pchapman

PSB-06 Oct 4, 2011 My interpretation only - please read the actual attached .pdf bulletin: Recall of all cutters produced in October 2007. Reason: One cutter (involved in a fatal accident in Canada) didn't have the blade installed. Believed to be an isolated incident. Those cutters should all be returned. Other cutters build before June 2008 should be magnet tested to confirm the presence of the blade, just as a precaution. (Later ones are 100% xray tested.) When: before next jump for the list of Vigils provided; at next repack for other Vigils (e.g., in case cutters were swapped around) Thanks to the CSPA who had this bulletin even before the A.A.D. site. [comment: Oops!]

Just about everyone experienced. Well, no not everyone, I'm not looking for responses here from people with big reserves... Even back in the mid 1990s, a not uncommon reserve for anyone experienced, would be a PD126. Maybe not for an extra large guy, but even for someone 180 lbs before gear. So MSW's have been ignored practically forever. (If one looks at container sizing charts from the era, say for the Vector II, you find that the rigs that in theory fit a Stiletto 120 properly -- a common hot canopy of the day -- will only take something like a PD 126 at the most.) Yes, just a guideline (at least in USA & Canada). Companies tend be conservative with their numbers. Clearly though a bigger reserve will be safer if one uses it.

Neumann gloves perhaps? I don't know where to find the company itself, even if many skydiving shops sell their gloves. Equestrian stores also seem to have them.

Great. Why don't you post your information in the appropriate thread about a Cypres problem? That will bump your thread back to the top. This thread is about a Vigil problem.

Let's stay focused on the Vigil issue here. I started this thread about an AAD problem I saw. You started a thread on an AAD problem you saw. (To give it more publicity for you: http://www.dropzone.com/cgi-bin/forum/gforum.cgi?do=post_view_flat;post=4115858 A Cypres 2 fire on the ground which was traced to a short in a damaged cutter cable. It took a long long time for Airtec to diagnose it, partially due to communication delays, but also due to Airtec not expecting that kind of rare problem -- they could have done better. ) It is easier for a company to respond promptly to a problem when they already know the problem was one they inadvertently caused.

Flight Concepts also makes large F-111 canopies - as used by some demo jumpers. But Dragon2 is right - there are some other options for large modern canopies. Even if in general the availability of large canopies is lower in the used and new market. One could also look at your overall situation and see whether a 230 might be actually be OK down the road, whether your preferences might change.

Nothing wrong with doing it -- as long as you do it right. The technique was even used for accuracy training a little bit in the 80s, such as in the UK, but never caught on. Para-ascending was then done with the earliest paragliders, which were basically the same as skydiving canopies of the time (mid 80s) as that's what they developed from. You don't need an efficient wing, after all, they tow parasails (aerodynamically like the ParaCommander rounds of the 60s) - but then you need a lot of power. Even regular skydiving canopies, with a worse glide ratio, will have much higher drag and thus power requirements than a paraglider. Of course a small skydiving canopy with a high stall speed is going to need more airspeed to take off, making the whole proposition tougher. The techniques of towing are specialized (attachment points, weak links, lockout prevention, tow pressure monitoring, etc). At least paraglider pilots involved with winch launching will know the techniques already.

I was replying to someone who asked about Adrenaline Rush (while the thread title is about Human Flight 3D).

Point taken as to preferred usage. But even the printed notes from my prof Dr. Vranesic calls it both assembler language and assembly language... back when learning to program the Motorola 6809!

Good to hear that AAD / Vigil has been handling the problems promptly, when there's a problem with a unit. Yes, I do think if a company has a bad batch the good thing to do is to publish an advisory bulletin. And if they don't, hey, what's to stop someone from bringing it to public attention (even if just on dz.com), when they see a bunch of otherwise reliable AADs suddenly crap out? The company got behind the curve, they didn't lead with the news. And when it happens like that, it looks like one is sloppy or covering up or making decisions disrespectful of the customer. Others may interpret it differently. Perhaps the company was just starting to see the problems crop up, so they may not have figured out the whole picture until around when this thread came up. That's certainly a defense -- perhaps we were all learning about this at the same time. If I had a Vigil that I had bought in the last year, or a bunch for a school, I'd sure like to know if mine were at elevated risk of not turning on properly.

