DrewEckhardt

Manufacturers will not undercut their dealers, so ordering direct is likely to be at MSRP. Most of the time buying through a dealer will get you 20-25% off. For the most popular rigs with big lead times, large dealers also buy up production slots (like commodities trading) so you can get a rig _much_ faster than if you ordered direct.

Ok, I'm curious how significant this is with "real world" examples. I could jump a Samurai 95 @ 171 pounds, or a Samurai 105 @ 189 - both loaded to exactly 1.8 pounds/square foot. Assuming I were a much better swooper, what sort of distance difference would I see?

10 meters? Is that it? Wasn't it previously within 2 meters of target(giving you a 4 meter circle)? 10 is freakin' huge! Mike 10 meter circle, on 10 successive declared jumps, first point of contact in the circle, stopping in the circle, standing up. The license requirements are 2 meters to the target center (4 meter circle), on any jumps out of your hundreds/thousands, first point of contact, stopping any distance from that point, and you don't have to stand up the landing. In spite of the 10 meter diameter, the pro-rating flavor is harder under both big sinky and small swoopy parachutes. You can come in steeper under a big parachute if you don't have to stand up the landing on hard ground, and with 100+ feet of swoop getting the first point of contact where you want is easy provided you don't have to stop immediately.

The pro-rating requires you to make 10 standup landings with both first and final points of contact within a 10 meter circle, when you're current and ready, under wind conditions of your choosing, in the drop zone environment of your choosing. The qualifiers there mean it's not a hard problem. I can jump my Stiletto 120 at my home DZ with no winds, start a carving 90 to the south just south of the the dirt road, and finish my swoop with a step or two in the middle of the pea gravel. Being able to do the same thing with winds or using different visual references are separate skills which haven't helped me in > 1300 skydives except by landing me close to the beer so I get the last one, letting me land by my tent at boogies, and in a swoop competition (where I didn't finish last in the accuracy round, and only got wet when I stuck my toe in too far). Being able to float in risers or brakes lets me hang out until a landing direction is set so I don't fly against traffic, and get vertical separation so I'm landing with the fewest people possible. Being able to flat turn when some schmuck dives in from above has kept me from hitting him or the ground. Being able to gain altitude to fly over obstacles has prevented broken bones. The ability to land up-hill has helped when I've had a horrid spot. Being able to steer after planed out has helped. I like landing cross-wind and will take a long/skinny cross-wind landing area (like a road) instead of trying to fit up-wind into a shorter space. I like landing with a slight tail wind (~5 mph) and can land with a lot more as long as I resign myself to sliding in instead of running - if the wind changes sudenly, I'll take what I'm stuck with. None of these essential survival skills is required to meet the pro-rating accuracy requirements. In theory, pro-grade accuracy skills might help on an out landing. In practice, every DZ/boogie I've jumped has been either rural (land out in a big farm field/desert/road) or suburban (land out in a big open space/road). Past some low minimum threshold (make it back to a DZ sized area), there are much more important skills than accuracy.

I shrank from about 180 pounds down to 150 making hiking and dating easier, although my wing loading is at 1.6 instead of the 1.8 I was trying for when I ordered my Samurai. I don't feel like taking another 100-200 jumps to get comfortable with a 95, or buying a new rig to hold it. Lead seems like a better answer. The difference between my current exit weight and what I want is 19 pounds of lead. How much is comfortable? How much is a problem in a water landing?

Those are probably (I don't know about strength for higher airspeed deployments) the root problems. ZP fabric does not change the performance characteristics of a parachute - it just means it retains them longer. Stories from the good old days place the effective lifespan of PD's Excalibur cross-braced F111 canopy at a few hundred jumps (wear is higher on a reserve pack job). Conversely, at 1200 jumps my Stiletto is as porous as when it left the factory (it just leaks a little more air through the enlarged stitching holes). Reserve shape (low aspect ratio square, and perhaps the open nose configuration) means they start off with lower performance (notably a higher stall speed) than a modern main canopy. Loose some of the already low performance, load it to levels like many of us enjoy on our main canopies, and you're not going to have acceptable (injury free) landings.

If you follow the directions in the owner's manual it's not a problem. Face the canopy, turn it into the ground with one toggle, release the toggles, and it will lie on the topskin facing into the wind. Push the slider up the lines, crack the tail a couple of times, and you can stuff it in your helment (a smaller samurai and a big head help when curiosity leads you to actually try this).

