Sport skydiving on history channel 9/19/08

[jclalor 12]

I just saw that a whole hour will be devoted to sport skydiving on the History channel Friday at 8 PM.

[RB_Hammer 0]

This is a show call "The Works". I already have it setup on DVR...

"I'm not lost. I don't know where I'm going, but there's no sense in being late."
Mathew Quigley

[TKE_440 0]

Thanks for the info, Went to set up the DVR before I even finished reading!

[mdrejhon 8]

Not found on my TiVo -- That show doesn't appear to be available in Canada.

[edjackson 0]

I think they were filming the PD factory team at ZHills this summer.

[yeyo 1]

more info...

http://www.nashobapublishing.com/ci_10445906

http://www.dropzone.com/cgi-bin/forum/gforum.cgi?post=3330081;sb=post_latest_reply;so=ASC;forum_view=forum_view_collapsed;;page=unread#unread

HISPA #93
DS #419.5

[kawisixer01 0]

Will be coming on at 7pm here in WI. It's a good show from all the episodes I've seen.

[JohnRich 4]

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Friday at 8 PM.

8 pm Eastern.

7 pm Central.

Don't know about you westerners.

[kkeenan 14]

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That show doesn't appear to be available in Canada.

Those wood-burning TVs are somewhat limited...

_____________________________________
Dude, you are so awesome...
Can I be on your ash jump ?

[ozzy13 0]

I thought they did it petty well

Never give the gates up and always trust your rears!

[keithbar 1]

I started to watch it and right off the bat. they had a little cartoon skydiver that had the reserve on the bottom of the rig..all right. who's the technical advisor? i want answers damnit. grin

i have on occasion been accused of pulling low . My response. Naw I wasn't low I'm just such a big guy I look closer than I really am .

[JohnRich 4]

Nice show for whuffos. It should bring more 1st jumpers to the drop zones.

But after seeing three technical errors in about the first 10 minutes, that was a bad omen, so I decided to start a list. This is what I caught, in order of appearance:

1) They talked about how if something goes wrong with the main chute, a jumper still has a reserve. The graphic showed the reserve chute located on the bottom of the container instead of the top.

2) In talking about B.A.S.E. jumping, they said that the El Cap cliff in Yosemite was 300 feet high, instead of 3,000 feet.

3) In the play-by-play anatomy of a skydive, they said that jumpers open their chutes at 5,000 feet. Well, tandems and students do that. But hardly anyone else does.

4) They went sort of off-topic to show chutes being used in drag-racing to slow high speed cars. They said that the drag chutes were 64 sq. ft. in size, "about half the size of a skydiving chute". The large majority of us jump chutes bigger than 128 sq. ft. in size.

5) When describing static line jumping, he reached up and grabbed the steel cable running down the roof of a Skyvan, and said; "This is the static line". No, it's not. That's just the cable to which you hook the static line. The real static line actually runs from the cable down to the chute.

6) In describing military HAHO jumping, high altitude high opening, they showed video of a large string of Army static line jumpers on round chutes, and said that HAHO jumpers can glide 30 miles. There's no way that round chutes will glide that far. Actual HAHO, I believe, is done with ram-air chutes, from high altitude, in small groups. And he never mentioned HALO jumping.

7) While describing parachute construction at the PD factory with John LeBlanc, they said that parachutes cost between $5,000 and $10,000 each. Nope. While some specialized chutes may run that high, most sport parachutes do not. That probably just scared away a whole bunch of students by making them believe that they can't afford the sport.

8) The lines were described as being made from spectra, which indeed some are. There was no mention of other materials often used in lines.

9) They said that canopy swoopers exited half as high as regular skydivers, and flew horizontally for four miles. I don't know where they heck they got that distance from. While they could cover four miles if they wanted to, that would be considered a very poor spot for anything but a cross-country jump.

10) Maybe I'm crazy, but in the wing-suit portion, I could have sworn he said that wing-suit flyers descend at only 20 mph. No way. Did I hear that wrong?

11) While suiting up for his personal tandem jump at the end of the show, he asked the instructor what the chances were of him falling out of the harness. The instructor replied: "Zero". Unfortunately, not quite zero...

Who the heck was the technical editor on this show. These things should have been caught and corrected before it got on air. But now it's too late, and this show will be running forever with these inaccuracies forever repeated, over and over again. Some are not a big deal, but others are outrageously wrong.

And I'll conclude with the thing that annoyed me the most.

They showed many types of skydiving: B.A.S.E. jumping, canopy swooping, and wing suits. But I don't believe they showed relative work belly-flying even once. Not the world record 300-way dive, and not even a simple 4-way dive. Why would they concentrate on all the extreme fringe forms of jumpng, and exclude the most common type of jumping of all?

[pilotdave 0]

And why'd they forget to mention that skydivers absorb oxygen through our skin so we don't have to breathe in freefall and we could suffocate in clouds? Eh, I guess that's common knowledge.

Seriously though, none of the technical errors you mentioned bothered me. It was a good show. They can't cover everything.

Dave

[Skwrl 56]

You're correct on all of that. Clearly, they made a few mistakes - the position of the main/reserve was one my seven year old daughter caught.

Having said that, though, I hope you'll admit that, when you consider the audience is whuffos, it was an incredibly positive message. There wasn't any "these people are death seeking mo-rons!!1!" or "they must all be idiots to jump out of a perfectly good..." It was pretty much a "skydiving is a fun, interesting thing" message. I'm gonna say whoo and/or hoo to that.

