davelepka

I would suggest that far more students malfunction on their first (few) jumps then radios malfunction overall. If batteries are charged, radios are turned on and volume adjusted properly, radios work almost all of the time. I cannot say the same for the performance of first jump students. In no way does the presence of a radio mean that the training could be anything less than complete, but if you look at the number of students that return for additional jumps, or even go on to get a license, you can see the skydiving is not for everyone, and even after a full day of training and passing a test, not all of the FJC students are really 'ready' to make a jump. While the radio isn't a guarantee of anything, it can (and has) turned a risk of injury into a non-event. A student who is, 'out to lunch' and not properly controlling their canopy, without a radio would end up landing off where ever they end up. If it takes the radio guy to instruct them on their every move to get them back to the DZ, where they land with a good flare and a PLF, then the radio saved the DZ the liability of an injury or damage to the gear. Let's think about something we can all relate to, AFF level 1 students. Some of us have seen this live, but we've all seen it on video, the student with the 'deer in the headlights' look on their face. They don't reply to handsignals, and don't even try to pull the PC. Is anyone surprised when they see these videos? Probably not, because a first jump is a big deal, and skydiving isn't for everyone, so when a guy 'freezes up', it's accepted as a part of the game. Now take that same idea, and transfer it to a static line or IAD student. There's a chance that the student is hanging under the canopy with that same 'lost' look in their eyes, and without a radio, what would the result be? Maybe it would work out OK, maybe not. I have talked down many students who had to be 'coached' into making that first turn, and in the end I'm gald I was able to do that as opposed to sitting on the ground asking, "Where's that guy going"? The idea that you 'shouldn't' need a radio is correct. Just like you shouldn't need an AAD, a reserve, or even an AFF I. If everyone arched like they were supposed to, pulled on time, and every rig was packed correctly, what's the point of all of those things? The point is that no student or skydive is perfect, and if all it takes is a radio help ensure a safe landing, then why not? It's the least expensive among the ADD, reserve and AFF I, and much like those things, it only needs to be used as much as the situaiton dictates, which sometines is very little, or just to say "You're doing great". But when a student is flying themselves into a bad situation, it allows the operator to put their knowledge and experience to use in flying them out of that situation. Remember that even a twisted ankle on landing is a serious injury for the student. It puts them on crutches for weeks, and makes for a less then happy memory of the DZ. It may not get an ambulance or helo to the DZ, or make the nightly news, but to that jumper it's a pretty big deal. So if it takes a guy on the radio to make sure they find and land on the DZ, to instruct 'feet and knees together' and tell them to flare, then so be it. I'd rather find out that a student is a retard because of how much radio help they needed as opposed to finding out when they fly off into the sunset and land in a tree/powerlines/swamp.

You really think that an intentional cutaway will prepare you for the real thing? You're going to put all sorts of time and effort into the planning and rigging for this jump. You're not going to be cutting away from a mal, it's not going to be an 'emergency', and it's probably all you're going to think about for 48 hours leading up to the jump. The main difference between pulling your handles on an intentional cutaway, and pulling them hanging in a practice harness is that you might die doing an intentional, and the practice harness would be slightly less dangerous. Let's remember, to come even close to the real thing, you would need a chest moutned reserve, so you can cutaway your main and pull your reserve. Adding a third canopy to your rig just gets you the cutaway, after that it a normal skydive. Pulling a cutaway handle while hanging from a canopy is one thing, and pulling a reserve ripcord while in freefall is another, so the extra harness/extra main canopy is only half of the battle. How about this - spend your time and effort learning about rigging, proper gear maintenence, proper pakcing techniques, and developing a bulletproof gear check. This way you can avoid having a cutaway, and if you do, you know your gear will be ready. Practice your EPs before every jump, and get yourself in the hanging harness a couple times per season to really go through the motions. When you make a jump, try to land the first good parachute you get. How stupid would it look if you cutaway a good canopy, and then went in tyring to get another out? I'll tell you, real stupid.

