pchapman

In that case, it is funny how tens of millions of Americans all wanted to achieve what George W. Bush achieved.

No, the point was that "wind at their back" was being understood as "flying with a tail wind", so it is something the jumpers will do a lot.

Good point. I've taught a few little canopy courses myself and there have been times when someone came away with an idea that certainly wasn't what I was trying to teach. Misunderstandings do happen when trying to teach a lot in a short time.

If the course participants were indeed being taught to get big to use the tail wind, the instructors have a fundamentally flawed concept of how a canopy flies. The error is a clear one, not mitigated by any significant differences of opinion in the community, or any imprecision of the terminology used in the sport. Their mistaken understanding is likely to cause other major errors in teaching about canopy flight. This would be true even if they are otherwise skilled canopy pilots and instructors.

Yeah, what's the answer on that? Where do I go to find definitions of such terminology? That's an honest question because I don't do a lot of wingsuiting. (Maybe there are no good answers. For example, for canopy flight, we don't have unambiguous terms or definitions for canopy recovery arcs.)

Depends on DZ philosophy. I don't know the percentages, especially in the US, but some DZ's insist on a student demonstrating a competent jump prior to AFF, whether by tandem, IAD, or S/L. (Or tunnel time.) They figure it just isn't worth the hassle for the instructors to have to deal with the first timers who freak out (even if the instructors are trained to handle everything). (FWIW, in Canada, this is that standard for our equivalent PFF program. Plenty of DZ's get a waiver and do first jump PFF, but it is telling that the baseline standard is that PFF students have to prove themselves first.)

http://www.bigairsportz.com/pdf/bas-sizingchart.pdf Page 4. That seems to touch on the subject but nothing more. (But I just skimmed it.) I believe it was Performance Designs / John Leblanc who have the full article on wing loading vs. overall weight. Must be at PD's web site.

You get to collect some good data! I just want to confirm: Are you sure they are taking it seriously enough, that they aren't just making sloppy motions because of that? Are you saying that even when they stand there, and pull both handles, they still mess it up often enough? Can you break the problems down more? For example, a straight pull across good velcro might result in 2 pull attempts. Does that argue for both hands on the handle, or just a better technique with one hand? Not pulling the cutaway all the way is of course sloppy, but in the actual stressful situation that might not happen. I don't think we get a lot of incidents with incomplete cutaways for the average jumper, where the reserve is fired into it before completing the cutaway. I'm not disputing what you've seen; just interested in understanding more about it. So you think that the one hand on each handle method could work, IF people were better trained to make sure the cutaway handle (& risers) cleared before pulling (or even dislodging) the reserve handle? Or do you think hard pulls on the cutaway handle are likely enough to warrant always reaching in with both hands? We have to evaluate a lot of different likelihoods when debating these sorts of things...

Gee, that's going to help convince people, just telling them they are dead wrong. Did some specific incident piss you off, Sonic? With all your jumps but only 12 posts, it doesn't sound like you are on dz.com a lot just to stir up shit. How about a third option then, one that I've never heard suggested? I know it's crazy talk, but it fits the thread and the tone of the first post: One hand is on the cutaway handle, one hand is extended. Pull one handle with one hand, then pull the second with the other hand. This allows for using one or both arms for stability or to regain stability for the reserve pull. This third option, like for Sonic's preferred method of two hands on one handle, does get away from the possibility of inadvertently pulling the 2nd handle if the first doesn't clear on the first attempt. It also is in agreement with that method, in the belief that it isn't essential to pull the reserve the very moment the main is chopped. A second's delay is acceptable. (Yet if altitude really is tight, then one can always revert to one hand on each handle method.) The argument for having a hand on each handle at the start is to be ready to pull the reserve more quickly right after the cutaway, either to avoid allowing time to start an unstable tumble, or to make sure the handle can better be found, what with harness shifting etc -- especially for newbies in the sport. To what degree freefall stability affects reserve opening, and what freefall stability should be as time progresses from a chop, that gets into all those old RSL debates. It is tough for any instructor though, to advocate to any newbie, to take a little time to get stable before pulling the reserve! The two hands on one handle method doesn't however insist on any particular level of stability before pulling the reserve, so arguments about stability have to keep that in mind. The method does require say a second between handle pulls though. This is also true for the third option of one hand per handle sequentially. One issue with both hands on one handle: Does it imply that one should always toss the cutaway handle away? It's hard to get both hands on the second handle if there's a cutaway handle in one hand. You might as well just use one hand for the reserve then. The third option of one hand on each handle sequentially, is based on the idea (right or wrong) that usually, one hand is enough to pull a handle, that going to two hands is only a backup plan -- just like when using the old one hand on each handle method. It may be marginally faster to pull a handle with one hand instead of setting up to pull it with both hands. However, one might argue that if a handle is hard to find, with a distorted harness or whatever, using two hands may help find and get the handle in hand faster. Still, one may choose to relegate that to a backup plan only. So in favour of the third option, if one already accepts that the reserve pull doesn't have to be a split second after the cutaway, then one might as well have arms more free for stability after the cutaway, to reduce time lost until the reserve is pulled. That is as long as one believes that overall, it is acceptable to make one's first pull on the cutaway handle or reserve handle with one hand. Edit: P.S.: +1 to mark Nice thoughts on the specifics of teaching particular techniques.