As my non-skydiving spouse said, the whole piece makes us, as a community, seem much more credible than any piece we've seen in the general press in a long while. Technical errors are going to be found in any general interest show. I'm sure the show on beer made hop aficionados shake their little fists at the screen and scream "but chinook hops are used post-fermentation, not pre-!!!. Those idiots!!!"

I propose we smile and say "cool". Or even "could have been better, but damn, that was fun."

Skwrl Productions - Wingsuit Photography

Northeast Bird School - Chief Logistics Guy and Video Dork

[Skydivesg 7]

I think the show was great. It had some mistakes but nothing too major and nothing we can't live with.

I especially like the look of the host. It shows that even a skinny geeky looking guy can make a skydive and have fun.

This was definetly good for our sport.

One thing he didn't get wrong was his final comment................

Yay..........

Be the canopy pilot you want that other guy to be.

[skyjumpsteve 0]

My DVR cut off the last few seconds....what did he say?

[keithbar 1]

what he said. the last line is the best thing in the show. i have yet to end a day of jumping w/o those words. i need a BEER! i just hope someone down there taught him the rules and the history channel bought for the night.

i have on occasion been accused of pulling low . My response. Naw I wasn't low I'm just such a big guy I look closer than I really am .

[SEREJumper 1]

They gotta keep this show interesting, so even though 4-way is very challenging in it's own right, it's not as "extreme" as b.a.s.e or wing suit flying. Overall good show.

We're not fucking flying airplanes are we, no we're flying a glorified kite with no power and it should be flown like one! - Stratostar

[deibido 0]

They actually did mention HALO briefly, but it bugged me a bit that they kept talking about HALO/HAHO while showing stock footage of Airborne School.

Yeah, HAHO is done with large Ram Air canopies in small teams. It is exactly the same as HALO except they open higher.

Standard Airborne jumps are with rounds from, give or take, 1,000 ft.


"An undisclosed desert location" Haha!

Like the location of MFF school is classified or something.


It also bothered me that in describing military static line ops, they said that the static line deployed a "drogue chute" before the main was deployed at a later time. WTF? Are they dropping HMMWV's or 155mm's or something? Where the hell did that even come from?

Overall it was a good show though.

"User assumes all risk"

[keithbar 1]

you know i thought the same thing when the mentioned a static line deployed drogue chute. but then they showed video of a drogue stabilized halo jump. and I guess I have heard of that. they DO do drogue stabilized halo's don't they any military guys want to chime in?

i have on occasion been accused of pulling low . My response. Naw I wasn't low I'm just such a big guy I look closer than I really am .

[Tuna-Salad 0]

I'm a little aggrivated that AFF was not talked about as an option to get into skydiving. Now there are people who think they NEED to do a tandem first.

Millions of my potential children died on your daughters' face last night.

[kawisixer01 0]

I thought it was good overall. You are going to have small technical errors and such on any mainstream media type coverage of anything. I catch it all the time on shows about other things I know alot about. As said above they did a good job of portraying it as a safe fun loving sport full of good people. I wonder how much tunnel time he got before they shot the footage of him in the tunnel cause the footage the footage they showed I think he was doing pretty well for a first timer in the tunnel. I was laughing about the tandem coming in that a couple guys on the ground had to dive out of the way of to avoid getting hit.

[deibido 0]

Drogue stabilized HALO?

No.

Only for Tandems.

HALO and static line?

NO, that would defeat the whole point.

HAHO can be rigged static line though.

Drogues are not commonly used in MFF operations.

However, static line heavy drops use drogues to deploy extraction chutes which pull out the load then deploy the main.

You want cool? Check out JPADS . . . Ram Air High Altitude Heavy Cargo drops with GPS guidance

You know you want to ride one.

http://www.natick.army.mil/about/pao/2006/jpads-med.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.natick.army.mil/about/pao/2006/06-40.htm&h=486&w=650&sz=223&hl=en&start=1&sig2=WCWW7GwAYawmdotPPOWgUw&um=1&usg=__u8ftBl-VpdVny3VBnisYkjENg3k=&tbnid=u8BBOWCKc1LoIM:&tbnh=102&tbnw=137&ei=dWbUSMPWO4iAvQWwgqDwCA&prev=/images%3Fq%3Djpads%26um%3D1%26hl%3Den%26safe%3Doff%26sa%3DN

"User assumes all risk"

[divnswoop 0]

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Drogue stabilized HALO?

No.

Only for Tandems.

The US Marines use this

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HALO and static line?

NO, that would defeat the whole point.

HALO Static Line Drogue..1st and 2nd MSOB have it.

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Drogues are not commonly used in MFF operations.

Exept for the Marines where it is very common now

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Parachutes cost 5-10,000..."This chased off a whole bunch of students"

Yep, I am sure we lost all kinds of future skydivers with that comment...

Great job to everybody who has put the show down. Maybe we should start a movement to get the show removed from cable TV. It is shows like this that is killing our sport....right?

[keithbar 1]

it sure looked to me like they had video of both a daytime and night jump that showed a military geared jumper with a bridle going out of the top of the frame. but a cool show all in all

i have on occasion been accused of pulling low . My response. Naw I wasn't low I'm just such a big guy I look closer than I really am .