davelepka

Wing loading is certainly a factor when choosing your first canopy, but once you have done that, downsizing should only be a function of skill, experience and currency. Just because you are lighter does not mean that you are ready for a smaller canopy. Your WL might have gone down, but you still need to base your choices on your current level of performance on your current canopy.

As previously mentioned, stop working on anything else if you cannot reliably maintain stability at, and though, pull time. Rigs are meant to be deployed in a certain orientation, and you will drastically increase your odds for a malfunction (not counting getting your bridle wrapped around an arm or leg) if you cannot hold the rig square and steady during that process. A note on the above - you do not have to mindlessly advance through your AFF jumps 'just because'. If you feel that you need more work on any skill, just speak up and ask to make another jump to work on that. In terms of what to do if your bridle gets wrapped around your arm or leg, pointing that appendage up and trying to shake the bridle off is the standard answer. Two tries, two seconds is the standard time frame for you to work within. In terms of what handles to pull if you cannot clear the entanglement, opinions vary so all I can say is to ask your instructor. If you are getting different answers from different members of the staff, seek out the drop zone owner, chief instructor, or safety & training advisor, and explain the situation to them and ask them for a 'final' answer. Once you have a license, you may want to re-visit the idea of what handles to pull in the case of a closed container malfunction, but while still in the student program at your DZ, the best bet is to follow what they tell you.

Zero. Canopy piloting skill, experience and currency are the only things that should influence canopy decisions. Your weight is only one aspect of the equation, and simply losing weight does not make you ready to jump a smaller canopy. Look at your skill level and competency on your current wing, and the one you plan to downsize to on the day you plan to downsize. Everything else is just speculation and not relevant to the reality of you jumping a certain canopy on a regular basis.

If the canopy stalls on landing, your brake lines are too short. They should be long enough that you need to pull the toggles to full arm extension (really trying to reach down as far as you can) and hold them there for 5 to 10 seconds before the stall. The catch is that this will make your canopy come in a little faster and the flare a touch lower in the toggle stroke, but if you're already getting your toggles to full arm extension, you shouldn't have a problem. The other idea is that this canopy is just too small for you. Not everyone performs well at high WL, and sometimes you just find your own personal 'sweet spot' by going too far down. Maybe just an upsize will improve your landings, and make your jumps safer and more fun?

This has nothing to do with the stitching on the harness, or if any/all ADs (required mods or repairs) have been done to the rig or reserve. What you need is a rigger to inspect all the equipment and determine if it is airworthy and compatible. Otherwise you have no idea what you're buying. What I would suggest is that this rig should be passed on. Find newer, more modern equipment, and if you're concerned about wanting to downsize shortly, just sell the modern gear for the same money you bought it for. You'll be jumping better gear for free (more or less). Buying older, mostly obsolete, gear will have you jumping crap you might not be able to sell when you're done with it. You'll be spending money to jump crap.

I can't be built into some practice training for various mals. You can bring the simulation with the pull sequence, where they would certainly touch the hackey, and then talk them through returning to a neutral body position, counting down the deployment, and then checking the canopy at which point you can call out a bag lock or streamer, and have them proceed to their EPs. With the exception of a lost main handle, every mal begins with touching the hackey, so that becomes a part of the training.

Again, I think what it all comes down to is what sort of course you want to run. Is it a training course or a testing course? Are you there to learn to become an instructor, or are you there to prove that you are ready to be an instructor from the get-go? In terms of the ground school and 'general knowledge', I would vote that the training course is the way to go. In terms of the FJC material, and the ground preps for the subsequent cats, there's a written curriculum for that, and as such it's easy to teach that material in a classroom setting. Most candidates will know the material already, but what they can do is reinforce effective ways of teaching that material. Even if you have a 'special needs' student who might not 'get it' right away, you have the luxury of time on your side to try another teaching method until they do. Compare that to the air skills where the last thing you have is time. You also don't have a written curriculum of how to handle the unlimited number of possibilities that you might encounter in-air. That's why there should be a firm 'start date' where the practice jumps end for everyone. It put's the pressure back on the student to really ramp up the preparation and to show up more than ready in order to give themselves a buffer. As it sits now, they show up sort-of ready and then do prep dives until they feel good. Then they can just barely pass the evals and they're good to go. If the pre-course was limited, and there was a 'start date', a serious candidate would show up ready to rock even before the pre-course. If it rained every day during the pre-course, they would still be more than ready to ensure that they are not wasting their time and money by taking the course. Back to your proposal, I get your idea, still think it's impractical. Even if you had the same evaluators, it doesn't mean that you'll be able to get enough jumpers to run two courses within a reasonable amount of time. The simpler solution is the one I outlined above where there is a hard 'start date'. It achieves the same result of not letting the candidates just stumble into the course and squeak by over-doing the practice dives during the course.