A reserve is not a main; so the life expectancy should be different. Few people intentionally load F111 mains beyond 1.0 pounds/square foot. If you jump a small main and buy a Vector or Javellin sized for it, your reserve loading can easily end up in the 1.5-2.0 pound/square foot range. Preoccupation with the 2 canopy out situation also leads to reserve loadings far in excess of what would be appropriate for an F111 main. At that point, it's worn out when it stops acting like ZP. Strength requirements may also be an issue. A reserve needs to survive (I saw a reserve split into 2 and 5 cells held together only by the reinforcing tape at the tail) higher deployment speeds (this case was an AFF instructor who got knocked out when the student deployed, resulting in a head-down deployment while unconscious) than a main, especially now that we have cypresses. Packing is an issue. I fold my mains in the air without clamps, so there's not much friction between the canopy and ground/itself. I carefully pack all my single-canopy rigs on the ground with clamps, so there should be more wear. You also usually have a reserve to go with your main, so its reliability is less critical.

Nah. I'm going to land where I feel like (in a swoop course if it's there because that's fun, probably in the pea pit if not because it makes a nice swoop accuracy target and usually isn't a long walk) into the wind or agreed upon direction, dump at an appropriate altitude and fly in brakes so I can find uncongested airspace for my approach when most other people are playing nice, make a predictable carving 90 if people are somewhat close or I'm the first one down and setting the pattern, and bail on my swoop if too many schmucks spiral down to the same altitude. If I feel like landing down-wind I'll do it outside the main landing area if I didn't exit on a separate swooper's low pass. I fly a 105. If you're flying a big canopy and there aren't too many groups after you and before me, I am going to pass you. If you spiraled down beneath me, that's less likely to happen at 2000 feet and more likely to be while you're on final approach or even planed out. I'm not going to run into you and am not going to fly so that you end up in my wake. I'm also not uncomfortable being within 50' of you especially at low speeds inches off the ground, and consider any mistakes you make while distracted to be your problem. Personally, I worry more about people s-turning through the pattern and having tunnel vision than I do swoopers.

I believe my reserve pack job has almost a 100% chance of opening into a landable configuration. I don't really feel like being injured. If there's any question, I'm going to chop my main.

2700' from that big cliff in Mexico. Once I got comfortable (I usually jump in Moab, so the first few skydive length BASE jumps did NOT feel natural) video showed that my delays were 15-16 seconds.

If you jump elliptical canopies, don't deal with them while they're opening, and do silly things with them (like your first few birdman jumps where you might be a bit wobbly) you can expect frequent cutaways. I used to cutaway real frequently until I figured that out (four in a couple hundred jumps). Have a nice pack job, replace your lines when they go out of trim, repair/replace your pilot chutes when the kill line shrinks or they get porous, interact with the openings, change canopies when your favorite parachute is inappropriate, and the number will be much higher (1 in 500? 1 in 1000?)

I like landing Cessna 172s in light winds and have no problem with other pilots doing the same. When the winds are below 30 MPH and I have a choice, I'm skydiving. That means riding down skydiving aircraft only happens when the winds are in excess of many aircraft's maximum demonstrated cross-wind component, or are at least high enough to make me nervous. I've seen one skydiving pilot drift off the runway in that situation, another pilot flip his plane, and really don't want to experience situations like those from inside the plane.

My main flap stopped being open in freefall (sit fly, 140-150 MPH) when I stopped letting other people check it.

No job, no work. It does get pretty boring.

Packing is something you need to do in order to first remember how to do it and later to be proficient at it. If you're going to subsidize your skydiving career with packing, starting ASAP is a fine idea - training, gear, jumping, gear, jumping, travelling, jumping all aren't inexpensive. Otherwise, you probably want to wait until you'll be jumping gear you can pack regularly (some DZs run slow enough that you can pack the rental gear you'll be jumping, some don't so it may mean waiting until you buy a rig). It's pretty much independant of actually jumping, although knowing how to pack obviously makes jumping less expensive and means not having to wait for a packer...

I don't do aerials (in which case I'd want a span) and am not real interested in making a lot of jumps off the same object (arround here we joke that you can only count the first 50 off the span in Idaho, and after 6-10 in a trip I'm ready for something else). Some subset of the BASE community seems to subscribe to the same theory and wouldn't be back for many repeats. When it comes to travel, for me it needs to be close (Moab is under 6 hours away), spectacular (the popular cave in Mexico, maybe Norway), or someplace I'd like to go but just need an excuse (Italy, Kuala Lumpur). I don't know how typial that is either. IOW, you might have a small subset of an already small market. As far as tower costs, I did a search. Estimated total installed cost was as follows: 350' $100,000 500' $165,000 1050' $620,000