So let me get this straight - you are not going use the RDS, which is the bigger benefit to the canopy, but you do want to be able to remove the slider? You realize that simply collapsing and stowing the slider takes about as long as removing it and shoving it into your jumpsuit or pocket, right? OK, maybe it's 5 seconds faster to remove it, but then you add the extra time to re-rig it for the pack job, and bigger issue, the risk of a mis-rig or slider malfunction leading to a hard opening (possibly damaging yourself or the canopy) or a malfunction (possibly damaging yourself or the canopy). So you're ready to take the extra risk to save 5 seconds under canopy, but you're going to pass on the real benefit of removing the d-bag and PC?

I've bought a bunch of suits from these guys in California, Flite Suit, and always had great service. Two of them had to go back for alterations, but they were fixed and returned in less than a week. After that, the one suit lasted for 1000's of jumps, and the other one is still being jumped. I hear your point though, about face to face dealings, and if you happen to live anywhere near a jumpsuit manufacturer, then I would go with the local company for sure. For evreryone else across the country, just go with long standing, established manufacturers like Flite Suit, Bev or Tony and you'll do fine.

No, that's not it. WL is not a determinate of opening speed. Canopy design, slider size, packing methods and airspeed at deployment will effect the opening speed.

This is where you're getting your information from? You saw it on Youtube, so it must be right? You say this based on what? Your one malfunction, which to be fair, some have suggested you could handled in a more appropriate manner? This grants you the knowledge to make such a statement? wouldn't you think that the collective knowledge of all the cutaways from everyone on the board might have some more accurate info? What would you prefer? That anyone with a negative comment hold their tounge? Did we hurt your feelings, or tarnish your 'image'? The real problem here is your attitude. What would ever lead you to beleive that you couldn't make a mistake? Your reaction to anyone with a negative comment about your situaiton makes it seem like such a stretch that a guy with 100 jumps might still have a thing or two to learn. Is that really such a stretch? Furthermore, what would lead you to believe that more experienced jumpers wouldn't have something to add, something that could improve your performance (and mayeb prolong your life) the next time? Why are you so resistant to that concept? Forget about skydiving, how for do you think you're going to get in life with that attitude? Are you under the incorrect assumption that 90% of the more experienced jumper here didn't used to be just like you? I don't even know you, but I feel pretty comfortable calling you young, dumb, and full of cum. We all were. Some of us jumped during that time, and some of us are still jumping. The concept is that we've been where you are now, and we're where we're at now, so we have two things you don't, experience and perspective. So you don't like the way some of the messages were delivered? Have you looked around a DZ lately? Last time I did I saw very few certified mental health professionals, and quite a few dirt-bag adreniline jumkies. Do you really expect these people to be polite, understanding of your feelings, and skilled in the art of constructive critisism? What planet are you from? Take off you panties, and put on your big boy pants. You've got a long way to go in this sport, and you'll get there faster by listening the advice of those who have been in your shoes before. Learn to sift through the sarcatic remarks and infalmatory predictions about your life expectancty, and pick up on the underlying message. That goes for all you 100-jump shitheads who are backing this guy up. All of you have a long way to go before you get to where I am, and there's a lot of shit between here and there. Shut your pie holes, and soak this shit up like a sponge. I'm not where I am by wide margin, nobody is after many years and 1000's of jumps. There were many, many very close calls where I dodged a bullet; some by dumb luck, and some because I paid attention to everything and when the shit was about to hit the fan, I knew which way to duck.

Just to put that into perspective, I consider ten jumps to be the metric for a 'full day' of skydiving. 8 jumps is means we got off early, and 12 jumps is working overtime, so you have the equivilant of one day's worth of jumps on that canopy. To be fair, you're coming off the student gear, where you start with a 280ish canopy. In 30 jumps you have downsized 90 sq ft in canopy size, and that's prefectly normal, but now that you're at about a 1 to 1 wingloading, the pace of downsizing is going to come to a screeching halt. Now you are at the point where you will need a minnimum of 75 or 100 jumps on one size to even be close to ready for the next, and that's if you're really, really good. It could take 150 or 200 if you turn out to be not so good, or take some time off from jumping (currency is king).

