A Canopy Flight This Past Saturday

[champu 1]

I'm interested to hear people's thoughts about this video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v44V07iTzCs

[Divalent 137]

broken swivel?

[popsjumper 2]

Tell ya what...
Knowing that your eyes were seeing much more than what the video showed, and the video showed a kick-ass good job of looking around (except for behind), I would have no worries sharing the sky with you under canopy.

My reality and yours are quite different.
I think we're all Bozos on this bus.
Falcon5232, SCS8170, SCSA353, POPS9398, DS239

[davelepka 4]

First impression - EVERYONE should watch and learn from the first 8 seconds of the video. Note how the jumper LOOKS at his toggles and insures that they are stowed properly and that his hands go through the toggles and only the toggles. This is how you avoid a simple problem with unstwoing your brakes from ruining your day. LOOK, GRAB, LOOK, GRAB, UNSTOW.

Beyond that, I'm not sure what I'm supposed to see. I'm guessing it has something to do with the canopy that slides in low and to the right on final, but I'm not sure what the point is. Yes, the guy flew under you, but the rule is that the low man has the right of way. How he came to be lower than you might be a topic of discussion, but he was there and took the left side of the LZ as was his right (no pun intended).

Of course, it wasn't cool of him to do that, and he should have noticed you high and to the left, and stayed more toward the center.

The other side of the coin is that a whole bunch of you were shooting of the only speck of grass in sight. What did you expect, wide, open spaces between canopies that were all going for the same patch of green?

One idea might have been to hold in brakes and let the 'crowd' land first. If you look at how you overtake the red/orange canopy you overtake after unstowing your brakes, you can see that you easily catch and pass him. A Velo will do that, if you let it. It will also float around stay up with just about any canopy out there.

The advantage to waiting is that you're only left to deal with other jumpers who are also holding in brakes. Furthermore, when dealing with those jumpers, you have more time to deal with them as you're both under canopy for a longer period of time. If one or the other just adds or subtracts a touch of brakes, buy the time your low in the pattern, that difference has opened up a nice gap between the two of you.

It's the classic case of 'it's better to land out and walk 500ft, then to land close and be carried 50 ft to the ambulance'.

+1 to popsjumper, good traffic scan.

[champu 1]

Quote

Tell ya what...
Knowing that your eyes were seeing much more than what the video showed, and the video showed a kick-ass good job of looking around (except for behind), I would have no worries sharing the sky with you under canopy.

So the reason I posted the video...

I saw the low guy at 0:55 and thought, "he's too low to cross over the center of the DZ [per the rules] and must be on his downwind leg landing at the alternate area" and so I went into a little brakes to let his teammate go by so I could follow him down. I then proceeded to almost do a 90 deg turn right into the low guy on final.

For those of you wondering about ways to avoid canopy collisions as a lower slower canopy, you can start by following the DZ rules. This is not to say that had I hit him it would have been his fault, but had I hit him, I don't think whose fault it was would have mattered much to the two of us.

The rest of the jumps that weekend I made it a point to ditch the convenient part of the landing area (we were doing back-to-backs) and just land in the North half of the area if I opened at all North of the landing area. As Dave reiterated, better to walk a bit.

[Divalent 137]

well, then perhaps I don't understand the concept of "head on a swivel". Obviously a camera won't tell you what the eyes are doing, but I presume it was bolted to his helmet, and so will tell you what the head is doing.

these are the biggest head shifts I saw:
0:23 quick glance up to right (catching right front corner of canopy)
1:06 fraction of a second glance to the left (bringing another canopy they were following)

Otherwise, it looked to me that the shifts in position were almost always very small angle about the center. From the camera view and the nice rectangular lay out of the roads and fields, the camera has a view angle significanly of less than 90 degrees (i.e, its not wide angle). Probably not much more than 45-50 degrees, if that. I watched a few times and other than those exceptions, the field of view never shifted more than about 1/4 of a frame, and usually less. Meaning no head movement more than about 15 degrees. (Does make nice jitter-free video, though.) Certainly never even close to a 90 degree "look left" or "look right". Never enough to bring the risers into view. On his right turn onto final, the field of view appears to be locked straight ahead and follows the canopy into the turn: no sharp look into the direction of the turn.

