TomAiello

I'd love to see Robi go up there (or Yuri, or Loic) and somebody shoot some relative footage with a top end wingsuit pilot to compare forward speed and fall rate (and heck, hook the wingsuit up to the VKB instrumentation too). -- Tom Aiello Tom@SnakeRiverBASE.com SnakeRiverBASE.com

Snopes -- Tom Aiello Tom@SnakeRiverBASE.com SnakeRiverBASE.com

Deja Vu!!!! Where have I heard this before?? Didn't you know? Magot is actually my second login. The real Maggot doesn't even own a computer. We just created the login so that I could play "good cop, bad cop" and fool you all. It's part of our evil plot to take over the world. edit to add: Ooops, I mean Magot is my 3rd login, after Skinflicka. It's so hard to keep all my schemes straight, here in my smoke filled control tower. -- Tom Aiello Tom@SnakeRiverBASE.com SnakeRiverBASE.com

I can think of at least one legal site where the landing area was essentially manufactured by cutting away jungle, with the permission of the park service that owns the cliff. -- Tom Aiello Tom@SnakeRiverBASE.com SnakeRiverBASE.com

In my opinion it's irresponsible to sell a high performance swooping canopy to someone just off AFF. Definitely both parties fault. Which means the seller definitely has some responsibility there. -- Tom Aiello Tom@SnakeRiverBASE.com SnakeRiverBASE.com

This is very bad advice. The most important thing to do on an unpacked jump is to manage your lines. On a roll over, it is critical to launch as hard as possible out (over the top of the canopy) to maintain line tension. Launching toward the canopy will create line slack, which will introduce more variables into your opening--worse heading, more chance for tension knots or line overs, and, of course, the chance to wrap yourself in the canopy as you are "trying to touch the canopy in FF." Have a look at this old post from BASE587 for some good advice on doing roll overs. -- Tom Aiello Tom@SnakeRiverBASE.com SnakeRiverBASE.com

Actually, it sounds like he's calming down a lot. He had his last student knocking down buildings to clear landing areas. -- Tom Aiello Tom@SnakeRiverBASE.com SnakeRiverBASE.com

Entanglement potential. With a tailwind, the wind blows the canopy forward of your body, so you minimize the chance of entanglement. With a headwind, the wind will blow a regular TARD back toward you, increasing your odds of entanglement. It looks to me like Bill's choices are (legitimately, given that I'd bet the majority of his unpacked jumps are from the bridge here) driven by his desire to avoid performing the "Nylon Burrito", which is a significantly more life and death consideration than heading performance from our local object. As an aside, my personal advice for TARDs (of whichever stripe) in winds is to hold the canopy off to one side of your body. It hurts heading for sure, but also reduces the entanglement potential (obviously, in a cross wind you have to make sure you're holding the canopy on the downwind side of your body). -- Tom Aiello Tom@SnakeRiverBASE.com SnakeRiverBASE.com

The exit difficulties with and without wingsuits are totally different. In general, going head low on a zero airspeed exit is the result of poor launch technique. You can see it in the first 5 feet, and work to improve it, because it's all the result of momentum carried off the exit point. In a wingsuit, by contrast, the head low position is usually a result of things that happen after the launch. You can have a perfect zero-rotation launch and find yourself going head low 3 seconds down (because of the way you are presenting the leg wing, and how much of it you have open). Two very different sets of skills. Having good results in the first is not much of a guarantee of good results on the second. -- Tom Aiello Tom@SnakeRiverBASE.com SnakeRiverBASE.com

I think that they airplane wingsuit flyers are mostly focused on formations and flocking right now. While more glide would be nice there, too, the only way to achieve better glide for a formation is to focus on improving the flying skills of the entire group, and also bringing up the lowest glide ratio member of the flock. All in all, I'd say that skydivers are probably better served to be practicing and training to improve the bottom end, rather than working on getting an extra 10% glide at the top end, at this point in the development of things. -- Tom Aiello Tom@SnakeRiverBASE.com SnakeRiverBASE.com

I've used both. I think the "isolating" ones work better than the noise cancelling variety. Also, I found that some of the cheaper noise cancelling types could give me a headache over time. -- Tom Aiello Tom@SnakeRiverBASE.com SnakeRiverBASE.com

You need to put quotes ("") around the somesite.com address. Let's keep this discussion in the original thread (linked above). Thanks! -- Tom Aiello Tom@SnakeRiverBASE.com SnakeRiverBASE.com

It takes about 30 cents and 30 seconds to make a closing loop. When to change it? Any time that you think it might need it. It's so easy that there's no reason not to. -- Tom Aiello Tom@SnakeRiverBASE.com SnakeRiverBASE.com