Normally I would suggest that there is no rush to unstow your brakes, and that it's good practice to inspect your toggles and excess brake line before unstowing the brakes. This helps to prevent little porblems like this, or putting your hand through a loop of excess brake line from becoming a big problem. However, this was at an SOS event, so I'm guessing this was a bigger way jump, and keeping your eyes on the sky looking for traffic after opening is probably more important in that circumstance. To everyone else, if you can clear your area and have the time, take a look before you unstow.

Did you read the excellent response to your question the first time you posted it? Let me refresh your memory - By the time you're in the neighborhood of 200 jumps, the basic control of your body should have been accomplished a long time ago. It's the other skills listed above that are just coming into play around 200 jumps. It's like this - can you teach a 12 year old to operate a car? The steering wheel, the brake, the gas etc.? Of course you can, the operation of a motor vehicle is simple in comparison to some video games or computer programs 12 year olds have mastered. Now would you put that 12 year old into traffic, and trust them to drive a car? Probably not. They don't have the maturity, focus, or life experience needed to make good choices and be a safe driver. Flying a camera is the same thing. Just because you can skydive doesn't mean you can fly a camera. Flying your body is only one part of the equation, the rest of it you pick up little by little as you rack up the jumps. Training in the tunnel will make a you a sharper body flyer. Once you get to terminal, and before break off you'll be a superstar, but in every other facet of actual skydiving, you still only have however many jumps you have.

That was with a Skyhook, no less.

I gave an answer, fucktard, and it was in reference to one line. How far above your risers do you think you can reach sitting the harness during a high speed spin? I'll tell you, not that far. So what you're left with is trying to get to the line closer to the top of the riser where it's surrounded by, guess what, other lines. First you have to try to isolate the line, then cut it. Your chances of not getting it right the first time in those close quarters? Pretty fair, so add time for you to fuck it up once, then to get it right the second time. Of course, now your 'fixed' canopy has two cut lines, but whatever, right?

On the low speed deployements, yes, provided you were cutting away from a stable third canopy. For high speed tests, you need the PC leaving from the correct location, and pulling the freebag out of a container with a packed main, so you would need to use the reserve tray for those tests. Part of the test is looking at launch, and getting the bridle stretched out, the other part is looking at the overall drag of the PC when doing it's job of extracting the freebag and getting it off the canopy. Even with the number of reserve pack jobs cut in half, it's a big project that isn't going to happen. No manufacturer can be involved, so the whole thing would have to be funded by an impartial third party. While I imagine that a lot of people would be interested to know the outcome, unless there was some sort of action to follow the results, nobody is going to be that interested. Who issues the TSO? The FAA? They're the ones who could pull a TSO, or call for a redesign, so they would be only ones with an interest in conducting the testing. I don't see that happening anytime soon, and I'm not even sure I want to see the FAA get that involved, it's a slippery slope.

Without hunting it down, we had this same exchange up thread. Part of my beef with any of these 'services' where they corner a local market, and then force you to play ball or they pass the customers on to your competition is that it forces the DZO to do business with them, and accept losing a hunk of their profits. I've likened it to mafia strong-arming a business owner for 'protection'. You don't buy their service, they become the thing you need protection from. A legitimate securoty service will offer to protect your business, and if you decline, they will move on and have no further interaction with your business. The whole point of this is that DZOs are not making these choices of their own free will, they're being forced into it, or risk losing a significant part of the market share. Let's say they give up 50% of their profits on 50% of their business, that's an overall loss of 25%. Now if they refuse to play ball with the booking service, who will send 50% of their business across town, that's a loss of 50%. They've got the DZOs over a barrel, and that's one of my main points of contention. As such, I don't hold much umbridge for the DZOs themselves. They would rather have nothing to do with it, but at the risk of losing a signicant, maybe critical, percentage of their profits, they do what they have to do. I've never siggested that anyone 'in business' with Skyride or Proskydiving be demonized. The people actually running those outfits are another story, but the DZOs forced into are victims like anyone esle (maybe even above anyone else as they take the biggest loss of all the 'victims'). Furthermore, we're talking about DZs, not pizza joints. There aren't DZ on every street corner, and sometimes you don't have much of a choice besides jump at DZ 'A' or don't jump at all. Would I jump at CSC or ASC? I don't think so, because that put's you directly 'in bed' with the main players in the game, but to hold it against a guy who'd getting ripped off for half of his profits, I don't see the merit in that. Besides, fun jumpers only have so much 'power' in this game. If every fun jumper deserted a Proskydiving DZ, it's not going to shut down the DZ and remove a revenue stream from Proskydiving, it's just going to make the planes fly faster. Even if it did shut down a Proskydiving DZ, they would just take ther strong-arm tactics across town to a competing DZ, and make their money there. So if my choice is to jump at a Proskydiving DZ, or quit jumping which will have no effect on Proskydiving, I'm going to keep jumping.

