davelepka

OK, what if I give you the angle where the cables were in good shape, and regularly inspected. If you want to call it OK to bust a life-limit on a component provided that you regualrly inspect, that's one thing, but then how do you explain the lack of the corrosion inspection on the wings? By your standard you can write your own maintence schedule so long as you closely monitor the over-timed components, but the wing inspection was just that, an inspection, and it wasn't done. What are the chances that the cables were regularly inspected, if the regular inspections aren't even done? Either way, none of it is OK. The cables have an AD on them because there has been a history of failures beyond a certain date, so the AD calls for replacement by that date. It's not even like he was trying to hold until the next 100 hour or annual, it was 18 months and 2100+ loads on the timed out cables. If you look at the link to the King Air accident, you'll notice that a simple inspection for corrosion on the fuel pump drive shaft would have revealed significant corrosion and the need for replacement. In that case, Bill again ignored a requirement for a corrosion inspection, and that time it brought down a plane. The report also states that P&W Canada prohibits skydiving operators from going to on an 'on condition' maintenence program, but this appears to be exactly what Bill is doing. Ignoring corrosion inspections bit him once, and it seems that he learned nothing becasue less than 2 years later he gets popped for skipping additional corrosion inspections. What a guy, skydiving should come together and thank him for his years of service.

Like what? Ignoring replacing elevator and aileron cables to the degree that the FAA took notice, and levied a fine of $664,000. You're exactly the guy I was talking about above. You'll do anything you can to find a way to make this right, but it's just not. The fact that the FAA has anything to do with this should be a huge red flag, but for some reason, you're chossing not to notice that. How about the President's Secretaryof Transportation commenting on this issue, does that mean anything to you? Do you realize that the scope of his responsibilities include every commercial flight, train, auto/truck, and boat activity in the US, and this is what he takes his time to comment on? I'm sure that he personally has nothing to do with this, or the comment he released, but his office and staff deemed this situation a target issue that warranted a comment, and that should casue some real concern on the part of anyone flying on any of Bill's aircraft, and anyone operating a sub-par jumpship anywhere in the US. I don't expect any jumper to be 100% on top of the maintenence schedule of any plane, but more to develop a level of trust with the aircraft operator, and either through experience or witnessing hwo they handle other business, have a reason to believe that the aircraft is being properly maintained. However, when it is clearly revealed by the highest aviation authority in this counrty that this is not the case, and that the shortcomings are significant enough in scope to garner a fine of $664,000, you have to wake up and see the forest from the trees. 18 months and 2100+ loads flown with over-due elevator cables. 6 months and 500+ of those laods flown with outdated aileron calbes, and no corrosion inspection of key structures that keep the wings on the fuselage. Don't write this shit off. Here are the important parts of the Transport Canada report on the crashed King Air that was also on the Lodi 'maintenence program- The entire report, linked in an above post, is worth reading, and the pictures are quite telling. Put it all together. This is not a good situation for anyone in skydiving, and most notably anyone jumping out of aircraft 'maintained' by Bill Dause. No offense, but get your head of your ass, and realize that maybe you don't know Bill quite as well as you think you do.

Maybe that explains the dead zebra laying next to it.

The suit is non-negotiable for a big guy or a lightweight. It has to be right, or you'll never be able to play with the average sized jumpers. Anyone who suggests that you just 'fly your body' and that a suit is not the key is not a big guy or a lightweight. Physics is not on your side, but jumpsuit manufacturers are. Any one of the better know manufacturers can make a big-boy suit. Bev happens to make a nice one, and if you call her and tell her you need to slow down, she can put one together for you that will do the trick. Until that comes in, avoid jumping with anyone that looks remotely lightweight, or even average. Find a bigger guy, and stick to two ways. It will give you the chance to fly and work on your skills. If you want coaching, ask around the DZ which AFF instructor is the fastest. Every DZ has a go-to guy for the big boys, and he will match whatever fall rate you can come up with, and you'll get all the practice you need. The tunnel is a fine idea provided you live near a tunnel. Otherwise, spend your travel and tunnel money on a jumpsuit (pay for the rush service, you'll have it in two weeks) more jumps, and maybe a coach slot or two. Once you have the suit, you can go back to learning as you go jumping with anyone you want, just like everyone else. If you want to learn a a quicker pace than that, take your suit up with a coach or to the tunnel.