Where are you going to school? Where I went to school, there was a DZ that always needed packers, and local students who wanted to skydive would start out with jobs as packers, then use the packing money to pay for AFF, and later for fun jumps. Definitely stay in school, though. The guys who get to do the most skydiving aren't the folks who live on the DZ and barely scrape by. They're the ones who roll in on the weekends, pull 2 rigs out of the trunk of the mercedes, and pay a packer to keep one ready all the time so that they can make every load. -- Tom Aiello Tom@SnakeRiverBASE.com SnakeRiverBASE.com

You don't need the tow rope. Lots of people have flown above planes on high speed passes. I'm sure that several people will post giving video links in just a moment. -- Tom Aiello Tom@SnakeRiverBASE.com SnakeRiverBASE.com

I believe Ren is posting here because he's getting weathered out on a Euro-BASE trip. He's probably interested more in maximum glide than in flocking. -- Tom Aiello Tom@SnakeRiverBASE.com SnakeRiverBASE.com

I can't find a picture right now, but the one that made me laugh the most when I saw it on a car was the one where the fish was wearing a little red baseball cap, and the word said "LINUX". -- Tom Aiello Tom@SnakeRiverBASE.com SnakeRiverBASE.com

I've actually seen several BASE jumpers pulling on their back. It started out as a trick (called the Higgly Wiggly because the first guy to do it was DJ Higgins), but lately I've seen folks doing it because they want to film someone else, and they don't want to take the time to flip over before pulling. The trick is basically to pitch and then roll over as the canopy comes off your back, and it's surprising how well it works when done properly. Obviously, there's some serious potential for things to go wrong, too. -- Tom Aiello Tom@SnakeRiverBASE.com SnakeRiverBASE.com

I haven't seen it, but I've heard about it. Do you know where I could get a copy? -- Tom Aiello Tom@SnakeRiverBASE.com SnakeRiverBASE.com

Gillian, If you want this post to disappear, let me know and I'll remove it from here. -- Tom Aiello Tom@SnakeRiverBASE.com SnakeRiverBASE.com

You don't. I can think of lots and lots of cases where someone thought they were the first, and it turned out that others had been there before. Since some folks are jumping without publicizing it, you can almost never be sure. -- Tom Aiello Tom@SnakeRiverBASE.com SnakeRiverBASE.com

Beckley is much better. -- Tom Aiello Tom@SnakeRiverBASE.com SnakeRiverBASE.com

Something that every new BASE jumper has to understand, and that most have trouble grappling with: Those old guys can actually find themselves wanting to go do other things aside from BASE jump. As a new jumper, we all wanted to jump every night, and we all hounded every older jumper we could find to take us out constantly. And, we were all disappointed that they didn't seem to jump as much as we wanted to. That's normal, and natural. When you're new, you have a lot of enthusiasm. But, unlike skydiving, you can't just show up at the DZ and have loads going. So, you get frustrated. Some people start to take it personally (what's wrong with me? how come none of those guys want to jump with me?), not realizing that it's just that those older guys have wives, children, careers, and heck, beer drinking, that may come before climbing a tower at 2 in the morning. We've all been there, and we all know how it feels. Don't take it personally when someone with hundreds of jumps just doesn't feel like going out tonight. In a couple of hundred jumps, you're going to be that guy, too. -- Tom Aiello Tom@SnakeRiverBASE.com SnakeRiverBASE.com

A car is also very useful for getting to the exit points in much of southern europe. You need to be able to drive up behind them, in lots of places, and there is no public transport to many of the sites, aside from the main ones in the Swiss valley. -- Tom Aiello Tom@SnakeRiverBASE.com SnakeRiverBASE.com

The very first thing that you must deal with is the canopy heading. Before you worry about getting the twists out, climb the twists and get yourself turned away from the object. That will buy you time to deal with the twists. After opening, my priority list is: 1) Where am I going? Where is my parachute taking me? Am I going to hit something? My very first priority is to turn my parachute onto a safe heading. If there is some problem with the canopy (line over, line twist, whatever) I turn the canopy first, before moving on to deal with that. I don't even bother checking the canopy before I'm pointed in a safe direction. Who cares if it's there and square, if it's pointed squarely at a big bit of rock? 2) How am I getting there? How is my canopy flying? Do I have collapsed end cells? A line over? Line twists? Now is the time when I get the thing in order and flying. 3) How will I land? How am I going to land this parahute? Now I need to set up a soft landing. It's more important to have this landing go well than it is to put it in the intended landing area. Plenty of people have hooked themselves in trying to land in the right place. Lots of people have walked away from careful landings on bad terrain. I want to be the second, not the first. 4) Where will I land? Can I make it to the intended landing area? If not, where will I land? Obviously, the mechanics of the specific site are going to have some impact on this, but my basic thought process is the same on every jump. Bottom line: Priority #1 is avoiding object strike. Fix your parachute after you know where it's going. The best looking and flying parachute in the world isn't going to be any help if it's flying you straight into the side of the object. -- Tom Aiello Tom@SnakeRiverBASE.com SnakeRiverBASE.com