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dmkellett

LEAD TIMES and poor customer service

By dmkellett, in Wing Suit Flying

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0584    0

0584
This is all very good information. For me it has always been as easy as clicking order and then pay and receive my goods, whether its from PF, S-fly or Squirrel. But I realize now that its not so easy.

Here is what I have gathered from reading these forums and beeing on dropzones and jumping from mountains the last couple of years.

Phoenix fly:
PROS
- Run by Robi, strong brave Socialist leader, like old dictator Tito.
- Makes sure peoples republic of Croatia is employed by keeping a line.
- Has nice employees like Mccordia that will make sure you get a suit if you bitch in a forum and, he can also cut slow-mo footage so fast that it looks fast.
- Invented the sharkfins.
- Sharkfins has socialist star on them.

CONS:
- Several people has died of old age while waiting for sharkfin-booties.
- Aerodynamic genius Robbie, can not be expected to forward business emails to the right person. After all he is busy with MAKING and DEVELOPING suits. He doesn't have time for pushing the forward button or setting up automatic forwarding on his email, dont try to suck a dick, use proper channels or wait extra 8 months.
- One part of a suit they made looks like its a complete rip-off from that other suit that the other guy made.

Squirrel.
PROS:
- Run by Matt - the guy has written a freakin book, so he is legit.
- Most WS pilots are just normal weekend warriors like me, and they generally speaking seems to me to be better than Phoenix pilots. I mean, I kind of eat them for breakfast and Im not even that good.
- The suit is delivered on time and your questions gets answered fast, even from hot-tubs.
- Suit-features has cool names like "nutsack", "glideskin", "innie-outie" etc.

CONS
- Wingsuits are not made of enviromentally friendly cotton.
- One of the 6 suits they made these last two years looks like another suit.
- I have heard that owner Matt drives his Bentley through the dirty streets of Dhaka and Calcutta kidnapping small children from local schools. After years of working them hard in a dark basement, their fingers gets way to chubby for them to work fast enough, thats when he sells their organs on the black russian market to finance prostitutes that works as email operators in a hot-tub filled with the tears of their factory children. Then he photoshops pictures to make it look like it is from some kind of clean modern looking factory with adult happy workers that are even allowed to listen to music in Vietnam. What a character.

Conclusion.
I guess it comes down to personal choice. Is Socialist star on your sharkfin cool, or is "glide-skin" or "nutsac" something that is of higher entertainment value. For me it was the fun names from Squirrel that settled the brand war. I think the glide-skin simply has the better penetration properties.

As the next year approaches, I am certainly looking forward to making more insane accusations against everyone in the name of winning the awesome brandwars, I think that if Phoenix fly cant even answer simple emails, they are bound to loose...anyone disagree?

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0584    0

0584
piisfish

***Ha, I made post #100 in that thread... sweeeet.

no you didn't :D

Ah snap. It was post #101, damn why must basic math be so hard?

Anyway I appreciate that you guys find my opinions of great value, I guess I did forget to evaluate Tonysuit yesterday. Thanks for the reminder.

Evaluating Tonysuit is pretty hard cause I only tried on a t-bird or s-bird or some kind of bird like five jumps 4 or 5 years ago, But, luckily I have read the forums so I am more than enough qualified to give my expert opinions anyway.

Tonysuit

PROS:
- Suits are so easy to fly that you just need 1,5k dozen cardboard-boxes and a fraction of mccordias skydiving experience to land them safely.
- I guess Julian flew Sugargliders in the early 2000s, but seems to me that TonySuits are innovators of modern big-wingsuits. (anyone disagree?)
- Name wasn't that cool until one day I was hitchhiking back to my car in the mountains. Some old guy that called himself Tony picked me up and told me he made wingsuits for a living. Then I was like "ahhhh, now I get the name, its named after a real person".
- Tony looks non athletic and geriatric, yet he seems to kick ass at competitions. If some guy that looks like grandpa can fly faster than Robi and mccordia, then surely his suit must be awesome.

