apoil

Downsizing to go fast before learning to make what you already have fly faster is kind of dangerous. There's stigma associated with "hooking" but I've got bad news for you: You can keep downsizing but it wont seem "fast" and "surfy" until you start using your front risers to increase your airspeed. There's a safe way to learn these techniques. Get coaching, and proceed at a pace that's comfortable for your learning curve.

It is typically protocol for the secondary jumpmaster to release if the exit funnels, and that happens on a small percentage of dives. When you are on your back, it can sometimes be difficult for one jumpmaster to fix it due to a variety of reasons. You mentioned that you were trying to arch "face down". But if you are on your back, your arch has to be pointed up at the sky. It's paradoxical, and it's possible that you were trying to roll over one way and your JM was trying to roll you the other way. That's far from the only possibility. You did fix the problem once you were on your own, so it means that you were doing something right. Stay with it. If you can arch like that the next time you exit, you will be fine. No it's not common, but it's also not unheard of. If it happens frequently to those jumpmasters, I'd be concerned about their training, but it can certainly happen to any JM at any skill level from time to time.

After my wrist injury I started jumping again as soon as I could. My wrist was extremely delicate and I had to favor it in numerous ways. Ron was one of the only people I allowed to dock on my right hand because we both knew it would be light with no tension. He was a bad-ass. We have tons of jumps together and constantly inspired each other to advance our skills. I can't say anything about Sara that hasn't been said. I can't imagine anyone not loving her after knowing her more than 5 minutes.

After making a notation in a student's logbook that she fell slow (103mph) she laughed at how relative things can be where 100 miles an hour is slow. so: 1. 100mph is slow 2. 1000 feet above the ground is low 3. 45 degrees (at altitude) is warm 4. an aircraft that seats 20 is large more?

I was tought something different from what I practice. In practice I often pull rather quickly, but I still remember the occasional slam from not slowing down enough. Depends on your canopy and how well you can be "pull-stable" if you are slightly faster than normal on your belly. For newer jumpers, I still teach them to take some time to slow down. If it helps them be more disciplined at break-off that's kind of a good thing.

QuoteBy the time you realize you have a pilot chute in tow two things are true: A) If your main hasn't deployed it's not likely to after your reserve deploys. Quote Completely false. Safest is to say that there is a significant chance that it will, perhaps even 50/50. In my experience it is MORE likely that the main will deploy. It depends on the cause of the mal. In the case of pilot chute hesitation(caught in the burble) or a shrunken kill line or worn material, it is almost a certainty that the main will deploy. In the case of a misrouted bridle it's pretty certain that it wont. Other causes like closing loop way too tight could probably go either way.

Avoiding analogies is like showering with a raincoat on.

The Golden Knights entered a freefly team at the last US Nationals. Some, perhaps most, members of Airzona Airspeed are already very skilled vertical flyers.

My criticism is not of you, but of the obsequious followup.

hd is my safety position. when i started i made about 40 sit jumps. then i made 1100 almost consecutive hd jumps where i stayed hd from exit to breakoff. of those jumps i did very few flips or cartwheels. in the time that it took me to make those jumps i became so uncurrent in my sit that i couldn't do anymore. i had to relearn the position. while I was learning to sit again i lost my balance a few times and instinctively went straight on my head. Most freefly students don't learn that way, and all freefly schools that I know of don't teach it that way.

And completely inconveniently for skydivers who want to exchange their footage via firewire. nice post, you say? It's just a reprint of sony's promotional material. It's practically an advertisement. sheesh.

I have heard of the middle finger salute, but that can easily be misinterpretted. People flip each other off in freefall all the time. I was taught the crossed arms "X" by total body pilot, and use it myself, although fortunately, I've never needed to.

Shocking to me that someone would say this, while at the same time trying to suggest safety standards and guidelines for freeflying. When trying to learn head down - emphasis on trying - what is someone going to recover to, if not to a sit? Belly/Headdown/Belly is not a particularly easy transition, and it is especially difficult for any but the best coaches to work with. Just about every freefly coach that I know of, requires at the very least basic sit proficiency before proceeding to head down, and most require a fairly high level of head-up accomplishment before moving on.

That's a picture of Marco himself from team Frick Atmonauti. His Teammate GI is watching from the benches. Realize that a picture is just a snapshot in time. I watched him doing this "atmonauti" in the tunnel and he was mostly getting up high, carving down, and then climbing back up. In this picture he may be climbing back up. It's a very dynamic mode of flight, so it's not 100% "doing" atmonauti in the tunnel, as much as exploring what the atmonauti body positions can do while expertly managing not to bounce off the walls :).