Take 'and equipment' out of that statement, and you'll be on the right track. Step one, learn to skydive. You will be provided an appropriate rig for your first 25 jumps. Knock out your first 10, and make sure you like what you're seeing. During the next 10, experiment with the various student rigs the DZ has to offer, so long as your instructors approve. During the last 5, be actively shopping for an appropriately sized and airworthy rig. Skydiving is not cheap. Skydiving equipment is not cheap. Trying to make either one cheap generally does not work out well in the end.

Don't take this personally, but how about you read this web page? This discussion has been going on here for years. Literally years. Several posters on this board, myself included, have made attempts to bring the thoughts and ideas exchanged here to the USPA, and we have all consistantly been told, 'Thanks, but no thanks' by the fine folks on the BOD. Go check out your blog? How about you spend a few hours and read what we've all been 'blogging' about here for years, and finally get off your duff and do something about it. I think I can safely say that any idea worth considering has been hashed and rehashed ad-nauseum on these very boards. Read up, take your pick, and make something happen already. You wanted to be the man in charge, well congratulations, you got it. Now do something with it.

Won't happen. They'll insist that it's a great DZ, and that everyone there is like family, and pay no attention to the fact that the head of the family endangered all of their lives. This wasn't a single occurance, or short term problem, this was well over a year and 2100+ loads past due for MX, but the jumpers will figure out some way to justify it, and just keep jumping there. The DZ is Bills kingdom, and he can rule it however he sees fit. The sky above the DZ, however, belongs to the FAA and up there they don't give a shit about Bill, how many jumps he has, or how low his ticket prices are.

Keep in mind that before you are the 'pilot in command' of an aircraft, you fly with an instructor until they feel you are ready to fly solo. If you were comparing it to a tandem jump, I would agree. In the case of AFF, it is not related because once the canopy opens you are alone, 'pilot in command' from the get go. I'm not sure if the age of the jumper, based on jumper performance alone, is really relevant. I know kids who started jumping at 14 or 15, and both did very well and are still jumping today. These were DZO kids who grew up on the DZ, which probably played a part. In terms of the general population, 16 seems like a good place to start. If you can earn a drivers license, you should at least have a shot at a skydive. By that I mean that if you show up and act like a 'kid', don't be surprised when they give you your money back. If you act like a person who understands what they are getting into, conducts themselves accordingly, then gear up and go. All of that, however, is for Canada and the rest of the world. In the US, it should be 18 just to keep the waiver on solid ground. DZs are already fighting a losing battle in court because there is a plantiff who is either dead or visibly injured, neither of which looks good. When that person happens to be a minor, it's even worse. if there's any legal notion that the waiver might not be valid, you can expect that to be exploilted to the fullest in the suit. The solution to the problem is to ensure that the person signing the waiver is the same person making the jump, and that they can legally enter into a contract in the state in question.