CONS:
- I was confused already when the letters that came early in the alphabet meant its a suit for chickens that have less chesthair, and the last letters in the alphabet like "X" were for the bros with longest hanging pair of nuts on the DZ. But now its a whole new level of clusterfu€k of names with references to starwars, insects and tribes and what not.
- Tony sends prototypes of suits to his basejumping buddies, then after about 10 basejumps he makes a production model that makes skydive-container fire the reserve at random times while jumping.
- No suits are the same, this is actually cool because jumping a prototype makes you special and badass, but not so cool if you are basejumping and you needed the version with the armwing-inlet that actually inflates the left and right side at the same time, not when they reach x and y mph.

CONCLUSION:
Tony suits are so 2010, if you want a wingsuit that is a prototype, you can just write prototype on a piece of tape like I did on my Squirrel suit (picture). You're not trying to impress people that are better than you anyway. You just wanna impress the AFF level 8 students. Impressing this group is easy and will get you more than enough free beer. I guess Tony is probably finished with prototyping on most of the suits by now, so its most likely just a normal safe suit at this point.

Whether or not the suit is desirable all boils down to how cool their testpilots are and how they name their wingsuits.
Jeff died and all the last Starwars trailer had was a bunch of muppets and a bluescreen. So I guess its simply not as cool as it was a quarter of a decade ago in a continent far far away.

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alygator    2

alygator
It s a new guy who is in charge now since Sfly became Sfly Equipement. Zun is still there but it s more Antoine who develop the new one. LJA stopped to jump after a speed flying or riding accident but some told me he jump again. I can t confirm that myself.
Core was not a great wingsuit, only Fred and Vince was able to flew it. I m not a big fan of the old line but the new big one seems to fly great, at least like an Aura with better start from what i heard/saw.
It was just to put another brand in the "battle", i m a PF "fan boy" anyway :)

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jakee    1,489

jakee
hjumper33

Good to hear hes doing well. I think Loic gets forgotten too often for the immense contribution hes made to wingsuit flying.



Yeah, the s-fly was the best suit around in its time (and was blatantly copied for other brands' Acro suits:P) and Loic's early proximity flying was on another planet to what anyone else was doing until years later.

I was in Gap a year or so after his accident and he was flying the Porter there at that point and said he wouldn't be jumping again. That was a long time ago though!
Do you want to have an ideagasm?

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uberchris    0

uberchris
The111

Usually people hate the brandwar posts. But apparently if you make your post in enough of a joking tone, you can flame on and shit on whoever you want, up to and including the dead.



this is correct. i recently held a seance in the rigging loft basement of the house i live in.

i was lucky enough to make contact with patrick de gayardon. we spoke about wingsuit designs, and i currently have blueprints of what i will build into the HOTTEST wingsuit ever made on this planet. the secret? its made of different types of fabrics, including rawhydes from several endangered species of animals from different continents around the world, making it illegal in many countries. all manufacturers will bow before me.
gravity brings me down.........

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airbornesid    0

airbornesid
Adding fuel to the convo for giggles just recieved my v-race 2weeks earlier than expected and the only complaint is that I have to wait until tomorrow to jump it :-)

On the whole s-fly thing , don't understand why you need to be french to fly it , demoed a hawk this summer and it's a awesome suit very responsive also got to see the prototype of the new suit a few times and it's def one to consider the start is amazing . ! Maybe s-fly need to improve their marketing though to world wide audience :-)

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vitriol    0

vitriol
Ordered a Squirrel Hatch for a friend Nov 10th, received it Dec 9th.

It's the second suit I order from them, and again I'm very impressed by the professionalism of the company.

The suit is really nice and communications could not be better.

The suit came in a nice bag with shoulder strap, and boxed in a cardboard box. There even was a strip of cardboard under the box flaps so you or the customs don't cut into the suit when opening the box.

I know it's just details, but it shows how much effort they make to have happy customers.

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