So Olga, you are not only a freeflier and tunnel rat, but also a Russian paratrooper gear packer! The D-6 doesn't have any padding under the chest harness hook at all. In the photos I've seen from eastern Europe, including yours, it seems pretty common for civilians jumping such rigs (especially the girls) to stuff a pillow down under that part of the harness... "Slava VDV!" (Figuratively "Go [Russian] airborne!")

Good question. Generally canopy designs are fairly fixed, but there are little tweaks made. Companies seem to be very poor in informing the public about these things. You can't just go to their web site and browse a list of modifications and configurations by date or serial number. If the company feels they have a significantly changed product, they'll rename it. E.g., Crossfire 2. Still, a Crossfire 2 is a modification of a Crossfire (1) (right?)[EDIT: No, it seems to have a fundamentally different. But that gets at the whole point of the original poster!]. And if you had a Crossfire 1, you'd want to be sure it was in post-modification configuration, because there were accidents with the earlier configuration. On the other hand, a Sabre 2 is a ground-up new canopy, which is only related to the Sabre 1 in applying to a very vaguely similar market niche. One canopy design that has been tweaked over the years has been the Raven reserve. At least there are sub-designation changes on the label, so one can see that a canopy is a Raven 150Maa for example, rather than a 150g. Riggers will know of some of the major changes (e.g., the saga of the "dash M"), but often not know what the smaller changes are. PD canopies have indeed had line trim changes. E.g., comparing my charts for the Sabre 150, for 2003 vs. Revision C in 2007, the upper steering cascades are 5/8" longer, 'A' lines are 1/2" shorter, 'D' lines relative to the 'A' lines are 1/4" shorter, etc. These are small tweaks that I'd bet most people don't know about. So you don't get anyone arguing at the fire pit whether they prefer the 2003 trim to the 2007 trim. (Besides, with Spectra lines, trims can easily be off an inch or more after a bunch of use.) The Triathlon is up to brake line configuration 5.0 or something like that. I personally have no idea what versions 1 to 3 were like, but the change from 4 to 5 is well known among Tri jumpers. Sometimes a canopy and its lines might not change, but the slider might. I have an Icarus Extreme FX canopy, where there have been three different slider sizes over the years that I know of. Over the time that stainless steel grommets have been used in sliders, better, lighter grommets have become available to the industry. The newer grommets just start getting used in the production line without any designation change known to the public. A PD canopy like the Sabre (1) also has an 'old size' slider, and a 'new size' bigger slider that has been used for many years now. Somewhat related to evolution but also partially a separate matter is the overall configuration. You could have a CRW canopy with the Demo line or the Rotation lines, or a canopy with different levels of CRW options, or a new canopy with the ZPX fabric option rather than ZP. A big shakeup at one company resulted in a different fabric supplier being used, so people still talk about the nice tacky Gelvenor fabric on earlier Triathlons compared to the slicker stuff now. More changes tend to happen where the canopy choice is important for competition. So the competitive canopy pilots will keep on showing up with lines with some different coating (& coating colour) on them. Or, the sail fabric option on a swoop canopy will consist of a rather different fabric coating between different years. But there's no designation change on labels as was the case with the Raven reserve. Those parts that can be changed, like lines & sliders, may of course have been upgraded on a particular canopy by the owner, so that's another configuration change. Hope this helps in understanding what a wide range of "tweaking" of canopies exists, and how knowledge about it isn't easy to come by without talking to those who are in the know.

