JackC1

Medical diagnoses should probably be performed by a doctor not some adrenalin junkies on the interwebz who stand around all day calling each other "dude". But seriously dude, it's probably just your harness not fitting right. I doubt it's like deep vein thrombosis or anything serious man.

It's ironic that people who jump out of planes and off stuff, relying on nylon and string to swoop in as fast as they possibly can or maybe fly a squirrel suit strait jacket, can complain about someone choosing a less safe mode of flight.

Skydiving isn't cheap, but it's not excruciatingly expensive either. Rough prices: BPA membership £120 per year Jump tickets £20 Kit hire £10-15 A complete rig £800 for a cheap SH kit £5500+ for brand new top of the range gear Reserve repack (done every 6 months whether you've used it or not) £35 Altimeter £100 Jumpsuit £250 Helmet £100 Then there's goggles, gloves, log books, beer fines etc which add a little. There are no rules per se on currency in the UK for licensed skydivers, but you need to satisfy your CCI that you are safe and jumping within your skill level. If you leave it too long in between jumps, you may have to do some retraining (often free) or check out dives at your CCIs discretion. I reckon about 10 jumps a month will keep you current and give you room to progress. I wouldn't do much less than that, at least in your first year if you can help it but that's just my opinion. I think it's important to get some solid skills built quickly just from a safety point of view. There are people who want to get formation training quickly (many people do) but some are happy to do solo lobs for a couple of hundred jumps before they think about FS training. By the time you've got 30-50 jumps, you should probably consider it. Leaving it too long can reinforce bad habits which get harder to break. In the UK, you need to be formally trained and qualify to get an FS1 endorsement before you can jump with anyone other than coaches and instructors. There is usually no coaching fee for FS training but you will probably have to pay for your coaches jump ticket as well as your own. You'll need to have done some FS work before you can progress onto free flying.

I know that there is at least one blind skydiver out there but usually, if someone is looking directly at you then there is a fair chance they've seen you.

You're missing my point. A leg kick on it's own doesn't mean shit in terms of communication unless you have something else to back it up with. Without that backup you have to assume he hasn't seen you so you get out of Dodge pronto. Same with a wave off. It means get out of my airspace, camera malfunction or not. The best option is to get clear which I reckon you should be doing kicks or no. If you have some agreed method that makes leg kicks means something to both of you and you are sure about it, then kick away. But don't just assume some other random guy knows what you're up to, he may not.

Hopefully you wouldn't. But even with the best peripheral vision in the world, you can only cover about 180 degrees horizontally and about 90 degrees vertically. That leaves a whole lot of sky that is not in your field of vision and that's where danger lurks. As soon as kicking boy is out of your field of vision, you are flying on trust that his kick is what you think it is and that he won't turn into you before you look back. Rather than rely on a kick to signal he's seen me and wont do anything stupid, I'd turn to a safer direction and put some distance between us. Even if it means a walk back to the DZ. In fact my no 1 priority after checking that my canopy is OK is to point myself into clear airspace and locate everyone else on the lift. That's before I collapse my slider, pop my brakes and do all the other comfort stuff. Then I plan where I'm going to fit into the landing order and fly accordingly. Assessing and reassessing the situation as it changes.

Dozens of canopies all opening in a small space and kicking their legs. Who's talking to who? It mainly happens with canopies closer to each other, rather than 1000 feet from each other, usually when tracking neighbours have off-heading openings that points roughly at each other, or they are trying to merge into a pattern and want to essentially notify them of an intent to merge. i.e. situations of actual threat. Or when the a small fragment of airspace is more congested than expected. Sometimes it avoids the needs for a drastic evasive response, if you know they aren't planning to turn into you. If they respond immeidately with a kick, while turning their head at you, you know they aren't planning to turn into you. It's sometimes safer to fly side by side than to turn left/right into somebody else's airspace, if that canopy has now acknowledged your prescence. Sometimes it is sort of like giving permission to fly 100-foot-separation CRW, or whatever -- if they don't see you, then you have to worry they may turn into you. There are certain situations where you are stuck with canopies in front, behind, and to left, right. You have to decide between flying nearer a canopy that sees you, or a canopy that does not see you. If someone gives you an immediate leg kick while staring at you and the acknowledgement was less than 1 second, it's pretty confirmed that the leg kick is addressed at you -- you ARE close enough to see their facial expression or hear them. The useful of legkicks are actually more apparent at bigways, because it's pretty much regular behaviour at the Perris 100-ways, large State Records, and World Records. Also, some skydivers (like me) are deaf, and any yelling is ALSO accompanied by a leg kick -- it's good supplemental visual information. BUT SHOULD NOT be depended on. It's just good courtesy. Go to several 100-ways, become assigned to a middle breakoff, rather than an outer whacker, then you'll once-in-a-while be in "boxed-in" situations that make you understand that leg kicks are useful, after all. You obviously rather follow side by side with a canopy that sees you, rather than turn closer to adjacent canopies that don't see you (because they might turn unexpectedly into you). In many jumps you want to AVOID being boxed in, and being good at it, you can avoid it more than 90% of the time, but there's often that "one jump" at a major event, where the leg kick may occasionally make or break a specific fly-direction decision. Another way to picture a scenario. 150 or 200-way jump. Your neighbour tracks a bit too far. Another neighbour opens a bit closer, and because you had to track between two neighbours that didn't fan out enough. Now you're surrounded by 3 canopies between 100-to-200 feet away, flying in various directions, within less than 100 feet of vertical altitude of you. You immediately see one of them that is doing leg kicks and staring directly at you (close enough to see eyeballs), she then immediately turns towards clear airspace. You decide to turn to follow her, knowing two things (1) You immediately noticed good safe airspace in front of her, and (2) she's immediately no longer a threat because she's flying directly away from you, and (3) The simultaneous instant look/kick/"yo!" confirmed your prescence, she won't move unexpectedly closer to you. .... Finally now you're safe from the other two canopies that don't see you until 3-4 seconds later (during which time they MIGHT unexpectedly turn towards you) Time elapsed: typically 2 seconds, on average. (during which time, you're actively flying to avoid everybody on average, hoping nobody turns into you, but preferring to fly past people that notice you, rather than fly past people that don't notice you) There's a lot of sorta-fuzzy scenarios, but you get the gist. The leg kick is good courtesy at big ways. Good answer.

