sergeantpowers

Cool, thanks for the replies... I'll probably just go to a meeting and talk to a rep about it, because I have a few other questions anyway. But I'm glad to hear Aflac is back to covering skydiving. Makes me feel a whole lot better knowing I'll be covered if I bust my ass

I just got my open enrollment papers for my insurance for 2010 thru my work, and I realized that I'm not signed up for the Aflac off the job accident coverage they offer for like $8 a paycheck. That's really not a bad deal, and now that I'm skydiving I think it's probably something I shouldn't be without. I haven't really looked into it, and I might have to go to an enrollment meeting anyway before I can sign up for it, but do insurance companies typically ask you if you do crazy things (for instance, hurl yourself out of airplanes ), before they'll give you coverage? Because this seems like a policy that I really need, and I'd hate to not be able to get it because of this skydiving habit.

Congrats dude! I'm on level 3 (at Skydive Alabama, no less), had to repeat it last Sunday but I'm hoping to be able to get out there tomorrow morning and knock it out.

2 of Hearts!

It happened not long after I left, but another guy doing his level 2 jump (Patrick, I think?) broke his leg on a hard landing. Like I said I wasn't there when it happened, but I from what I was told when I got there Sunday morning they were thinking he forgot to flare. Happy now?

Don't take this personally, but is there anyone from your new DZ that can verify that you are a real person and are jumping at the new DZ? . You think I'm just making this up to try to make ASC look good? I really don't care about the whole feud one way or the other, I'm just telling you what my experience was doing one tandem there. Honestly, I probably won't go back anytime soon, because it's a 4 hour drive from my house, and I like the atmosphere at Skydive Alabama a lot better, but I didn't have any of the problems with my jump at ASC that so many other people have had. But as far as anybody who can verify that I'm a real person... I don't know, I've only done a few AFF jumps here and I haven't gotten to know anybody all that well yet. And I don't know who from Skydive AL is on DZ.com... but I was there this past Saturday and Sunday mornings for my level 2 and 3, as well as the Friday and Saturday before that for my ground school and level 1.

I just ordered a USPA membership a few days ago. I didn't get the expedited service or anything, so it said it'd be a couple weeks before I got my membership card. My question is, when will they start sending me Parachutist? Will it be in a few weeks after everything goes through, or is there a chance I may get this month's issue?

No, AFAIK they didn't charge us any other extra fees, aside from obviously the video package. They were pretty straightforward with us about it all.

It was ASC in Cedartown. IIRC our price wasn't too bad, it was something like $180 before the extra fee. And they told us about the charge on the phone when we booked it, before they got our credit card info. So they didn't try to mislead us or anything. I've heard a lot of bad things about ASC, but our jump went really well. Everybody there seemed really cool, and we had a great time. I just wasn't sure about the extra altitude charge; it seemed reasonable at the time, I just started thinking about it and thought it sounded like it may be a way to squeeze some extra cash out of people who don't know any better. But that makes sense. I just wanted to make sure we hadn't gotten scammed. Especially since we almost booked thru Skyride until I looked it up and found some shady stuff about them. So we decided to go through the DZ directly, just to be safe. Either way, it turned out well... I was hooked after my first tandem and decided to go the AFF route.

Okay, that makes sense. I just wasn't sure if that was typical or not.

A few months ago, I did my first tandem jump at a different DZ than the one where I'm doing my AFF now. Everybody seemed really nice, but something struck me as a bit odd. They charged us an extra $10 each for "extra altitude," to jump from 14,000 as opposed to 10,000 feet. At the time I didn't think anything of it, but the more I thought about it and the more I read about skydiving I started thinking that sounded a little shady. I may be overreacting, that may be a totally common and legit practice. I've never asked if they do this at my home DZ. It just seems a little shady to me, with my very limited experience in the field of skydiving. I mean, what would they do if one of us didn't pay? Make us jump early? Put us on a separate load, going to 10,000 feet? So my question is, is this typically the way drop zones handle tandems or did we unknowing whuffos get taken advantage of?

Cool, thanks for the advice. But even if it never gets any better, it's totally worth it.

I'm in the middle of AFF, and so far the opening and canopy ride on all my jumps (yeah, all 3 of them) has hurt like hell in the crotch region. Is this normal, or is there something I can do about it? I tried loosening my leg straps a little on my second jump, and it made it a little more bearable, but turns under canopy still sucked. At the risk of sounding like a pansy, is there anything that I can do to make my canopy ride a little less... excrutiating? Or do I just need to suck it up and quit whining about it?

I took my AFF ground school last Friday, then had my first jump Saturday. I got two more jumps done this weekend, the last one being level 3, which I have to repeat. My left instructor let me go, but the right one never released because my body position wasn't stable enough. He said he had just gotten to the point where he felt comfortable releasing me, but that also happened to be 6000 feet, so it was too late. But that's okay, it'll give me time to practice for next weekend. My main problem is that I need to relax. I'll get a signal, and instead of thinking about it and slowly responding to the signal, I go "oh crap!" do it too fast, and my movements are really jerky. And then I overcorrect, and I mess up another aspect of my body position, and it just becomes a mess. I know it's just something I need to work on, and I know it'll come with time, it's just a little frustrating that I keep making the same dumb mistakes despite my best effort on the ground to tell myself not to. It's like I exit the airplane and I stop thinking... I'm just doing it automatically, but my automatic reactions suck. But again, I know nobody's perfect, especially starting out, so I'm not gonna let it bother me too much. Learn from it and move on, right?