As for the Astra being dumb, here are some quotes from the 1996-1998 in rec.skydiving: From FXC documents copied to the newsgroup: And about the main sensing part of the software, the main software loop: So the Astra did simple averaging to determine the speed. It also did inhibit firing until below 1400'. It was supposed to fire at 1000' +/- 200'. If you think about the averaging method, the vagueness of the altitude makes sense. At say 200 fps it wouldn't detect 1200' until 1100' because it would be averaging the last second's worth of input, ranging from 1300' down to 1100' -- at which point the average finally reaches 1200'. It isn't that it would fire low, just that it had to be in effect set a bit high so that due to the lag from the averaging, it would still first roughly at the desired altitude. A very very simple system. Before the Astra came out, Bill von Novak had this to say: FXC confirmed in some document that the Astra does indeed use an interpreted language: Whether it was actually BASIC was debated, but it sounds plausible. I'm no microcontroller programmer, but using INTERPRETED BASIC seems a very crude way to do things. Not the sign of sophisticated design even then. Code in assembler or compile some language. In 1998 FXC claimed "improved and more sophisticated signal processing and software driven filtering" in its latest software upgrades, but there was no sign of any major changes. While most people didn't ponder the software design, they could see that the battery life and on/off switch design made it a lot clunkier than the Cypres. (And a pain for schools where it was easier for an AAD to be left on.) So it never got popular. The last Astra I rigged was about 2-3 years back but I've seen one other one around somewhere. Very rare.

You could well be right but I'm not sure. Is the pressure change during climb a "large difference"? Haven't people had Cypres' boot up OK in the aircraft during climb, and fire early in freefall due to that?

Yes I believe that was a factor at the time. There was talk (on rec.skydiving) about how simple the processing seemed to be, from the little that had been heard about the internal logic. It just didn't sound like there had been much attempt even to design smart logic. But all of the electronic AADs will get fooled by that, so that can't be held against the Astra.

Do the calculations on how much freefall time you will have. You'll most likely still have tons of time to the minimum student opening altitude, and even more to the minimum for skydivers in general. You can exit just the same as always, just that the ground is a bit closer. The whole point is to learn to not get psyched out by it! Some AFF students don't get psyched out, partially because the jumps are made out to be no big deal. Exit and deployment are the same; you just cut out the time in between and don't practice any maneuvers. (Meanwhile, all the jumpers who trained the traditional way with static line or similar and did all their early jumps at 3000' or so will be snickering.)

Oh, it is out on the internet... p2p, file share sites... but as for buying it, that I don't know about.

Was this with the 'single' black RSL tape, rather than the newer split RSL / Collins lanyard version which is optional on sport rigs? (If the split version were a retrofit, it could explain how the whole system could have been re-assembled incorrectly when the new RSL part was sewn on or replaced as a whole.) To confirm, the red line was larks headed purely onto the straight part of the white line? Rather than being larks headed into the larks head of the white line? (Which is also incorrect, and could allow slippage, but not nearly as likely to do so or to slip as far.) Both red and white line are supposed to be larks headed to the black RSL tape individually. (Did some have the loops fingertrapped and sewn into place, as you also ask, based on the fuzzy photos?)

Thanks for the input. I still wonder if a less tacking-intensive method can be found. Your argument, in my opinion, works better when it comes to the reason for 2 pins: By distributing the load and holding the PC down at 2 points, instead of one central point, there's less bending to be withstood, and no solid cap made of aluminum or fibreglass. The issue of weight of pilot chutes (also in relation to spring strength) is one for which there's no one accepted concept in the industry. There's no question that the Racer pilot chute is kept light.