The whole point of this thread has been to not waste time unclipping the chin strap, and you suggest a course of action that would take at least ten times as long? How long do you think it would take to locate and extract your hook knife, isolate the one the line in question, and cut the line? 15 seconds sounds reasonble given the high pressure situation, combined with the physical aspect of spinning at a high rate of speed. What are your chances of snagging the wrong line wiht your hook knife? Add 10 seconds to locate and cut the right line. Do you wear gloves? How easy do you think it will be to grab on specific line, under tension, with a gloved hand? Add another 10 seconds for that. In the end, it you fail to cut the proper line, you still need to cutaway. How low do you want to do that? Forget the idea of cutting lines under canopy unless it is your last resort. If your reserve has a mal, start cutting. If you're in a wrap with no options left, start cutting. Otherwise, use your handles, and do it quickly.

You do realize that your arguments for how unlikely it is that the GoPro will create an actual snag hazzard are actually helping the arguemtn against jumping them with low jump numbners, right? You might be 100% right that the GoPro would just shear off in the case of an entaglement, which is good, but the fact is that it became a factor in this cutaway, and the speed at which the OP 'took care of business'. That's the whole point. The camera adds a distraction, another factor (if only in the users mind) to deal with in the case of an emergency. In tersm of 200 jumps, I'd go out on a limb and say that when the OP doubles his jump numbers and gets to 200, he won't be dumb enough to untangle a mess of lines/d-bag/PC during a pack job and just guess it's 'good enough'. Another 100 jumps would give him the perspective that backing up the pack job a few steps to run a line check is well worth the 4 minutes it would have taken.

The problem with that idea, and this whole argument, is that wind tunnels are designed for meansuring factors at constant speed in clean air, and as we all know, reserve PC launches are in anything but. Between high speed, low speed, clean launch, or burble interference, there are a wide variety of circumstances that a reserve PC might encoutner. While one desigh might work better in one set of circumstances, the other might be the better choice for a different circumstance. The real test for these would something on the order of 20 low speed deployments (like just after a cutaway from a stable main) and 20 deployments from terminal for each PC. This would give you a reasonable sample size from both low and high speed deployments to let the variables other then airpseed hash themselves out. The real problem is finding someone to do the 80 test jumps rigged up with video and test equipment, and an outside video guy. So far I'm up to 160 slots, and 80 reserve pack jobs. The up side is that the test jumper can use a chest mounted tersh resereve, and stuff a Velocity into the freebag. All were looking at is time to bag strip, so the canopy has no effect on the test, and hey, built in RDS for the swoop.

Lightweight helmet, lightweight camera, and no moving parts. I'll bet we see more and more 'survival' stories like this in the years to come. Did you catch the hang time the helmet got from under 2K? Sure wasn't falling fast at all. I can't believe that dude took the time to unclip his fucking helmet. He got a great shot of that mal and it was clean as hell and all he had to do was put his head down and pull the handles. Or just learn how to pack, that would work too.

73 jumps on what? T-10? Yugoslvian military surplus from WW2? 73 jumps when? 1989? 1979? With the information provided, the Nav 280 is the canopy of choice. If he wants to share his experience to date, exit weight, and goals in canopy flying, I'd be happy to revise my answer. Even the most remedial amount of research would have revealed the importance of those factors when it comes to canopy selection and learning progressions. In the absence of even remedial research into the subject, the only thing I would reccomend is the 280.

