a lot of stalls, but more than most people, including getting fully toggle stalled on a Stiletto 120 and FX 88.) So I kind of think there is some time factor involved. But that applies more to fast canopies. If one is under something more docile, then the idea of "it doesn't know how long it has been stalled" makes more sense.

Try to open it, then manually delete the crap in the link, and that does give a valid youtube link. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LwVa_ydZOyw

Nice! (As for the furry site, that's less my thing.) The song reminds me of the somewhat less technical Weird Al song, "It's All About the Pentiums", which had a great music video too.

Now that's a conversation only the old timers have!

I should have put more smileys on my post!

[A 90 degree turn takes up much less of a volume of airspace than a 270, 360 or greater, airspace that is filled with canopies. That's why they SEPARATE canopies in time or space at good DZs, rather than banning things. Landing would be so freaking boring without being able to swoop on every jump. I'd hope jump prices be halved to make up for the loss in fun. Either that, or I'd have to go back to accuracy as I used to do and 260+ sq ft canopies. Slow but at least not mentally dull like some normal landing.