First off, I did not mean to suggest that your canopy would 'dive', as-in an abrupt and significant pitch down of the nose. That, of course, would be a bad idea anywhere near the ground. However, there is only one way for your canopy to go up, and that is for you to swing forward of the center and effect a pitch up of the nose. Once you have done this, short of a stall, there is no way to get back down without your body returning to a position aft of the center. Once this occurs, however slight it may be, the canopy can ptich down (again, however slight it may be) and you may begin a descent. If you happen to meter the degree to which your body swings aft of the center, and stop it just as the pitch is effected enough to allow the wing to sink, then so be it. If you happen to allow your body to swing further back, and allow for a more rapid descent, then so be it. In either case, you will need to reverse the swing of your body and return it to a point forward of the center to effect the picth up allowing you to flare the canopy. While the exact timing of the events may vary, you cannot go pop up, come back down, and flare the canopy withou the fore-aft-fore swing of your body under the canopy. With that said, it's the final 'fore' swing of your body that eats in to the energy that would be used for flaring the canopy, reducing the effectiveness of the flare. If you want to try to stand up such a landing, where you have intoduced a vertical component to the strictly horizontal movement you are used to, is entirely up to you. In the case of landing into the wind, the inherently lower touchdown speed afforded by the headwind might make the overall impact such that you could stand it up. I mentioned that I like to pop up in a good headwind, just becasue I can and still have good airspeed left for a soft touch down. In the case of a downwinder, it's probably not the best idea. With no 'flintstone braking' available to bleed off the excess forward speed, plus the introduction of the vertical component, you're taking a chance that the sum total may be beyond your ability. The slide-in manuver, on the other hand. provides for easy management of the forward speed, leaving you only to contend with the vertical component. The advantage to the slide-in manuver is that it prevents a head-over-heels tumble at high speed, a situation which has actually killed jumpers in the past. In terms of competition, the pop-up should only be used no wind or down wind scenarios, where the increased time aloft allows the winds to carry you down the course that much further. This is similar to the use of brakes or rear risers to minimize your descent rate when returning from a long, upwind spot. When running into the wind, remaining level, without inducing increased drag due to the pop-up, will net you a longer swoop. This is similar to returning to the DZ from a long, downwind spot, where too much brakes or rears will induce drag, reduce airpseed, and have you landing short of the DZ. It is true that while returning the DZ from a long, downwind spot, a touch of brakes or rears will help to imporve the L over D ratio, as full flight is generally less than optimum in that department. When you look at the same concept while swooping into the wind, the input used to level out the canopy, and maintain level flight takes care of bumping up the L over D ratio, any additional input, such as used for a pop up, would be going to far, and giving 'D' the upper hand over 'L'.

Can you PM or email me a copy of the list of people that will never happen to? While you're at it, how about sending me a copy of the list of low timers who can safely jump a camera, wingsuit, and a highly loaded canopy?

Ask the guy at 2:55

You missed a key point. You have been driving for ten years. You may not have a lot of high performance driving experience, but you have a lot of driving experience. The high performance part you can 'figure out' if you already have the driving experience. Likewise, the 'experience' part you can figure out if you're not talking high performance. This is why a teenager can drive a VW Gulf with little to no experience, it's not high performance. The lesson is that you can't figure out both at the same time. If you gave me two jumpers, one with ten years experience and 1000 jumps, and one with one year of experience and 100 jumps who both flew the same canopy at the same WL, and asked me which one would do beter under a Velocity, I would pick the guy with 10 years in the sport. He's got the experience, just not the high performance part. For the record, I don't reccomend anyone jump down to a high performance canopy, regardless of their jump numbers or time in sport. You downsize in a steady and methodical way, whoever you are. My example was just for the purposes of comparison.

No jackass, not 'style', as in the cool way to do something, that's the competition discipline of 'Style", sometimes paired up with, and reffered to as, 'Style and Accuracy'. A 'style set' is a front loop, left 360, right 360, and a backloop (I think). It judged by ground-to-air video, and based on time to complete the set, and you lose points for being off heading when you start or finish any of the turns or loops. The tuck position allows for a high airspeed, giving you more power to push through the turns. It's typically done from a low-ish altitude of 5000 or 5500, and it's paired with Accuracy becasue after your style set, you opened and shot accuracy. It's super old shcool, and I haven't seen anyone seriously practice style in about ten years, and even then it was rare. By today's standards it is weird, but 30 years ago when all you had were Cessnas and Strato-whatever canopies, it probably seemed like a good idea. When I called you a 'jackass' I meant in a nice way, not in a PA way.

