MikeJD

Expect you've got the message by now - it's unlikely you could get away with this, and it'd be extremely foolish and irresponsible to try. But your mention of the coat reminds me of seeing a balloon load of skydivers about to take off one cold morning at Eloy. I noticed one of them was wearing a long coat over his rig and thought that looked a little dubious, so I approached to remind him (jokingly and rather obviously) not to forget to take it off before exit. He assured me he wouldn't, and it was only later that day I found out the main reason for the coat - he was jumping naked.

In my neighbourhood I stumble upon vomit on a regular basis, typically after the bars have closed on a Saturday night and before the street cleaners have done their rounds. I don't think it's worth very much, though.

He wasn't great in Cutaway, but I thought he was fine in The Usual Suspects. Seems to me that some actors can only perform well with good scriptwriting and direction, and Baldwin is one of those. As for driving while suspended, I wonder whether he's suffering from the same sense of celebrity entitlement as his older brother.

All good points until the final one. I live thousands of miles from Mr Obama, and I don't think I'm in danger of inhaling his gas.

I must admit my first reaction was to question whether this was a hoax. Wouldn't be the first time. Wasn't there a case a few years ago of a driver in a 'runaway' truck who eventually stopped it by grinding it against a crash barrier? And wasn't the eventual conclusion just that he'd faked the whole thing?

Actually I've heard three variations of that at the DZ: 1. "I want to see a cartoon with me in it" 2. "Don't you dare put me in the cartoon..." 3. "That was me? You draw that? I didn't know that was you..."

What a fantastic post. Thanks, airtwardo. I generally have a problem with the way the term 'hero' is used. The moon landings were an astonishing achievement and I'm glad to be able to say they happened in my lifetime - but they were the fruit of a huge team effort, and you could argue that to a large extent Armstrong just happened to be in the right place at the right time in history. Yes, he was highly trained and skilled and an effective mission commander - but he was no more an exceptional human being than millions of others who have dedicated themselves to a goal, and who have achieved things that were personally at least as difficult, but whose stories will never be known. By all accounts, he himself would have been uncomfortable with the 'hero' label. But he had the huge privilege of being the first man to step on the moon, and nobody can take that away from him. I also find it odd when people say that it's 'sad' that someone famous has died, as if we expect these celebrities to escape the inevitable. His defining moment was over 40 years ago, and he'd been out of the spotlight for a very long time. This all looks a bit curmudgeonly, so it's worth saying that I was hugely excited by the Apollo programme and still find it fascinating. Even now I'm amazed that we went to the moon, and I'm hugely impressed by the people who got us there, including Armstrong - I just don't see the reason to mythologise him over the other participants.

Mainly marketing, I guess - I think the original Crossfire was a pretty popular canopy. Same with the PD Sabre/ Sabre 2. I've never jumped the latter but it's surely a very different design from the original. The more I read about the XF2, the more I think about putting my Katana up for sale. Not that there's anything wrong with the Katana - it just wasn't designed for pilots like me.

Given a choice between a glove and a cutaway cable, I know which I'd rather lose mid-jump. I'd even argue that the guy was right to release your glove. Unless someone is very experienced/ switched on, he or she is probably better off without the distraction. Early in my career I jumped with a disposable camera to take some pictures in freefall. I remember how uneasy I felt having something in my hand during the skydive - it just felt 'wrong', and I was very conscious of having to transfer it to my other hand prior to pull time. The big question is - did he offer to buy you a new pair of gloves?

My advice would be - don't try too hard, and don't get hung up on doing something out of the ordinary. Dangers include: - Taking forever to do your hundredth, because you're waiting around for the right people/ organiser/ equipment to make it special. - Having a zoo dive because you wanted to do something beyond your capability or that of all the friends you wanted to be on it. - Pressurising yourself with the fear of screwing up your landmark jump. Sure, if the timing is good then it's nice to plan and do something out of the ordinary - but if not, then you can always just go ahead and log it, and then at some point when the conditions are right do that celebratory jump to mark it. Have fun!

Wouldn't that have been great? We love showing that flick to skydivers when they come over. We sit on the coach and bust a gut laughing at it all. I use Cutaway for the same purpose - most appropriately at a weathered-out Speed 8 Nationals. It always draws a crowd, and hoots of derision, and a suprising number of people can yell out quotes at appropriate points. "Their last two men went no-lift! They're diving blind!" "He was a little too slow, so we killed him." "You're asking us to just lay down, and take two torpedos up our ass!" "It's better than a silver medal!" It's actually, on its own terms, a pretty entertaining movie.

A little like John's 'Whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger' is 'Time heals all wounds'. I like both sayings because there's some truth in them, but sadly they're a little optimistic.

Still the definitive concert movie in my book, not bettered in the nearly 30 years(!) since it was made. Everybody in that movie is cool - Byrne, the core band, the extended band, the backing singers... musicians/ performers at the top of their game, giving it their all and having fun doing it. I think the thing about David Byrne is that he's not just both brilliant and a dork - his dorkiness is integral to his brilliance.