But hey, what do I know? My ground instructor taught me that before you turned right, you look right. And I interpreted that to mean (following the example of my instructor who was demonstrating it to me) that you turned your head 90 degrees (or more) to the right. And I do recall my instructor illustrating "head on a swivel" as the head turning up and down and left and right nearly as far as it can go in all directions. (He looked kind of silly doing it, moving his head around like a bobblehead doll, but he made the point: look everywhere). But now I think I got it wrong. I think I'll speak to that dude next time I see him.

[champu 1]

You're right, the lens is not especially wide (0.5x, or on this video camera about the field of view of a 25-30mm lens on a 35mm camera) so you're not quite seeing what I'm seeing, but it's a reasonable approximation.

My overall strategy of where I'm looking takes advantage of the fact that I know where I'm planning to go my entire flight. That's step one. Step two is I'm looking where I'm going to be in about 5-10 seconds, and I scan around that area for people who might also be there in about 5-10 seconds. I then try and make small adjustments to my flight based on what it looks like they're trying to do. Sometimes you read people wrong and you re-encounter them, as in this case. I know how to abort a turn and use a braked approach to maneuver around someone and land safely though, so it was really a non-event.

I posted the video as an example of how something bad might unfold. To be clear: I don't mean for this to be a, "look at this noob-canoe blowing my swoop" rant or anything like that. I just like the idea of discussing canopy flight here rather than in that other forum.

I may post more videos of the same nature if I have any other interesting situations come up.

[Scrumpot 1]

How many jumpers were on the load (total load - not just your group) with you on this flight, Ryan? Was this the only plane flying and in the air too at the time? How many canopies in the air with you at the time? Did you account for them all?

coitus non circum - Moab Stone

[champu 1]

Quote

How many jumpers were on the load (total load - not just your group) with you on this flight, Ryan? Was this the only plane flying and in the air too at the time? How many canopies in the air with you at the time? Did you account for them all?

Ten canopies were in the air at the time including me. My group was the first of two four-way teams getting out on a pass at 10500 (which is why you don't see me looking back North very much.) There were two planes flying offset by about 10 minutes with the occasional load dropping military jumpers worked in there. So, no other aircraft were dropping at the time.

I am the video guy and pulled at break off which is why I was high and landing amongst the second group. Three of my teammates fly velocities (two fly 90s and one flys 103s) so they land well before me unless I work to catch them. The orange canopy you see me pass towards the beginning of the video is my other teammate who flies either a pulse 135 or a safire2 139, I forget which of the two is in this video, they're both orange. She expects me to pass her.

[davelepka 4]

Quote

But hey, what do I know?

Much less than you think.

You fly a high performance canopy differently then a beginner canopy. When you fly the fastest canopy in the sky, being overtaken from above is much less of a concern than paying attention to where you are actually going.

Furthermore, if you read the OPs comments, you would see that he was aware of the position of the lower canopy well before the landing. Anoter aspect of high performance canopy flight is counting canopies, and once you have accounted for them, there's no reason to look in a direction they couldn't possibly come from (above).

Something for you to think about is the concept of the whuffo, because right now you are a whuffo in terms of more advanced skydiving skills. Your non-jumping friends may watch a deplyment on video, and ask 'why do you go back up when you pull the cord'? You, being a jumper, realize that it's just the relative motion of the camera falling away from the deployment. They don't understand those details, and have a different impression of the events they see.

Similarly, you are taking your level of understadning, and applying it to a situation that is different that are familiar with. Your non-jumping friends watch TV all the time, know the difference between up and down, and see the jumper getting further from the camera, so they beleive they know what's going on. You know how to fly a certain type of parachute in certain conditions, and now you believe that you know what's going on. You and your friends are both wrong, neither of you know what you're talking about.

You were correctly trained for the type of canopy flight you are doing, but that's not the same thing we see in this video.

[Scrumpot 1]

+1 Dave! Perfect analogies. Well said. (hopefully the poster to whom you are replying also LISTENS, pauses, THINKS, and -at least tries to- understand/s).

Your post just summed up precisely why I also asked the questions just previously that I did - which the OP to the thread answered thoroughly, clearly and succinctly. Indicating (at least to me) that he also does posses that (appropriate) level of understanding - which the poster to whom you are replying, conversely, also just as clearly does not.

Kudos to the OP for posting up something that can provide such truly applicable, LEARNING dialogue! - Pictures (and even better/further) - Video, being worth 1,000 words, and all that.

coitus non circum - Moab Stone