Only if you think it means he sees you.

Dozens of canopies all opening in a small space and kicking their legs. Who's talking to who and which one just has line twists?

Turn signals are a standard way of letting other drivers know your intentions. There are even rules regarding them which every driver should know and abide by. Leg kicking is an ad hoc, non-standard, made up thing that means nothing to most skydivers. Suppose you see someone above and in front of you and they're kicking so you kick back. You think it means he's seen you but in reality he's just waking up his legs so he can run out the swoop he's just about to turn 450 degree into. Next thing you know, he's ripped right in front of you and you were paying attention elsewhere because you thought he knew where you were. If you want to be seen, buy a neon orange canopy. If you think kicking is some form of universal skydiver communication system that everyone will recognise, think again.

I dunno, false information could be bad. Not everyone knows that kicking means anything. People kick for all sorts of reasons. Misinterpreting someone's kick could potentially put you in trouble.

And what would you do if you saw someone kicking and they were only trying to get the blood back in their legs before they hooked a 450?

If someone is close enough to me to be a worry, I'll be able to see where they're looking. If it isn't directly at me, waving isn't going to help much. If it is, then they've already seen me. I think my time is better spent turning to fly in a safer direction than waving back at them. Besides people kick for all sorts of reasons, it doesn't mean a thing.

Looks like fun. Although I thought all Blaniks were grounded after a wing fell off one back in 2010. Guess I'm wrong.

Tell your girlfriend that if she doesn't let you skydive, you'll still love her. And you'll miss her very much.

http://www.amazon.com/Fog-City-Hyper-Optiks-Inserts/dp/B001AWLWMM/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1315569796&sr=8-1

Pulsatile tinnitus. Crap, another thing I have as well as plain old ringing-in-the-ears tinnitus. Gee thanks. Ignorance is bliss and all that. Skydiving isn't so bad really. My tinnitus came mostly from standing in front of a cranked 100W Marshall stack three nights a week. Skydiving hasn't made it any worse I don't think. Still, ear plugs on the ride up are a good idea. I'd rather be able to hear someone yelling at me under canopy so I take them out for jumping. But if you do use ear plugs in free fall, use porous ones. If they seal too well, you can get perforated eardrums from the pressure change.

Exit order might play a part here too. Let's take the convention that flat groups go first, with free fliers out last. There's a good reason for that as we all know but... Slow fallers exit first and to an extent will get caught up by fast fallers in free fall, then they all dump at 3k and fly towards a small landing area in one big herd crashing into each other. Do it the other way round and free fliers have a bit longer to get into the pattern and land before the flat fliers catch them up. I've been to DZs that do it this way and seen the first group landed before the last group have even opened. If you organise your exit timing properly, you can still have good separation even with a bass ackwards exit order. The downside is it doesn't have the built in separation safety aspect of slow fallers out first so it requires discipline. But then herding towards a small PLA doesn't have built in safety either. Might be worth a thought, might not. Just sayin'.

I know some camera jumpers who go for a soft handle because they spend most of their jumping lives climbing around aircraft doorways out on to the camera step. While they take care not to snag their handle on anything, the risk with a D handle is higher. If they had the reserve deploy and hook over the tail of the plane, they, the plane and potentially everyone in it could be royally fucked. You pays your money and you makes your choice.

Google tends to show you what it thinks you'd like. 3 of the top 4 results for my dropzone search are military surplus dealers, and as it happens I searched for military surplus dealers just the other day. Have you been looking up skydiving fatalities recently? Or maybe just skydiving?

I guess it could be possible. I was thinking that flipping the bag through the lines to get a full inversion would mean the bridle and pilot chute had to go through there as well. That seemed unlikely but I'll admit I know nothing about stowless bags or wingsuit deployments.

This isn't just a line over though is it? There is also an inversion by the looks of things. I'm not sure how that could happen on deployment, even if the bag was rotated in the container snagging up a line or two.

I doubt it. All you've done is tell them there is a real person on the end of the email address. They like knowing that.

is very different from hey, he got like 24 seconds canopy time, that wasn't close This is closer. http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=9194881818135049107#

I've got a Sabre2 190 and a PDR176 in a V350 and it goes in fine. Looking at your pics, I think maybe you need to try and get the canopy right down into the bottom corners of the bag before you put the locking stows in. I can get my D-bag completely closed and I never have gaps in the closing flaps like this.