PD Navigator 280

SnackBucks

Stop double posting, and go troll for free gear in the classifieds. The other option is to get some GL training, and buy some GL specific gear so nothing gets dragged through the brush.

I would focus re-training on properly stowing the lines, and handling the bag before and during placement into the container. These are two areas where it would be easy for a new-to-parachutes pcaker to get things mixed up, and induce a 1/2 or full twist during the packjob. If you have video of the deployments, you can slow-mo them to see if the twists are there before the canopy gets out of the bag, just to narrow things down.

If you've never jumped a tailgate, get over to Perris. The days of tailgate jumpships (in the US) are numbered, so get out of one while you still can. Otters are great, but they're eveywhere and will probably be around skydiving far longer than the few Skyvans left.

The problem with that is that consumers have very little knowledge of this industry, and how things work. Using the terms 'member' and 'non-member' DZs makes it sound like this is an organization, ala USPA, and not a for-profit business. It gives the impression that 'non-members' are lacking in something besides their willingness to part with half of their profits. While not of the same caliber and scale of the deception carried out by Skyride, it does leave the door open for consumers to believe that the non-members DZ are 'something less'. Priceline, Orbits, and Travelocity customers are well aware that Holiday Inn and Hilton are individual businesses, and that even if DoubleTree and Motel 6 don't appear on those sites, they are credible businesses who simply chose not to do business with those booking services. I would almost venture to say that the inclusion of 'non-member' DZs is a backhanded way of downplaying their status to the consumer, creating an artificial bias where none would have previously existed. So while there may be a DZ an hour away, they are not a member of 'Pro' skydiving.com, and in turn must be less-than 'pro'fessional. There simply is no room for a booking service in this industry. Travel is a different animal, catering to national businesses and national customers, but DZs are local businesses seeking only local customers. With or without the booking service, the DZ and their customers would come together, only competing with other local DZ, and as such the size of the market would dictate the size of the marketing effort required to deal with such competition, I've said it before, but Proskydiving could make a mint offering secure online payment and reservation solutions to DZ. If they were absent from the equation until a DZs customer hit the 'Buy now' button on the DZ website, at which point Proskyidving took over and handled the administration of the sale, that would a legit business, and one that virtually everyu DZ would take advanage of because it does not come between them and their customers. I outlined earlier in this thread how such a business could be run on a flat monthly fee, and easily generate upwards of $75,000 a year. That's $75k a year for operating a website, all the while leaving ample time to run CSC and make whatever profits are to be had there. That would be a legitimate business, and that would be an asset to the industry. Instead, greed has once again been the victor. Doug has set his sights on the high six-figure range far what he wants to extract from this industry per annum, and nothing is going to stop him. Not that fact that all of the money is no longer going to the DZOs who actually provide the service, and rightfully earn it. Not the fact that with all of that revenue going into his pocket, it's not available for upgrades to tandem and student gear, upgrades to aircraft, or upgrades to the amount of food in the cupboards of some DZO's homes. None of that matters to Doug becasue he's a greedy parasite, looking to drain this industry of money it can't afford to lose. Some people work their whole lives to make $75k per year, and even though he's got a chance to make that by doing very little work and not interfering with his existing business, he's going to take a pass, and shoot for the big time. The only difference between Proskydiving and Skyride, is that Doug had the benefit of seeing Skyride's mistakes from the outset. Skyride set the bar for how low you could go, and Doug had the advantage of being able to come in just above that position, and claim to be the 'good guy', and while in some areas he may be a 'better guy' than Skyride, at the end of the day all he did was just barely clear a very, very low hurdle.

What I got from his question was that he wants to take a strap, which by design is adjustable for length, and make it field-removeable, so he can swap out straps of different length. Adjustable length strap, removed to install a different length strap, also adjustable for length. Sounds simialr to a dog chasing it's tail, or any other completely pointless, circular activity.