howardwhite

Thanks. (But by making a public post, you're opening yourself up to getting lots of other requests, no? I'll let you know if I am, in fact, the hero. HW

Yup. I think so. Top Secret pic is from an Altitude Shop ad. This rig would be very uncool these days (aside from its size.) Wrinkles and bumps all over the place, elements that don't quite seem to fit together. But I guess it was popular, at least on the left coast; I don't remember seeing them often in the northeast. HW

Tall, lanky, longish dark hair, maybe. Guitar, no. Probably Terry-O, who is responsible for several lyrics in the olde original Parachute Songbook that Dan Poynter published in, I guess, the late sixties. But I still want it

Ed O'Brien was a frequent visitor to the Pepperell, MA, DZ before his death a few years ago. Fran Strimenos, the DZO, was one of his students in the VI before moving to New England. Pepperell was doing some housekeeping the other day, and one of Ed's really old rigs, a red piggyback which I couldn't identify, was on the floor. It had a PC in it. As to the 337, I talked to a friend/Otter pilot last week. He recalled a jumper/pilot in the Albany, NY area years ago who owned a 337 and used it for demo jumps. He shut down the rear engine on jump run (and often left it off on his return to the airport.) HW

If that's the Jeep show, I want a copy. (I think it was "American Family.) (I'm the instructor in the show). HW

Jacques was in Europe in the summer of 1955 for an International Parachuting Commission meeting and spent some time at a French DZ learning style and freefall stuff from French champion types. As to the sleeve, he and Lew Sanborn got a patent in 1961 (two files attached). It wasn't that people hadn't been using sleeves earlier but -- in the patent-speak of the patent, "The most important disadvantage of the prior art sleeve was its separability from the parachute" -- in other words, it wasn't attached and you had to go chasing it after every jump. I've got a few other Istel patents which are also fun to read if you filter out the patent-speak. They need to be chopped up to make them small enough to post (as I did with this one.) I'll get around to it. HW HW

My first reserve ride, in 1967, was on a tri-con. If memory serves, I stood it up in front of a "target tour" group of whuffos on their way to the Bowl at Orange to watch skydivers land close up and personal. HW

This article is from Ripcord, the 82nd Airborne newsletter, from circa 1958, in which Jacques Istel, D-2, suggests skydivers need to learn "pointing." HW

http://www.yosemite.org/newsroom/clips1999/october/102399a.htm Google Jan Davis and El Capitan for lots more. HW

Pop The web site for the Goleta Air Museum (source for the ground picture) says: "Conroy also created a single engine turboprop conversion of Cessna 337 Super Skymaster, N1414G called the Stolifter. The rear engine was deleted and the forward engine was replaced with a 575-shaft horsepower Garrett AiResearch TPE 331-25A turboprop. The fuselage was extended to nearly double the volume available for cargo. The short take-off characteristics of the Stolifter were improved by the incorporation of a Robertson Aircraft Corporation high-lift system. This picture was taken on June 12, 1974." By the way, the engine is the same one used on CASA 212s. HW

Those not familiar with the Cessna 337 ("Mixmaster," "Skysmasher"...) may not appreciate what a radical conversion this was. The 337 is normally a twin (see pic) with front and rear piston engines; the "centerline thrust" design is intended to deal with the control issues that result from an engine failure on a normal twin. So a 337 is not normally a jump plane (anyone ever jump one, presumably with the rear engine shut down?) In this conversion, the front engine was replaced by a Garrett turboprop and the rear engine by a cargo pod. Wonder how much that cost and who thought it was a good idea. Oh, by the way, the picture was published in Parachutist in June, 1969. The plane was flying over Santa Barbara, CA. The jumper about to exit is Bob Hughes and the photographer in freefall is Bob Sinclair. HW

I'm impressed.

This one may be one of a kind. The photographer, looking up, is someone most people here will know at least by name. Some of you may know the jumper in the "door." The plane is currently registered to an owner in the northwest. Wonder if he lets jumpers use it. HW

Bingo!!