I know it's all fun but maybe it is getting a little excessive, people making posts just to get the DB Cooper thread away from the top of the list. That's been a popular diversion in the last little while. That thread is just so popular that the tactic can only succeed for a brief time. To try to do it all the time, we'll basically be spamming our own little forum every day -- harming ourselves while doing little meaningful to the DB Cooper thread. Self destructive spite. Here in History & Trivia we don't have an excessive number of posts, so we've always been a little more free to play around and have fun, chat with each other, make comments that aren't absolutely necessary, and so on. So if people have had their fun, I'm hoping that there's enough agreement that we can all go back to ignoring the DB Cooper thread (or whatever you personally like to do). Lets get back to legitimate stuff here -- old time skydiving tales, explanations of how vintage gear was used, plus the occasional tale of jumping the old stuff once again....

"It's EXPLO... cough... ELECTRONIC".

Every once in a while someone in university wants to give skydivers some new survey about the sport. Looking at skydiving and risk taking is a pretty common thing, and skydivers roll their eyes at it. Hell, back in university I steered at least one project into being skydiving related too. As for more serious study though, check out papers by Jason Laurendeau, who started his research in university maybe in the mid 1990s. He went native in his anthropology: He did at least 800 jumps before retiring from the sport. Skydiving sociology comes up under the topic of edgework too. Just beware of simplistic, overly quick looks at skydivers and risk taking. And to throw in some confusing skydiving culture: EFS! BSBD!

Indeed. So who has more info about that meeting?? The minutes of that meeting would be fascinating! Did other AAD companies attend, and what did they say? One could probably get a good reality TV series out of this all. ========= Summary of the pdf: August 25 meeting in St Louis by harness manufacturers, inviting all AAD manufacturers. Aviacom attends but can't provide good information about their old cutter issues or the new cutters. Aviacom buys their cutters basically off the shelf. The cutter company doesn't want to change their design, Aviacom doesn't have the capital to buy their time to do so, and now the company doesn't want anything to do with AADs. Aviacom says it will still try to replace the old style cutters at no charge. But the stock of new style cutters (post Aug 2007 or whatever) is about 200. [It's not clear if there are many others out there in dealer hands or not.] That doesn't give them much to work with either, if they had wanted to do tests to try to prove the capability of the new cutter. Taking everything into account, SunPath permanently withdraws approval of the Argus in its rigs. =========== Wonder what other companies will do...

Well, just skim some threads and get an idea about how many different people are posting. There are going to be a bunch more lurking and staying out of the arguments. Plus there's the "Who's Online" link along the top of the Forums section, to see how many at least have their browsers open to dz.com in general. There is a members list but that's full of spam addresses too and people who aren't active. Since I've seen that you are into smoke that could be used by skydivers: The number of skydivers who use smoke is pretty small, but there have been some threads about smoke and smoke brackets over the years. I know, I've looked through them all. Finding good sources of smoke is always an issue. A few years back someone else with a small smoke company came on here all enthusiastic with a new product, it got talked about for a while, skydivers were interested in testing it, but then the whole business quietly disappeared. So if you are a new supplier of smoke, best of luck! Try to avoid posts flogging a commercial product, but you are welcome to join in any threads about smoke and contribute your experience. There's some tolerance for announcing a new product for skydivers, but that's best done with a short description and a link to a web page, not some 'ad copy'. And it is always more acceptable when someone asks first for the information. Just my opinion. (Or enter any other conversations relevant to this site, of course.)

Nice logbook pics, John. Back when every jump was considered precious and worth writing about. Distance to target was important to have in a logbook too... but AVERAGING the distance to target, that's just mean, when one occasionally has those T.F.T.M. off DZ landings. First standup jump 41! But.... what did the pi symbol mean?

Not to mention the idea of all that needlework, tacking down the pilot chute cap in umpteen places. Especially when one sees the solutions used on Reflexes, Wings, or Teardrops for many years to keep the PC cap in place. All that tacking is like some military rig from the 1950s. Also "just saying", as I happen to jump a Racer.

I wonder. I don't know that particular DZ, but some Las Vegas area DZ's are known to be tandem mills. So they may say 15K but with Vegas at around 2k, it may only be a 13k jump above ground level. If it were 15k above the ground (17k above sea level), one would also get into FAA oxygen rules for passengers (and USPA too, if it is a USPA DZ.) Depending on how info about the jump was phrased, the DZ could be lying or just trying to deceive.