I'm not sure I trust the technical accuracy of a study coming from a company with "Marketing" in their name.

etc... (Not sure what the dynamic flare implies, since we don't have standardized terminology for such things.) But anyway, I think I'll mix it up here again. So Mr. 125 jump newbie expresses an opinion, and admits he's a newbie. Then people gang up on him and say in effect, he's an arrogant newbie who doesn't know anything. Maybe. But nobody actually argues against anything he actually wrote about a canopy. (We're talking about the recent Pulse / Storm / Silhouette canopy info, not the earlier Stiletto debate.) They don't say, "Your opinion on canopy X is simplistic and wrong because of ...." The argument just goes back to, "You're an arrogant newbie who can't possibly know much about canopies with a few jumps on each." It's true his base of experience is low. But having done a number of jumps on a few different canopies recently is actually decent experience. Yeah, some people have 30,000 jumps. Then let Mr. 30,000 jumps explain the difference between the flight characteristics of the different canopies. But he isn't posting here. So if you want to convince Mr. 125 jumps that he knows nothing, it might help to provide some real evidence other than just repeating that he knows nothing.

Why presume his was safe? Um, because that's what he implied. Courtesy to Airtec? Um, yes I am giving them the courtesy. I don't know the circumstances either way. The originally posted info about the incident was very limited, so I asked what the real situation was. Remember that the initial report basically said they were flying at a boogie, they did this towed dummy thing, had a problem, very quickly cut the dummy away, and it impacted without any AAD to open a canopy. Based on that information alone, it makes it sound pretty dangerous. That's true whether or not I think that was a true, false, incomplete, or misleading description of the actual event. So maybe there's a lot more to the story.

Wrong forum. Joke threads should be in Bonfire. (As opposed to the serious threads... which later turn into jokes.)

This is the old dz.com problem where any general statement is misapplied to a specific case, while any specific statement is misapplied to the general case. Anyway, I'm obviously talking about the perceived situation where something heavy and fast is dropped accidentally over the normal countryside. It would clearly be interesting to know whether Airtec had taken precautions -- otherwise it would be dangerous. Presumably your dummy drop was preplanned with appropriate safeguards -- rather than just hoping a 254 lb dummy going at 200+ mph didn't hit a farmer's house or some new San Diego subdivision.

Even if Airtec is correct in saying, 'just trust us, there wasn't a Cypres failure', they could have been more clear about the circumstances. With the limited info we have, one wonders about dropping a heavy test dummy from altitude into farmers' fields. Either that is quite unsafe and shows poor planning, or the circumstances were quite different.

There was a description of a possible Cypres failure in the Incidents forum, in the "Double Vigil 2 Fire" thread that got locked after there was no longer any real info about the event coming out. It sort of came up in the context of the the idea that is sometimes expressed that, "Oh sure, everyone goes on about Vigil problems, but what about those Cypres problems that are kept hidden?" I'm not sure why Cypres problems would be hidden any more than others, except perhaps that their happy customer base is perhaps bigger. In any case, the described incident seemed to be odd, with no public explanation. In the light of fairness, it is probably best to get the incident talked about, good or bad. In the first "In Reply To" section below, the "Quote" section is from SSK, while the rest, describing the Cypres incident is from a very experienced jumper. He was the first to bring the incident to light, at least as far as I recall on DZ.com. I figured it was worth asking more about the incident, so asked Cliff at SSK. His reply is also below. It suggests there was no "failure of a Cypres to fire". Still, there is that element of the old Airtec "just trust us" way of doing things. I can't tell what the truth is either way. But at least a puzzling incident was brought to light and a comment from the manufacturer received. (Technically, Cypres is an acronym, so it is CYPRES, but that's a pain to type. A clever marketing scheme in a way, to ensure that one's company product name always stands out. Not like Vigils in their small letters, e.g., "Get the Vigil 16: Because Vigil 17 will be great!" Ok, that was a cheap shot.) So after all that pre-amble, here's the actual information discussed: In the Vigil thread a week or two back: Let me throw this out there for people to chew on that shows the other side of this same scenario. 2008, Boogie in Cochstedt, Germany. As part of a ongoing test to determine what would happen if a static line jumper was towed by the aircraft and had a Cypres in his system, how would the resulting rapidly changing airflow affect the unit as the jumper moved into and out of the airflow around the aircraft. A rig was placed on a metal test drop dummy and attached to the anchor line cable so that it would simulate a towed jumper. The test dummy was pushed out and it began to bounce around into and out of the airflow but what wasn't considered was that the test dummy would start banging off the aircraft. So after a very quick realization that the test dummy was going to cause damage to the aircraft, they cut the test dummy away and it went into freefall.......all the way to the ground, ZERO parachutes out. So, not to beat the dead horse more than it needs, no system out there is impervious to the complicated scenarios that real world skydiving situations can and do create in some instances, none of them are perfect. Cliff at SSK wrote in reply to being asked about it:

