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Sounds right to me, perhaps not even multiple strokes if near the ground, but just riding it out with brakes and a good PLF. Of course prevention is the best bet.

Yes! Good addition to the list of characteristics.

Perhaps, but I am not familiar with all 9 cell ZP canopies. This may sound confusing to those who have started skydiving since 9 cell ZP canopies became common, because even higher performance canopies have been developed since, but yes, the original Sabre is high performance. The Sabre was one of the first canopy designs to be trimmed flatter than the previous generation of canopies in order to make its performance higher, (and the zero porosity fabric made it stay that way for most of its life.) Much of a canopy's suceptability to collapse due to turbulence has to do with how pressurized the cells are, so wingloading, trim angle, (and whether the canopy has airlocks) are some major factors in this. Perhaps a better way of making this warning would be to say that nearly everyone with low wing loading is at danger now that most canopies are trimmed flatter (than the previous generation of canopies) now. To diverge from the topic a bit, some of the reason that people are still hurting themselves under canopy is that they may not consider an older design like the Sabre to be "high performance" and think they are OK with one, but the Sabre is high enough performance to bite you if you are not careful. "High performance" is on a sliding scale now, with the rapid advances in canopy design in the last decade. Back to the original topic: Be careful and get educated.

A while back in this thread: http://www.dropzone.com/cgi-bin/forum/gforum.cgi?post=1073912 I spoke of lightly loaded high performance canopies having stability issues. Yesterday I saw someone flying her (original) Sabre loaded at maybe 0.8 and at about 300 feet her end cell rolled under and snapped back out in about a 1 second period. Since there were no "obstacles" to create turbulence at 300 feet my guess is that the heat rising from the pavement (which was slightly upwind of the column of air in which she was flying) caused this turbulence. (It was very warm in the midwest this weekend.) So again, please use caution with lightly loaded high performance canopies, and brief the less experienced jumpers using this gear on the possibilities of this happening. (And please believe that this can happen on many models of high performance canopies.) About all else, teach them to not be landing downwind of obstacles, where we are sure there is turbulence. (We should be teaching them this anyway, but I still see experienced jumpers landing where they should not be.)

Something else that people may not know is that the "Manta", (which used to be only a 288 sqare foot low porosity canopy) is now available in many sizes and also available as low porosity, fully zero porosity, or hybrid low porosity/zero porosity. All types have the same "traditional" type of flare, and (many) cannot be stalled. The Navigator is an interesting canopy in that it is partially elliptical, which allows the student to get a feeling for what that type of design flys like, but its "2 stage flare" and planing out can cause trouble with students (usually with only a few jumps) who get excited and jam the toggles down suddenly. (No matter how well you train some student will do that eventually.) What would be ideal is have both designs, but most drop zones cannot afford to do that. Having students jump low porosity canopies, (even some with a number of jumps) is not a bad thing. It teaches them to land a reserve, which many experienced skydivers are now terrified of doing. (There are those who think that it is always best to have the "latest design", which PD often does, but there are suitable canopies other than than PD.)

To me, hearing those things is really sad. Not wanting to learn or participate is sad. It indicates that Tandem jumps are not registering in their minds as a skydive, but only as a carnival ride. Now the important question is, why? Do you think most of these people know Tandem skydiving as carnival rides from word-of-mouth or from seeing videos of students not participating? Does the drop zone care? Where do you instruct?

Of course there isn't really anything wrong with it, but what has happened over time is that now Tandem jumps are known to be carnival rides to many people, because the people they know that have done a Tandem jump of that kind tell them about it. Just think how nice it would be for all our our Tandem students to excitedly greet us and tell us how they can't wait for us to teach them all that cool stuff their friend told them that they did on their jump, like reading the altimeter, doing turns by themself, pulling the ripcord and steering the parachute. If we all did that we might get the momentum going the other way!

I'm surprised that someone thinks that. Both Bill Booth and Ted Strong had training in mind very early in their development of Tandem jumping. It was the carnival ride stuff that came later. PS Your earlier post about "pressure" on the student to pull is interesting too. A well trained Tandem student should not feel any pressure at all, but should consider it a challenge. After all, their instructor is there to pull if they do not, so that should make them quite comfortable, knowing that they can try something without the risk of "failure" actually causing any danger. I have heard this arguement from many people, that Tandem students don't want to do anything on their jump, but if they are trained as a skydiving student they will usually act like one, and enjoy it. I think too many instructors just give up and take the easy way out. I wish everyone that is participating in this thread will consider training their Tandem students as much as they possibly can, because the apathy very easily spreads.

I don't know if they have contacted Ronnie. If you feel like you need to edit, then yes, but I mentioned their name to help people recognize who I was talking about. If someone contacts them posing as an expert then that would be unfortunate. (Considering that the only thing they would stand to gain from it would be having their name mentioned somewhere it would seem to be a lot of trouble for the worth too.) In posting that I'm trying to appeal to everyone's sense of pride in our sport. We generally try to be positive, while the media often (usually?) focuses on the negative.