I think it's too complicated, and that the costs and logistics are going to become a huge factor. Example - we have run AFFICs at my dz for the past couple years running. We have never had more than 4 people in the course, and these were established, advertised courses. So everyone who could travel to the course did, and we still only had 4 people. I think the answer, if there is an answer (or even a question), is to go back to the old format to a degree. You can have a pre-course to get your hands on the evaluators your working with, but there needs to be a 'start date' for the course where everything from that point forward is 'live'. Come ready to rock, or find yourself going home without a rating. I don't think it's cheating to get a crack at the evaluators before hand, that's just being fair. Each one is different and has a different style. If the course standard is high enough, and there's a firm 'start date' for everyone, it puts it back on the student to prep sufficiently before the course. I agree that you have a point about the status quo. When you get to practice until you and the evals feel your ready, and then you pass with just the min standard, you really snuck in under the wire and probably can't do the rating justice.

I'll add a quick story - I had a first jump AFF student over the weekend, who happened to be a female. The student radios we use have helmet mounted speakers and a control unit at the end of a wire which we put down the front of the student's jumpsuit for the jump. We keep the radios off to conserve battery life, so part of the final pre-jump gear check is to turn on the radio. With a dude student, I'll turn it on, drop it down the front of their jumpsuit, and tell them to zip it up. With a female student, I hand them the radio and ask them to put it down the front of their jumpsuit, and then to zip it up. Now I don't have any bad intentions, and I'm as professional as can be, but I'm also aware that this person is willing to do anything I tell them to (including jump out of a plane), and I know if I said that I needed to put that down their jumpsuit, they would never question it even if it did make them uncomfortable. The easy solution is to not take the chance, and just let them handle anything going down the front of their jumpsuit. The other side of the coin is that I'm trying to keep my student focused on their jump, and doing a good job. I can only imagine that being made to feel uncomfortable by inappropriate behavior is going to break their concentration, and get in the way of my real goal which is a safe and successful skydive. Besides, if I really want to put hands in a woman's shirt, I want to earn it the old fashioned way with $40 worth of beer or wine, and several hours of smooth talking.

What you described is not a skydiving issue. You're not commenting on his gear check procedures or training methods. What your describing is basic social interaction, and you've been doing that everyday of your life since you were a kid in the sandbox and learned to share your bucket and shovel. Keep perspective on things at the DZ. Skydiving is one thing, but it's separate from everything else. A great skydiver, instructor, or whatever at the DZ might be a total dirtbag, asshole or loser out in the real world. One thing has nothing to do with the other, and in areas outside of jumping, you might a much better person than this TI who you describe as a 'great instructor'. Note that I'm not trying to talk shit about this guy, I'm just saying that it's possible for 'anyone' to be a dirtbag as well as a 'great' skydiver. My advice- Keep a keen eye out for similar behavior from the guy. If gets remotely close to that again. pull him aside and reference the earlier episode, the new one you just witnessed, and say 'Hey, I'm not trying to tell you how to skydive, but I've seen you make some of the ladies a little uncomfortable, and it just bugs me'. The truth of the matter is that tandem passengers take a very submissive role with regards to the instructor. They are placing their physical bodies under the instructors control, and that's a responsibility that needs to be dealt with carefully.