As an all-round canopy I would say the Stiletto too. I like my Katana well enough, but one thing to realise is that (by design) it is extremely ground-hungry. I do miss the less aggressive glide angle of the Stiletto. I guess the bigger question is, why just limit your choice to two designs? Even if you want to stick strictly to PD there are several other options, any of which might be worth considering.

If I wake up with half a mustache I'll want to know where it came from.

I've been encouraged to use visualisation by every coach I've come across, and I do reckon it's a great tool. But I think it's important to stress that you have to use the right visualisation - else you can end up with negative reinforcement that will do you no favours at all! That sounds silly, but if you're feeling apprehensive about your performance it can be surprisingly hard to picture it in a positive way. The first step is getting those positive pictures in your head, so try to recall what it feels like to do well, and watch lots of video of successful skydives. Then imagine yourself performing at your best, and using the techniques your coaches have taught you rather than the bad habits that we're all prone to falling back on. Watch yourself pulling off the perfect exit. Visualise the big picture, not a tunnel view of the grips you're going to take. I find it helpful to picture the whole dive from a third-person perspective, and then 'zoom in' to repeat it from my own point of view. All the while I try to recall the muscle movements that I'll use to achieve those turns and transitions. The more you do it, and the more you integrate it with actual skydives and tunnel sessions, the easier and more effective it becomes.

Often there are multiple groups, of course. I think what tends to happen is that you hear the first group opening, and then look up to see the canopies deploy for the later groups. Interesting to think about the physics, though. The higher pullers open first, but the sound has further to travel - and the dirty low pullers open later and nearer to the ground. So I guess the relatively slow speed of sound concentrates the deployment noise into a shorter, more intense burst than the accompanying visuals would suggest. OK, I may be overthinking this now.

The bomb-burst of a break-off, the whoosh of tracking bodies and the crackle and bloom of opening canopies. Like daylight human fireworks.

Nice thread. We forget how many of our senses are involved, and how powerful the little triggers to those senses can be - more so, in some cases, than the visual aspects of the sport. I do find that in everyday life I can call up some of the feeling of skydiving by recalling those associative triggers. I tried to capture some of the effect in this, which I wrote a couple of years ago. Some of the things that set my skydive-senses tingling... - Standing out in the middle of the landing area on a still summer's day. The only sounds are the birds, the insects, the distant drone of the jump plane descending and the faint rumble of a big formation in freefall. - The cut of the engine on run-in. Even when I'm on the ground, it gives me the same sense of anticipation that the jumpers are experiencing thousands of feet above me. - Hearing a song on the radio that was popular when I was learning to skydive. - The smell of nylon when I open my rig bag. - The smell of jet fuel, of course. - The smell of the inside of my helmet (Eww!)

Interesting. I think most of us have seen floating handles at some point, but assuming you checked yours before climbing out it seems like it should be difficult for this to happen with nobody being aware of it at all. Was there no video? Were your cutaway pad and cables completely missing, or had they just moved enough to clear the loops? What sort of condition was your velcro in?

As you'll know, in the UK a logbook is considered an important document in some circumstances, and not just while you're a student - for example it'll definitely be checked if you turn up to jump at the nationals. It's almost on a par with your BPA, FAI and reserve docs. That doesn't make much sense to me given how easy it is to falsify entries, but I guess them's the rules. For that reason I wouldn't screw with anybody's logbook, whether I knew them or not. Edited to add: regardless of the rights and wrongs of logbook abuse, I think if your wife is very conservative she'd likely be offended on a pretty regular basis at most of the DZs I've jumped at.

If the wings fall of the plane, you have a better chance to jump at 670 ft from it than when you stay in the plane. If the wings fall off the plane, good luck getting out of it anyway! For me, quad-level paralysis or something that left me in permanent pain would be a far worse proposition than sudden death. Death is coming regardless, after all! I think one thing we all fear is regret, and being killed outright takes care of that. My other big dread is mental impairment caused by an accident. I've had two friends suffer permanent brain injury through bad landings, and that was very sobering. Why anyone would make a habit of jumping without a helmet is beyond me. I do also fear being forced to give up jumping permanently for any reason beyond my control. When the time comes for me to hang up my rig for the last time, I hope I can be at peace with that.

To put that in perspective, the class is long to help you and make sure you have grasped that information before you jump. So although there is quite a lot to learn, much of the course duration will be taken up with reinforcement, repetition and practice.

I agree with you. Although you must keep looking all the time while you are tracking - including in places where you don't expect other jumpers to be - with a simultaneous break-off you get great information about where everyone else is headed (and they get to modify their vectors if necessary in relation to you). I used to hear a lot of dive organisers saying stuff like 'If you're below the formation and can't get back up by 6 grand, turn away and track like hell.' I hated that, not least because too many people's 'tracking like hell' is actually diving at the ground. If people are already below you and start tracking before you but steeply, then that's a recipe for a parachute in the face. As has been noted elsewhere in the thread, people get very small very quickly with vertical separation. And they get very big very quickly when they open their canopies underneath you!

That is not related to jumping. OK. You made me wince a little.