I received the following (excerpted) email, and I suppose they found me from the PCPRG web site and considered me an "expert", but I discouraged them from re-hashing yet another old skydiving video. This happened 15 years ago. I instead told them that "heros" are to be found everywhere, and pointed them to Make-A-Wish foundation (who regularly arranges for Tandem jumps for kids with terminal illness), and to Jump for the Cause. I urge you to do likewise if you are contacted. Let's try to keep the media focused on positive things about skydiving. "I am writing from Darlow Smithson Productions, a TV production company based in London, UK. We are making a drama documentary about people that do heroic things in extraordinary circumstances. This series will be broadcast on the Discovery Channel in 2007. We are hoping to speak with as many people as possible in this research stage of the programme with a view to finding an expert to contribute to an episode of the series. We will be taking the story below ... In 1991, Ronnie O'Brien saved tandem skydivers Mike Smith and Richard Maynard from certain death in Peterborough, UK. Mike Smith passes out mid-air after his 'drogue' chute bridle got caught around his throat on release. [Ronnie] decided there was not enough time to untangle the chute and so crawls over the tandem jumpers to release the reserve shoot. This was opened 2,000 feet lower than tandem jumpers normally would. He opens his own parachute at 1,400 ft. Once the reserve chute is deployed the stress is taken off the drogue thus allowing Mike to breath again and he regains consciousness and is able to safely land himself and Richard in a field Ronnie also lands safely. This incident was filmed by Ronnie throughout the jump." (Particularly interesting was the request to discuss "alternate scenarios". If Ronnie got open at 1400 feet I don't think there was any alternative!)

Presentation Title: "Parachute Research From Computer Simulation to Uses in the Field" 1. Introducing the Truncated Cone Decelerator (TCD) parachute 2. Introducing OSCALC, a simple but effective opening shock calculation program. 3. Using the Parachute Inflation Modeling Suite (PIMS) to model the opening shock of hard opening canopies modified with large sliders. 4. Improvements to the Parachute Inflation Modeling Suite (PIMS) to include modeling ram-air parachutes with sliders during both the slider-up and slider-down phases. The presentation will include live demonstrations of both computer programs running on a laptop computer.

I think it's a great idea, but skydiving is way too politically correct for that. People would be whining about how it is not respectful to the deceased. If I had the resources I would love to make a radio controlled life-sized dummy with a high performance canopy to hook-in right in front of everyone.

Well, you know what they say about statistics.... I wonder how they collected those. I actually wonder how anyone does. An interesting point is that once a person is through with their static line jumps or harness hold jumps, they are simply a student, and no longer a static line or AFF student, although that is how they are often thought of. Thanks for the answer.

Safer?!!! Please quote the source of statistics from which you formed this opinion.

Yes, that would be a good question for some, but when "slow, medium, or fast" is useful is when someone, fopr example: 1. small or thin comes along and they say that their friend think they fast fairly fast, considering 2. someone short and round comes along and says that they can stay up with their thinner friends with the jumpsuit they are using This is when I would much rather hear that (opinion from their friends) than I would some number that they probably don't understand. Basically, it is an example of trusting the advance computational skills of an experienced skydiver's brain, (including the intuition part), rather than using the uninterpreted number from an unintelligent device. (Hope that didn't sound too far out there.)

Yes, yes, yes! I found another person who understands! That is exactly what I think when they quote me a specific number. (Actually, I don't smile. I roll my eyes.) I would just rather hear them say "slow, medium or fast".

I for one am delighted that you know the difference and care. Why? Well, www.pcprg.com/baro.htm, that's why. Most people are simply clueless, and these devices are little more than a toy without this knowledge, (and a lot more.) Most people I ask don't even know how theirs is set up. The best way to use them is to download the jump and analyze it.

Payback? No way man, I'm glad you took what I wrote and changed it for that purpose, which is, educating people about what not to do. It's a nice use of words. (Now if I can just figure out what ITW and IBA are.)

I don't know. How ignorant do you have to be to critcize someone's appearance? And how much time do you need to have to bother doing so on a forum? Please post your picture. I'm sure some of us will have some choice comments.

Steve, where on earth did the name "pull through chord" come from? I can understand using "chord" for "cord" because "chord" describes a canopy dimension, but "pull through" is interesting indeed. Of course in a way we actually _do_ pull it through the grommets as well as pulling "up". Now to answer your question, I make a little pouch that goes on the left "lateral" (webbing) of my rig. Attached is a drawing and picture of how to make it. The colors may seem strange because I used whatever color Velcro and webbing I had for this picture.

I left it blank and it assumed zero. No need to change it for me, but fixing the script might be a good idea, because most people won't know what to think of the error. I'm familiar with server errors because I have written many of them. :)

server error creating classified ad I tried to put a question mark in the entry for number of jumps on an AAD and it gave me a sever error

That's exactly how it is supposed to work. Unfortunately there are some canopy designs that open in a less than ideal way, so people start doing other things (and combinations of things!) as a "fix". All the techniques you hear about get rather convoluted after a while.

I'm on Skydive Chicago's email list to get notices of their updates, and when I read that one, I emailed Rook and told him how good of an idea that was, telling it like it is. Sometimes skydivers need to be told to quit fucking around taking chances for little reward, and just be as safe as they can be.

Well, at least it is one of the later licenses.... I guess because many people are completely unwilling to admit that they will ever need one, even to the point of not doing one even when a "crash" is eminent. I see a lot of absolute denial of a lot of things by skydivers.