Just to clarify for others, a Lightning is a CReW canopy, which means that you would do a full altitude clear-and-pull in order to be open right away and begin building canopy formations. So when he describes elbowing his rig to dislodge a PC in tow, he would have been a 10k ft or higher, and had plenty of time for that maneuver. A PC in tow down at normal pull altitude is another story. You will not have much time at all, and spending it trying to dislodge the PC in tow by jabbing your rig with your elbow is not an 'official' or 'approved' method of solving that problem. A mis-routed bridle or similar problem will never be 'fixed' and you would still be at terminal while wasting time doing something besides your EPs.

Kelly - I'll give you the final word on this from the DZ staff, don't second guess your decision. For starters, what is your experience with rear riser landings? How many have you done under controlled circumstances when it was your option to bail out and use the toggles? I'm guessing none, and based on your canopy control history, I don't that would have been the time or circumstance for you to start landing with your rears. Furthermore, landing on rears with a 'good' canopy, and doing it with two broken steering lines is two very different things. Even in full flight, with slack in your steering lines, they are hold the tail in place. When you pull on the rear risers, it also pulls the steering lines and effects the position of the tail (it pulls it down). The end result is that you're flying the entire back half of the canopy when landing with your rear risers on a 'good' canopy. When your steering lines are broken, there is nothing left to hold the tail in place, and it is free to flap upwards and provide zero lift. So when you pull on the rears, all you are pulling down is the area from the B lines back to the D lines. Essentially, it's about half of the area you would be pulling down when you used your rear risers on a 'good' canopy, and it's a much more difficult landing. At the end of the day, they are your handles and you may pull them as you see fit. If you have any reason to believe that you cannot make a safe, controlled landing on your main canopy, it's clear that you know what to do.

I'm short on time, and might have more thoughts later, but this one stood out to me. You have to make a choice about the above. Is the course a test or a teaching session? It used to be a test, where you came in 100% ready to go and were tested on your abilities. You could do the pre-course, and prep all you wanted, but once the course started, it was 'on' and everything you did went in the books. The 'new' course is a teaching course. You jump until you say you're ready, and then you go live. The pre-course sometimes happens during the course itself. Your buddy might be going 'live' while you are still doing practice jumps. The idea is to teach people to do the job to the point that they are ready to pass the eval jumps. So if you want a 'gap' built in there, you have to go back to the 'test' format. Even then, it's impractical because the pre-course was traditionally held the week before the course because the actual evaluators would be at the DZ and available. All other prep was with other people, some of them AFFI, some of them evaluators, but maybe not the actual evaluators you would be jumping with at the course. That was the appeal of the pre-course, it was a shot to jump with real evaluators, and the week before was really the only time to do it.

You're missing the point. The X-braced canopy is more rigid and flatter across the surface of the canopy, letting you use more of the square footage for 'flying'. A conventional canopy has those little 'valleys' in between each cell, and there's very little lift being created down there. So out of 120 sq ft, you're not actually flying all 120 sq ft, just the 'high spots' that get the clean air flow (although those 'spots' represent a good portion of the sq footage). The x-bracing lets the canopy's surface be flatter, with no valleys, so you get clean airflow across more of the surface. The end result is that you can fly a smaller sized canopy and still produce the same amount of lift. So you can expect a similar bottom end (stall) speed as a larger, conventional canopy, but you can also expect a higher top speed based on the loading. This is why people say you 'need' to load an x braced canopy at 2.2 or better (or whatever). We know you don't 'need' to in order for the canopy to function, but for it to really stand out much more than a conventional wing, you do need to push into the WL where a convention wing would start to suffer (which has always been about 1.9/2.0). Of course, none of this has anything to do with downsizing progression. You still need to make smart, gradual moves, regardless of what people thing you 'need' to be doing. Even flying a Velo at less than 2.2 is a very HP wing, and there is lot's to learn. You will get to know the characteristics of the wing, and if you downsize again to a smaller Velo, you'll notice it's just 'more' of everything you learned on the 'big' Velo.