We're fucked. The training is old school and the canopies are new school V3.0. On top of that, the average WL and performance that is considered 'acceptable' for newbies and low timers has been creeping up every year, and in direct correlation, so have the number of open canopy incidents and fatalities. Why does an A license holder recieve the same canopy related training I recieved 15 years ago? Why does that same jumper then jump a canopy that would have been an 'expert' level wing 15 years ago? When are we going to relize that the top-end of canopy performance has nothing to do with anyone but the top level canopy pilots? Just becasue Luigi can jump a 37sq ft canopy, I didn't rush out and downsize my wing, his accomplishements have nothing to do with me. What used to be considered a 'hot' canopy was a sqaure-ish square, short diving Sabre 135. That was a wing-and-a-half back in the day, but today the semi-eliptical, long diving Sabre2 135 is looked at as 'intermediate' and as a 'stepping stone'. The training hasn't changed, jumpers haven't all become The 6 Million Dollar Man, smarter, stronger, and faster than ever before, but for some reason the idea of what canopies are 'acceptable' has slowly crept way too far in the wrong direction. The USPA sucks. They sat there with their thumb up their butt too long, and now it's out of control. The situation is so far out of hand that getting back to a reasonable place would represent a huge change in training, equipment selection, and the general thinking of the community as a whole, and none of that is ever going to happen for the worst reason of all. Much like what canopies or sizes have become 'acceptable' for newbies, so has the number of canopy related fatalites. Forgetting that 75% of the 2010 fatalites thus far have been under open canopies, and using the '08 and '09 figures alone, you get an average of 42.5% of all fatalites happening under open canopies. If steps were taken to cut that number in half (fat chance) the community as a whole would rise up and rejoice. People would sing the priases, and the USPA would boast in some bullshit PR move that open canopy fatalites were only 20% of the total. People would be happy that 20% of skydivers died with an open canopy because we let it get so far that 40% actually are. 20% still sucks dick, but everyone would be blinded by the 40% we're at now that it would seem OK. The only solution is for the individual jumpers to take action. If you see a new jumper you like the looks of, mentor the shit out of them. Don't let them fall into these traps. Make them learn about their parachutes, and how they work. Lock them down to a 1.0 to 1 max for 100 jumps. Max meaning the maximum, meaning that many people will actually be below that. If they don't want to listen, deciede how much you really care. If you really care, make their time at the DZ a living hell. Ostracize them, and make sure nobody wants to jump with them, and nobody wants to pack for them, and nobody even wants to hang out with them. Get them to quit jumping before jumping makes them quit jumping. If you really care, you'd rather never see them again knowing you kept them alive and kicking that much longer than to just let them make the same mistakes that are killing other jumpers, only to have to meet their family for the first time at their funeral. If you deciede you really don't care, screw it, and make sure they don't take you out in the process of doing whatever it is that's going to kill them, and find someone to mentor who will listen. We're fucked.

I'm not sure what to say about he lack of response to your letter. While I have many disagreements with the policies of the USPA and actions of the BOD, I have always found all individuals involved to be polite and professional. The lack of any sort of acknowledgement surprises me. One thought, I see the letter is primarily addressed to Jay Stokes, was the envelope directly addressed to, and only to, Jay? I ask becasue I'm not sure jay spends too much time to USPA HQ, and is frequently on the road conducting ratings courses. It is possible that the letter was recieved at USPA HQ, forwarded to Jay's home, where it might be sitting waiting for him to return from a ratings course or otherwise. I'd consider sending an e-mail directly to Jay asking if he has seen the letter. In a releted manner, and becasue I just don't know the details, how exactly is a team manager chosen for US teams participation in international meets. I seem to recall seeing a cattle-call for resumes for a team manager position for the US canopy piloting team, which leads me to believe that there is one individual in charge of 'hiring' for this position. I would be interested to hear who this individual is, and if they have any connection with the individual who was appointed your team manager. Along the same lines, is this a paid position, and what is the situation regarding the travel and lodging expenses for a team manager? I cannot imagine that anyone would do this work for free and pay their own way, so my next question would be where to the funds come from to cover the costs of a team manager? If this out of the USPA general fund, or out of donations made directly to the US Team Turst Fund (as listed every month in Parachutist). As a USPA member, this is another area where it appears the the USPA has failed in their duties, to include the mis-use of funds by appointing an unqualified individual as team manager. If the funds all come from the Team Trust Fund, I feel confident in speaking for those jumpers who donate to that the mis-use of those funds is upsetting to them. Please update this thread as the situation moves forward, and let us know what happens.

In any case, under any canopy, the rule is always a full and complete flare before touchdown. When you pop up like that, what you do is require the canopy to pitch nose down to get you back to the ground. At this point, you are 'behind' the canopy, in that you physically swing behind the wing to allow the dive to occur. Now you are diving back toward the groud (no matter how slight, you are still in a dive) at a speed something less than full flight. You hit the gates at high speed, and popping up used quite a bit of that engery. Additionally, you'll stay up there until the majority of that energy is dissipated, at which point he canopy will nose over to regain speed and get back to full flight. Of course, you're not high enought to reach full flight before touch down. So you're nose down, slow and approaching the ground. The first part of your flare will be used just to bring you back from behind the canopy to directly under, putting you in level flight. Now you are flying level even slower than you were diving. The remainder of your toggle stroke goes to actually flare the canopy, but due to your low, low airpseed, the flare is weak and ineffective. Then you pound in. There's no way to avoid this if you pop up. Watch the landings on distance runs in a canopy comp, and you'll see that everyone piles in like a sack of potatoes tossed off the back of a truck. A good headwind can go a long way in that situation. It provides the extra airpeed you need to get a good flare after a pop up. On windy days, I'll take the pop up on purpose, just because you can set it down soft afterwards.