Maybe this will help. N-number cleverly disguised to foil those who would cheat by looking it up. HW

Hybrid quiz. Name the canopies and when, where, who. Or just marvel. HW

This is a truly obscure airplane, but if you know where the picture came from, you'll be able to identify not only it but the people in the picture. (I have better pictures of the plane,....for later.) HW

O.K., pretty easy plane ID. But I don't think it's a common skydiving plane. Registration indicates the owner is in Boston, but I don't recall its use anywhere in New England. So,....where and when? And, while you're at it, identify the rig. HW

I think you're right; I went by the label on the pic; not the first time lately I've been burned with bad info. I've jumped out of both normally-aspirated and turbo Porters. Sheepishly yours, HW

Helio picture is (I think) a Courier. (The picture is partially faked; the original has a terrible-looking sky so I cloned in a pretty one.) Stalliion picture is definitely a Stallion; it says so on the cowl. HW

According to contemporary newspaper articles, the two who survived (pulled out of the lake) were Robert Coy of Springfield, OH and Bernard Johnson of West Ridgefield, OH. Two others, Larry Hartman of Fairview Park and Air Force Capt. Alan Homestead of Oberlin, had oxygen, jumped on a separate pass from 20 grand, and landed at Ortner Field, the intended DZ for all. (I have a lot of .pdf files of newspaper archives of the event, and David Layne kindly sent me some entire original newspaper pages which I've scanned and saved.) HW

Exactly. Martin Caidin was a prolific author of lots of books and articles, many on aviation, and one, "The Silken Angels," about parachuting. He died in 1997 in Tallahassee, FL, and "Iron Annie" was later acquired by LH (one of many pictures of it is attached.) The Parachutist story says jumpers (Andy Keech and Don Yahrling among them) showed him the earlier pictures of Beech hang loads and talked about beating the record. Here's a quote from an article by Milt Salamon, a Florida newspaper columnist: ------- The wingwalk, on Iron Annie, a 50-year-old tri-motor Junkers Ju-52, set a world record on Nov. 14, 1981. Nineteen skydivers kneeled, crouched or stood on the wing of the German bomber-type craft that Martin Caidin owned at the time."All nineteen were outside of the airplane for at least a minute, held on by a rope," he told us. Rope? "We tied it around the wing and the fuselage. The jumpers used it to pull themselves out of the airplane against high winds, to assume correct positions on the wing, and to keep from being blown off. The insanity - Martin calls it "A challenge...engineering and pilot-wise and personal" - began almost a year earlier "When we were beating up the countryside with a bunch of war birds and we put in at Palatka and did some jumping there," he later told an interviewer. "The talk got around to wing walking." An idea was born. "We approached the record slowly and carefully," Martin insisted. For almost four months, "We hunted all over for special rope and we found Pigeon Mountain Industries in Georgia with a rope that had only 2 percent stretch and an 11,000-pound test strength. On our early tests with regular nylon rope it stretched by 40 percent and we had guys hanging on for dear life all over the wing." That Nov. 14, "We flew over Palatka, our designated drop zone. I started the final run at 9,000 feet. Soon, half a dozen guys went onto the wing to block the wind for others, he said."My first real big surprise was a sudden severe yaw of the nose to the left. I kicked right rudder hard as I could and she came around. Our speed went to 140 mph indicated and she put her nose down as that gang kept pouring out on the wing - and, just like that, she went through 2,000-, 3,000-, then 4,000-feet-a-minute rate of descent. And then the shaking went wild. . . The left wing was twisting, you could see it flexing like mad, and the right wing was drumming like a washboard, and then we got this terrific KABOOM! KABOOM! sound . . .she was trying to roll over on her back. "There we were, coming out of the sky at nearly 200 mph and over 4,000 feet a minute. I didn't think the airplane was going to stay together . . . My head was slamming into the top of the cockpit. I almost hit the smoke switches as the signal to bail out, and I was yelling for them to get the hell off my airplane. "I glanced at the left wing and it was twisting and rippling and then I heard crew chief Bill Tharp yelling on the radio, `They're going!' He meant the jumpers and not the wing, and as fast as they were spilling off that wing, things were smoothing out and suddenly we were back in the real world with a docile airplane, coming downstairs like a bat out of hell, but smooth. "And we'd done it!" ------- HW

This one was made in 1935 HW

Probably pretty easy, but it's a nice picture (identifying text crudely Photoshopped away.) Where, when, whose plane, how many on the wing, etc. The wording on the cowl says "Protected by German Shepherd" and the lettering over the door is "Es bleibet trotzdem," which translates roughly to "it will endure, anyway" or some such. HW

It wasn't me. I swear it wasn't me. I don't remember a thing. HW