Common incorrectly spelled skydiving terms: No "flair". Recovery "arch". "Bridal" length. "Cord" of the canopy (as opposed the span) "Parashoot". (That's more a whuffo mistake though.) "Cypress" AAD. Any others to add to the list? Decent knowledge of English has no direct bearing on ability to skydive, but since reading tends to be part of the learning process (not just oral transmission of knowledge around the fire pit), one would hope people pick up the proper terminology.

The B2 (Stealth) Bomber is black. Does that suggest anything to you? Still, one has to distinguish between the types of conditions and ranges where one wants to see things. After all, the Brits very carefully chose a high gloss BLACK for their BAE Hawk jets in training use, for HIGH VISIBILITY. I'm only commenting on what might be an overgeneralized comparison, not the specifics of a particular colour in a skydiving environment.

Hey, I'm just taking a cheap shot, but it sounds like the owner/operator of the aircraft is a flag waving nutcase. No fancy names for the Dago CASA and Canuckistanian Twin Otter though. Still, some friends of mine travelled to the US last year for the boogie and really liked it.

What are you waiting for... the government to track for you?

The part of the board meeting doc that Mark pointed out is this: So how does that mesh with the rather different 3.B.4 that was quoted? It seems as if the SIM was not updated properly, if that was from a recent SIM. I didn't check the 2010 SIM myself, but looked at the 2008 one, and it still mentions having to follow the BSRs -- and nothing obvious about how military jumps under military authority are counted as equal to following BSRs. Has someone told the USPA of this discrepancy, if this is correct? Of course then we get into the issue that plenty of skydivers will have jumps that don't follow the BSRs; and remember that the BSRs include something about having to follow all FAA regs. If you ever jumped too close to cloud, didn't wear a seatbelt during the entire taxi, or pulled low, that jump doesn't count. But that's being picky, as some such rule about following the rules is inevitable.

We really do need to know your weight & experience. Sounds like you may even have been jumping back in F-111 days. Zero Porosity fabric allowed for much better designs to evolve. Many of them actually open a lot smoother and slower than traditional F-111 canopies. And once you get used to their flying characteristics and the typically higher approach speeds (assuming some downsizing going on), the landings will actually be easier and softer. And get ready to get your head on a swivel. Dying under a perfectly good canopy has become extremely popular, given that we aren't all floating around under 220 sq ft boats any more.

Hey EFS, 1) So how do you find that tendency of a Stiletto to "over" turn, to gradually stop turning after you stop giving an input, instead of coming right out on heading very soon after releasing input? That's one of the characteristics of Stilettos that can be disconcerting to people new to them. How much of that behaviour do you find at 1:1? 2) How about the issue of "twisting yourself up", self inducing line twists when doing too sudden turns. The Stiletto, with its quick turning and short recovery arc is a canopy where one is more likely to do that -- especially when the canopy is new and cool to someone and you want to whip it around the sky. What tendency to do that have you found? Have you gotten appropriate training to learn about and avoid that? 3) I wonder how likely the lightly loaded Stiletto is to spin up on opening, even if the light loading may help avoid the canopy then starting to spiral. It is more difficult for novices to deploy with a really good stable shoulders level body position. (This explains why jumpers may have all sorts of spinetto problems early on while jumping them, but magically it becomes far less likely after they get more experience on the canopy.) Training in that area would be really good for you to have too. There aren't many Stiletto 190s out there...