Brilliant. So this should solve the problem at every DZ where they all currently agree to an unpredictable landing pattern. That, of course, is sarcasm. Just like every jumper who goes in thinks they are being safe and that their jump will go fine, every load at every DZ has some intention of a predictable landing pattern. There is always either an agreed upon landing direction, or a 'follow the first jumper down' rule. The best you could hope for is to help the DZs that do nto mandate the direction of the pattern. Some DZs allow left or right hand patterns at the same time, but even then those places are rare. The reason your overly simple solution will not work is becasue the problem isn't that simple. Canopy collisions are 'accidents' meaning that nobody intended for them to happen, and something went wrong to allow them to occur. Even if you have an established pattern including the direction of turns and direction of landing, things can still go wrong. How about the first group out on a pass? They exit downwind of the DZ, and may not have the altitude to make it all the way upwind to the pattern entry, then turn back and fly the complete pattern. These jumpers are left entering the pattern on the base or final leg. That's not predictable, it depends on the severity of the winds and the quality of the spot, but adds a variable to your 'predictable' pattern. How about the other end of the jumprun? Jumpers too far from the DZ upwind may not have the altitude to make to the DZ by pattern entry. They might be able to cut the pattern short and fly it low and tight, but again, this adds a variable to your 'predictable' pattern. How about traffic in the pattern itself? If a jumper flies a tighter pattern than another and makes and inside turn to final, the outside jumper might feel too close to them under canopy. So they skew off to the right (given a left hand pattern) and cut off anyone coming from their right rear position. That's not 'predictable'. How about the newbie who turns onto final too high for the LZ, and opposed to overrunning it and landing out, they make a 45 degree turn and take advanatge of the longer diagonal line across the LZ to land within the field? That's not predictable. Are you catching on? There's nothing predicatbe about 20 unpowered aircraft, all flying at different speeds with pilots of different skill levels. No amount of pre-planning or good intentions are going to level that playing field and make it sensible. The key is education. Teach jumpers about winds, and how to use them to their advantage. Teach them about different flight modes of the canopies, and what you can use them for. Show them techniques for improviing accuracy and encourge them to do hop n pops to practice those techniques. Want proof? Go watch a load of tandems land. Notice how they don't have any problems even if they don't use a pattern? There are no sequencing problems or proximity issues under canopy. They all manage to land next to their camera guy with no problems. The reason is pilot skill. A load of tandems is an example of a group of accomplished, rated jumpers completing the simpel task of landign several parachutes in one area. Want more proof? Watch a swoop training camp. They put out four or five jumper on a single pass, and every single one of them will land in the exact same spot with no problems at all. The reason is that these are skilled jumpers with an interest in a successful canopy flight such that they create and follow a plan. Again, educated pilots flying their canopies in a controlled fashion. If you could describe every load as the same, 'eductaed jumpers flying canopies in a controlled fashion' you wouldn't have a problem. So educate the jumpers, then mandate a landing pattern, and since they will have the knowledge and skill to follow it, it will work. As an aside, study the available data, high speed approaches are not a part of the majority of open canopy incidents. Nothing can kill an arguement more than an unfactual premise, and that's exactly what you have there.