I started BASE with 800-900 skydives and am probably making more skydives by a factor of 5 (I'm real bad at logging BASE jumps but have my pro-track to depend on while skydiving). Being a proficient and current canopy pilot has mostly helped me - I'm comfortable flying arround in narrow canyons, landing in small areas surrounded by rocks/RVs/cars/other parachutes, landing right next to cliff walls, landing cross-wind, etc. On one screw up which led to a ridge between me and the landing area, I was able to salvage the situation by landing on a 15x15x10' boulder. OTOH, I used to use full-flight approaches (like skydiving) when I shouldn't have (crashed into a tree) and normal skydiving doesn't provide much experience and confidence in sinking in arround tall obstacles like trees, cliffs, etc. I think experience under high-performance canopies really helps with openings too - you learn that you need to be relaxed, to notice by feel when things aren't right, and to deal with those problems right away (because otherwise your parachute will spin-up and put and end to jumping until you find the freebag+main and repack your reserve).

I think that as you go smaller, perceived differences in performance for a given percentage change in size become greater. Skipping a size at this point would not be prudent. If you're looking for distance/glide you also need to be careful about going past the optimum wing loading. You might even find that you want to split between stock sizes - when I was playing with Samurais before shrinking my belly, up here at 5000 feet MSL a 120 @ 1.7 wasn't enough and a 105 @ 1.9 was a bit much (stall speed, altitude lost in turns, etc.) so I was going to order a 110. Demo a 109 first, put a few dozen jumps on it, and see how you like it. If that's not enough you might try the next smaller size and see how that works; although I definately would not order anything without playing with it first.

143 reserve 105 main You can load a modern main a lot more heavily than a reserve without compromising landings (which are more likely to be in a smaller area or with a sub-optimal landing surface) and don't have to worry about landing it without flaring as the case will be if you had a cypres fire due to incapacitation. Two canopies out might not be nice, although can avoid that by being responsible about your pull altitude.

4000 feet is a nice pull altitude once you have some wing suit experience. This is because you always have more to deal with after opening (unzip everything, stow your leg wing), may have even more (jammed zippers), and are more likely to have line twists.

1. Falling through my shadow on a cloud at noon. 2. First night jump with the Hale-Bopp comet and lunar eclipse.

1. Get video and have some one who understands landings look at it. 2. Assuming you do everything the same, you'll have more forward speed on a no-wind day. If you aren't finishing your flare this may be enough to make you stumble. 3. The increased forward speed and shallower glide angle with no wind will change your perception so you probably aren't doing things the same.

I did a successful Mr. Bill under my Stiletto 120. Total exit weight was ~330 pounds. Be level when you pitch to avoid an opening wich throws off Mr. Bill, gives you line twists, or worse. I've also done a semi-succesful (we held on, although I got line twists so she jumped off) one under my Batwing 134, and lost Mr. Bill under the stiletto 120.

1. You are not flying the canopy at its limits unless you're pulling 90+ degree turns after planeout, flying over obstacles on the ground, using 180/270 degree turns to build speed, landing on rear risers, making dead centers, and stopping within a couple steps. Some of those things (obstacle avoidance, accuracy, shutting down the canopy) are survival skills you should know before down-sizing because the effects of not knowing them will become increasingly critical. More radical approaches and rear riser landings are probably not yet good ideas for you. This doesn't mean that you're not bored, or that a less radical downsize will be unsafe - it's just not possible to master canopy flight or even a single canopy in a few hundred jumps. 2. Any high performance elliptical @ 1.4 pounds/square foot is going to fly radically differently (it'll dive more, respond to subtle control inputs, etc) from your Omega. I had some problems flying straight after plane-out when I switched from my Batwing 134 to my Stiletto 120 - a change of one size between elliptical canopies. Two sizes at once is a bad idea, a size + shape change is bad, and both at the same time invites comments like "show us your femur." 3. Canopies have a wing loading at which they fly best; although when underloaded within reason they still fly great. If the DZs you jump at will let you jump a high performance elliptical and you're still going to buy one after people have told you it's a bad idea, something in the 170 square foot range will give you something more twitchy and ground hungry that's less likely to break you before you master it. 4. You don't yet have enough experience jumping smaller parachutes to predict how you'll do. Although canopies don't fly much faster as they get smaller, your perceptions of the speed are radically different. Altitude lost in a dive, control sensitivity, etc. are also hard to predict and potentially problematic. 5. An intermediate performance non-square wing of your choice (Lotus, Omega, Sabre2, Spectre, etc.) ~20 square feet smaller would be a good next step. Downsize again to the same class of canopy after your local canopy gurus feel you're ready and you've made at least 100-200 jumps on your new canopy. After similar experience under your Omega 145 it may be appropriate to buy a Crossfire 145.