A crapshoot is right, and this is why this topic is (and has been) an 'issue' for years. It's with the crapshoot idea in mind that we go with the simpler method of one set of EPs for students. While you are correct that the full EPs involve pulling two handles and the partial is quicker based on only being one handle, but I would suggest that blowing through the basic, practiced, physical motions of pulling both handles could be quicker than the more complex mental step of categorizing the mal and making a 'red/no-red' decision. Deciding you have a mal is a yes/no decision. Your main is deploying normally or it's not. Narrowing that down to a closed or open container mal is a more complex decision, and thus could take longer to make. There are several variations of closed container mals, and several mals that are not closed container but still have you falling at high speeds as if your container was closed. Take a horseshoe or bag lock. Both feature higher speeds and 'something' out over your back, just like a PC in tow. According to the 'experienced jumper' logic, the PC in tow is a reserve-only mal, but a bag lock or horseshoe is certainly a red/silver mal. I think it's the complexity of that decision, along with the sheer volume of information and the idea of the 'crapshoot' with regards to pulling/not-pulling red that points towards to simpler solution for training students. Give them one set of EPs, and leave it at that. If they have a problem, there is one solution, no additional thinking required.

I agree with the above. I would rather have a two-out, and retain control over when (or if) the main leaves, as opposed to the pulling the handle with no idea when (or if) the main is going to leave. However, this adds another mental step to the EPs. First you decide that you have a malfunction, then you must decide to pull two handles or just the one, then you must act on that. Compare that to the alternative. First you decide you have a malfunction, then you perform the one procedure that you practiced. The latter scenario is less complicated, and probably better suited toward a student jumper who will probably have 'a lot' going on in their head during any sort of malfunction. When you consider that, along with the idea that pulling the red handle can be harmless/helpful in any number of closed-container mals, it seem clear that the choice for student training remains a single procedure where they pull both handles.

It doesn't, read it again. The idea is to move the twists down far enough that you can reach up past them and apply input to straighten out the canopy. Once the turn has stopped, you can kick out of the remaining twists with a level wing. Here's my problem with the plan - you don't really get any 'practical' experience with it until you're already fucked. At that point you have to learn a new skill, and do it before your hard deck or you have to change up your plans for the rest of the day (and your buddies will miss their tandem w/ $20 tip when they land off following your shit down). My view, and this may not be popular (but it works for me) is to keep one eye on your altitude, and the other on your canopy, and just pretend the horizon is not reeling by in the background at a million miles per hour. There are two problems - your canopy is diving, and you have line twists. The line twists are between you and the canopy. Turn yourself in the opposite direction of the twists, and you'll solve the problem. The diving is a problem between you and the ground. Figure out a way to get control of your canopy, and you'll solve that problem. Are spinning line twists on a HP canopy intense? Scary? Fast? Dis-orientating? Sure, all of the above, but if you're not up for that, don't jump a HP canopy. Spinning around on your back? Kick out of half a twist and now you're facing the other way. Keep going, and you won't be spinning out of control for long. HP canopies require HP canopy piloting at all times, to include kicking out of line twists. It's not going to be easy or fun, but that's what you sign up for when jump that sort of canopy (or a cutaway, one of the two).

Check in with the Chutingstar gear store. They have an escrow program where they will receive used gear from a seller and inspect it for the buyer. Provided it passes, they will collect payment from the buyer, and the pass the money to the seller and the gear to the buyer. I'm pretty sure the escrow service is free, all you pay for is the inspections on the gear (which you need and presumably would have to pay for anyway). They are a well known and established gear dealer / rigging loft, and any seller not willing to use their program is likely hiding something or is a pain in the ass.

Yes, the people who have already have their impression of 'low' planted in their brains might not benefit from this change, but like I said, there is a whole generation of people who are up and coming who will. How many jumpers do you know who are comfortable in freefall at 1600 or 1500ft? I don't know many, but those I do are old timers who came up back when pulling at 1500ft (or lower) was no big deal. The reason being that they were told in the beginning that 1500ft was 'ok' as a pull altitude, and thus have based their thinking off that number. If they had a mal at 2k, they be cool as a cucumber. If they had a mal at 1500ft, it would be business as usual, while a mal at 1k would put them in 'panic mode'. The point being that the psychological aspect is huge in shaping people's performance. Try taking an American driver to the Autobahn and sticking them in traffic at 90+ mph. To them, it's crazy-town, and they'll be white knuckles on the steering wheel. The locals, on the other hand, will be playing with the radio and thinking about laundry and grocery shopping. So we make this change today, and there's a whole crop of jumpers who will be in full on 'panic mode' at 2k, not 1500ft like current jumpers. There's something about 2k, about the fact that some people are allowed to pull down there, that makes it a 'line of demarcation'. A B license jumper who was planning to pull at 3k could smoke it down to 2100ft be accident, and while they would realize that they pulled 'lower' than they planned, they would still not think it was 'low' because some people are allowed to pull at 2k. This change is not about you or me, it's about future jumpers. This change might also be about manufacturers interest, but I still don't see how jumpers and manufacturers are necessarily on opposite sides of the aisle. We need them, and they need us, and we all need the sport to be safe and thriving in order to have a future.