Well fine, cater to those folks and continue the ban on wingsuits at Lodi. If you have the jumps to handle a wingsuit, you should have the ability to navigate yourself and make a safe landing. If you cannot accomplish those two things, you shouldn't be on a wingsuit. Let's face it, everyone wants to land on the DZ, so the times where a wingsuiter gets too far out are not by design of the wingsuit pilot, it's an unintended consequence of either paying too much attention to the flock (even if it's just one other guy) or misjudging your glide. Those two things are both easy to do, and easy to prevent. If you know that making it back is a serious issue, you can simply move that priority up in your flight planning. I don't think too much about getting back at my home DZ because I jump in Ohio in the middle of 1000's of acres of farmland (it's sad). I would have to guess that a wingsuiter at Skydive Hawaii might be a little more concerned about making it back to the DZ as the alternate is millions of acres of the Pacific Ocean. When there are real consequences, it's easy to make it a priority. As it turns out in this case, when the consequence was pissing off Bill, that wasn't enough for people to be serious about making it home. Bill called their bluff and made it serious by banning wingsuits. At this point in time it's either no wingsuits, or serious enough conseqences for people to make getting back a priority.

You said it yourself in your question. You asked what the next step should be, that's 'step' as in singular, as-in one step, as-in one step at a time. Pick one step, do you want a smaller canopy, or a higher performance canopy? If you want smaller, go down one step to a 135/140 sized canopy simlar in performance to what you have now. The other option, a higher performance canopy, doesn't really apply to you just yet. If you chose that single step, it would a higher performance model in the same size you have now, but trust me you don't want a 150 sq ft high performance canopy unless you weigh 200+ lbs. On your next change, that might be an option. If you were to switch to a Sabre2 135 or a Pilot 140 now, the next time around you could look at a Sabre2 120 or Safire 119 -OR- a Katana 135 or Crossfire 129. The idea is that you're making a single step, either in size or in performance, never both at the same time. There's no reason or merit to pushing your WL, canopy progression, or swooping progression. it might seem like it now, but there really isn't. The smartest move is to be conservative and safe, and keep yourself in one peice so you can continue to jump without any down time due to injury. The fatser you build your jump numbers and expereince, the faster the skills will come to you, but the idea is that you have to be it to win it. You don't get any better sitting on the sidelines with an injury. Even a twisted ankle or broken foot can put out of commission for weeks or months. Time you need to be jumping, and improving, jumping and imoroving and so on. Slow your roll in terms of downsizing and rushing into swooping. Focus your energy into staying healthy and making jumps. Jump, jump, jump, and the swooping will come.

I would advise doing a few riser dives with the toggles in yoiur hands, and few without the toggles in your hands and see if there is a difference. I would also advise pulling high and going through the full range of control options on any high performance canopy that is new to you. Both sets of risers, the rears to a stall, and the toggles to a stall. This will reveal any sort of 'funky' behavoir before you get close to the ground. It would have revealed the tail flutter, and you could have tested it by dropping the toggles right then and there (provided you were aware that short steering lines cause tail flutter during front riser input, which I hope you were is you're jumping a Katana or Xaos). It's probably the steering lines. It shouldn't cause a collapse, but it's killing the performance.

Why B? By that time the jumper could have gone to any DZ, and jumped in all sorts of different situations and conditions where the extra information could come in handy. I'm not suggesting we teach pre A license jumeprs to swoop, far from it. What I'm saying is that if you thought about a young person close to you, and they had just learned to skydive, what would you want them to know before they headed out to an unknown DZ on their own. No instructors watching over them, no oversite from experienced jumpers concerned for their well-being, just out in the world left to fend for themselves. Whatever you could think of, that's what we should be teaching people. The A licesne grants jumpers the right to self jumpmaster, and sometimes that means doing a solo on a nice day, jumping from a 182 shared only with a tandem pair. It also means doing a solo out of one of three otters flying non-stop on a busy Perris valley day, with some of those Perris winds kicking up from time to time. It's two distinctly different scenarios, requiring two different skill sets to be successful, but every A license jumper should be ready for either one, or anything in between. They're not all ready for everything in between. They should be, but they're not.

FYI - this is just a request for PC tech support, nothing interesting happening here. I have a new computer running Windows 7 (64 bit), and when I hooked up my HP all-in-one printer, Windows installed the driver by itself, like it's supposed to. My problem is that when I try to scan, the printer informs me that HP software needs to be installed in order to scan. I no longer have the CD for the printer software, so I search online for a solution. What I discover is that Windows only installs the basic driver, and you need the full feature driver to scan. I'm directed to the HP help site, where they have various drivers available for download. So I enter my printer model (5510xi) and operating system, and the only option it offers me is instructions for pluggin in the printer and letting Windows install the (basic) driver by itself. Becasue windows does the install itself, there is no way to download the full feature driver for Windows 7. I even tried lying, and telling them I was running XP, which has the full feature driver available for download, but at some point the computer caught on, put a stop to the download. I have been all over the internet, and everything leads to a dead end where they tell you how to plug in a USB cord and let Windows 7 do it's thing. Anyone here smarter than everyone else on the internet and Bill Gates put together?