I disagree with that point. I don't see how this doesn't benefit the community. What's your angle, that the AAD companies want to limit their liability by raising the firing altitude to 1k, and this change will enable that? Correct me if I'm wrong, but that 'liability' only comes into play in the case of injury or death, so what the USPA has done, according to your theory, is limit the occurrences of injury or death resulting from the use of an AAD, and I can't see how that's a bad thing. Watch any of the Cypres save videos, and you'll see that there is very little room for error in the successful firing of an AAD. If everything goes according to plan, you're under an open reserve at under 500ft, and that's close. Factor in the changes to the sport since 750ft was set at the altitude, such as the higher airspeeds of freeflying and smaller reserve canopies that might take more altitude to get control of and pointed toward a safe area, and you're cutting it even closer. I don't think it's wrong to assume that 750ft was chosen as a compromise between 'reverse engineering' a reserve deployment from the ground up, and 'forward engineering' a high-speed mal from 2k on down. Ideally you want to be open at some point above the ground, and you want a shot at dealing with a high speed mal without an AAD fire. Last time I checked, you can't make the ground lower, so if the application changes (like the gear and freefall activities) your only option is to go up in order to give more of a buffer to the proper operation of the AAD and reserve/container system. Again, just an assumption, but if the min pull altitude has been 2.5k back in 1991, I feel strongly that they would have chosen a higher firing altitude right off the bat. While I can see where this change 'may' have some benefit to the manufactures, I can also see how it has benefit to the jumpers, and I don't see how that's a bad thing. What exactly is the harm to the jumpers the BOD inflicted while bowing down the manufacturers? I just don't see it.

It may or may not, and that's something to consider. However, the fact remains that there is a community full of gear that just makes more sense to open higher than 2k, and that's the current reality that we have to deal with. Let's say that there was no problem with tight reserve containers, we're still jumping smaller, faster canopies that take longer to open than when the min pull altitude was originally established. We're also jumping smaller reserves, so when you stack all that up and figure on what kind of altitude you need to have mal, cutaway, and get under an open reserve in time to set up for a landing in a clear area, 2k is just cutting very close, much closer than when 2k was chosen as the rule. Lot's of things in skydiving will change, this is just one of them. I have never heard of an extra 500ft doing anyone any harm, but there are many, many incidents where it appears that an extra 500ft would have made a huge difference in the outcome. Those who argue that people will just take longer to cutaway are making the assumption that the people who went in with partially inflated reserves were altitude aware. I would argue otherwise, that they were not, because I find it hard to believe that anyone would intentionally wait until they were below 500ft to cutaway. I would suggest that they lost altitude awareness, and were just acting according to their own personal time line. Be it due to slow reactions, improper procedures, or simply lost track of time, I would suggest that they acted based on something other than an awareness of their exact altitude, and that they would have the same reaction and the same time-line to a malfunction that occurred higher.

Of course it's not, but none of them were scared enough high enough to make a difference. If you bump up the min. pull altitude, suddenly 2.5k becomes 'low' and 2k becomes an emergency. It's nothing more than a learned behavior. New jumpers will believe anything you tell them. You could tell them that 1500ft is a good pull altitude, and if they don't have an AAD or snively canopy, a good number of them could get away pulling at that altitude for many years. If you compare their impression of being in frefall at, say, 1600ft, to the impression of a jumper who was taught that 2k is the lowest they should ever pull, you would see that one of them would simply be doing 'business as usual' and the other would be in a panic for being so 'low'. Like I said, this may not make much of a difference today, but in time it will become the new 'normal', and in a few years jumpers will start to see their definition of 'low' start to change, and also when they feel like it's time to react to a problem. The physical act of getting people to pull at 2.5k (or higher) is one thing, but the shift in the psychological impression of what is 'low' is another, and in this case I think it's the more important. Again, people continue to mention that 2k has been working for decades, but ignoring the changes to the gear that has taken place during those same decades. Where I learned to jump, when it was really low skies, we got out the T-10 and did static line jumps from 1000ft (or less). Good fun when we couldn't be jumping our 'modern' rigs with square canopies. Was it dangerous to do so? Not really because those rigs were designed to be operated from those altitudes, so that was 'safe'. A rig from the 80's might have also been 'safe' to ride down to 2k on every jump. Much bigger canopies that opened faster, malfunctioned slower, and were generally easier to handle. The containers were nowhere near as tight, and the reserves were also much bigger. Rigs today are different. Not bad, not wrong, just different and require a different set of operating parameters. If you want to fly a fast, small canopy, and you want it in a rig that will be 100% secure in any freefall scenario at any speed you can achieve, you need to account for that. It's not a 1980 rig, so don't try to operate it like one.

I would see if you could get the DZO or head instructor from your local DZ to call on your behalf and explain your skills/experience/training. That's not to say that you won't have to do some sort of training at the new DZ, but what you are describing sounds like the same thing a guy with zero jumps would have to do, and that doesn't seem right. Doesn't the CSPA have some sort of standard in place with regards to student currency?

This is what people seem to be ignoring when they bitch about higher pull altitudes. I don't think it's incorrect to say that every single jumper who went in with a partially deployed reserve will still be alive today if they had another 500 ft. Everyone is going to say that you just need to act higher, and take care of business sooner, but the simple fact is that most people don't think about going in when they plan a skydive of make decisions. They think about less severe key points in the skydive, with two of them being 2k (the lowest published pack opening altitude) and 750ft (AAD firing altitude, if so equipped). Like it or not, people don't think they're going to go in, so they use these altitudes as their bottom end 'landmarks'. Moving both of them up is going to build more altitude in the 'attitude' of jumpers with regards to how their actions down low. It's not going to make much of a dent in some of the more experienced jumpers, but we graduated 3 new A license holders just this past weekend, and not a single one of them is going to ever be comfortable being in freefall below 2.5k. As far as their concerned, anything past 2.5k is going to be LOW, and a time for immediate action, and that's a good thing. It has to start somewhere, and now is a great time. To put the 'big picture' in perspective, I know a jumper who hit the ground with a partially inflated reserve and did not survive. I was there when he made his first jump, and jumped with him for years, right on up to him earning his AFF rating. In that case, if the pull altitude was bumped up to 2.5k the same weekend he got his A license, he might still be alive today. To anyone who makes the bullshit 'slippery slope' argument, and asks why we don't pull at 8k, it's because (like I said) that's bullshit. Between the time that 2k was set as the min pull altitude and today, the gear and the sport have gone through some significant changes, and many of them point toward bumping pull altitudes up a notch. Pulling at 2k with a modern, slow opening canopy and an AAD is setting a VERY thin margin, and there is simply no reason to cut it that close. Personally, I made this change to my own program several years ago. I used to jump a Sabre 1, and got used to the quicker openings and easy-going nature of the canopy. I used to pull at 2k all the time, and sometimes even a hitch lower. Then I moved to a Stiletto, which opened slower and was loaded higher, and I found myself reaching for the PC a little sooner. Later, I started jumping a Velo, and made it more of a 'rule' that I would be opening higher. I have never regretted having more altitude between me and the ground after opening.

Maybe, but the gear has certainly changed over the last few decades. Canopies open slower, and fly/turn/descend/malfunction faster as well. Containers have become freefly friendly, and as a result are tighter and more 'built-up' then they were decades ago. Some would argue that the gear has gone in the wrong direction, but the fact is that it's there and not going back anytime soon. So the application of the gear should change. If you have to give up 500ft of freefall to fly a faster canopy, and have a rig that holds together during any freefall maneuvers you can imagine, then so be it. Any rule that's decades old in a sport that has gone though the number and scope of changes as skydiving should certainly be reviewed for it's applicability in the current environment.