Even DZs that attempt to follow the ISP to the letter come up short in the area of canopy control. As previously mentioned, trying to teach canopy control in bits and pieces during the student progression is not the ideal situation. Students are aware that they are not graded on canopy conttrol, and the informaiton they are given isn't directly related to learning objectives on the upcoming jump. Due to this, the student is less likely to see the canopy control portion as a 'lesson', and the instructor is less likey to address it that way. It sounds more like 'tips' for them to file away with all of the other 'tips' they get like 'carry a pullup cord in your pocket' or 'don't pee into the wind'. Students focus on their next big task, which is their next jump, and the freefall portion is all they are graded on, and by virtue of that, all that seems important. Trying to teach the finer points of canopy control in a hap-hazzard, bits and peices method to a jumper with other things on their mind, and 10 whole jumps experience is far from ideal. The idea is to catch them with 20 jumps, after they have built up a little time under canopy and done more than half of their jumps without a radio. This is where they have begun to develop an understanding of mechanics of it all, and teaching the finer points is the natural extension of that. Additionally, when you teach in a stand-alone class, it allows the instructor to use a methodical syllabus where one lesson leads into the next. The topics can be arranged so the thing you teach first helps with the understanding of the thing you teach second, and so on. The other thing a dedicated class does is make it easier for the student to ask questions. Without a plane to catch, or a jump on their minds, they'll feel more free to put their hand up. Of course, all of the other students in the class then get the benefit of hearing the question and the answer, something that does not happen when you're trying to dirt dive a guy to make laod 3. The big one, the one I keep coming back to, is that by making canopy control a 'thing' that gets it's own stand-alone class, required for getting an A license, it sends the message that it is important. Canopy control is not a 'tip', or an add-on to a level 9 student jump, it's a 'thing' that is important enough that when you get serious about jumping and want an A licesne, you have to take this class or no licesne for you.

I would disagree with that on many levels. In terms of equipment design and manufacture, safety advances have been plentiful and remain one of the key focuses of ongoing R&D. In many aspects of training and DZ operations, promoting and maintaining safety is job one, and lots of good people send an awful lot of time and effort in those areas. You'll notice, however, that the above areas are not overseen by the USPA, these are private enterprises who see the value in doing the right thing, and protecting their business as such. The problem with the USPA is that the traning mentality in place is from the days when open canopies did not kill the majority of skydivers. When F-111 was king, the majoroty of jumpers never jumped anything smaller than 200 sq ft, and accordingly never had to deal with high closing speeds, high turn rates, and canopies that could dive more than 100 ft. at best. If you could get your hands on a training manual or FJC syllabus from 1990, you'll see that the majority of the canopy control information is the same as it is today. For the FJC course this is adequate, and in 1990 is was enough to allow a jumper to be cut loose with no additional training. In 2010 (and even in 2000) this is not adequate for a jumper being cut loose with an A license. While the training hasn't changed significantly, the canopies themselves are a world apart. What is considered to be an 'appropriate' entry level canopy today would have been the hottest canopy on the market 20 years ago. That's the problem. Training that it freefall intensive with very little in the way of canopy control. This is left over from the day when canopies didn'y warrant the additional training, and the only thing you could do in freefall was RW. Things are different now. Canopies and canopy control is more involved , the freefall has way mroe to offer than RW. We need to shift the time and effort away from center-point turns and floating/sinking, and put it towards learning winds/weather/aerodynamics as they pertain to canopy flight.

I always pronounce it like 'chaos', but you have to wonder why they didn't just call it a 'chaos'? Or if they wanted to be 'clever' they could have went with 'kaos'. The literal pronounciation now, I guess, would be 'zaos', becasue the X usually sounds like a Z when it's at the beginning of a word. However you say it, not so good for a guy with 250 jumps.