Another possible selling point for the vigil is that it retains the programmed offset from jump to jump. At Hollister, our CYPRESes must be switched off and on and reprogrammed on every single jump. The downside of course is that the programmed offset must be unprogrammed before jumping at just about any other DZ. To further clarify on this incident: The student did not handle the two out situation very well. He cut away his main from a stable bi-plane at 200 feet and is quite lucky that no entanglement resulted.

Differences between the Nitro and Nitron (that I know of). Material. Nitron uses the slippery ZP common to US canopies. Nitro uses Galvenor fabric which is ZP but a little bit more waxy feeling when it is new. Super easy to pack at first. Rumored to have a shorter lifespan. Different Slider weight/size - this could affect openings. The kill line system on the Nitro is bulky and inefficient. The Nitro has the leading edge constructed from a separate piece of matierial, while the Nitron has it as a continuation of the topskin. I'm not exactly sure how Precision was able to do this and have it be the same canopy but it does seem to be the same. This allows for the Nitro to have the leading edge in another color.The Nitro also has the checkerboard color pattern available on the bottom skin. Precision shows this in the advertisements for the NITRON but they don't offer it, or at least they didn't when I ordered one. The Nitro scheme with the top/bottom skin in one color and the checkerboard, leading edge and winglets in a second color is super nifty.

I don't want to hijack this thread anymore than it has been, but this fact scares the crap out of me. I waited till I had nearly 400 jumps to go through the coach course, and I still think I was doing it prematurely. Someone with 100 jumps should not be allowed to coach... in my opinion. You also need to be evaluated on your teaching and in-air skills! The USPA set the B lic. and 100 jumps as a minimum. Some folks at that level are capable. Many are not.

Absolutely no way. I've jumped both and the Katana is a very different animal to the blade. While they are both considered HP canopies the Blade is no where near the Katana. The Blade, IMO is much more like a stilletto with better lift at the end. Blues, Ian They are similar in that they are essentially third generation fully ellipticals. The Crossfire1 and Cobalt are 2nd generations - ie a design that evolved when pretty much the only other elliptical was the stiletto. Flight characteristics between the Blade and Katana are very different however they are both among the most aggressive 9 cell ellipticals on the market. The Blade is VERY different from the stiletto. You toss it off by saying "better lift at the end" but that means a lot. I load my blade at over 2.1 and don't suffer any shortage of swoop or flare. It is also rock solid stable in the deepest of brakes (like the nitro). Just because it has a flat glide and a short recovery arc doesn't make it the same.

It adds a tremendous amount of value. It's one thing to see which threads I've viewed, but it's hard sometimes to keep track of the ones I've actually posted to. Granted, if the current implementation is inefficient, don't leave it on, but there has to be a simpler way to build an index of the threads a user has posted to. It can even be stored on the users side with a cookie. That way the server doesn't have to do anything. Sure there's thousands of posts to search through, but the number of posts made is comparatively small.

I switched. I had a double pouch put on, basically a right hand deploy pouch on top of a left handed one, so the rig can go either way. It was no struggle at all. Although I am left handed, and I'd been largely without the use of my right hand for over 2 months. Because I drilled, and focused, I never went for the handle with the right hand, although I suspect if two or more sudden stressful things went wrong during breakoff, I might have reverted to original training. I switched to a loop cutaway handle as well because my right wrist just couldn't find the strength to peel that velcro at that angle. Looping the thumb in was effortless. Didn't need it until my hand was nearly recovered. I ultimately switched back to right hand because that's what's standard, and I didn't want to be switching the day I was jumping borrowed gear, that's just asking for it. Since I was highly current with the left hand deploy, there were one or two times during the switch back that I started to go for the handle with the left hand. I immediately recognized it and deployed with the correct hand. I like to dump above 3000 to keep everything safe.

It's fun, but come on, flying is flying. The first time most accomplished freefliers attempt it they do a pretty passable job. That's because it's familiar to them and therefore not "a whole new way of flying"

Not entirely true, but mostly. If the wind direction is going up or down, you better believe it will affect your rate of decent. Under ideal conditions, with a purely horizontal wind, blowing at a constant rate it will not affect your heading, air speed, or rate of descent, in pure steady state flight. (meaning control inputs are not changing). As soon as things start to change, ie wind speed changes in speed or direction, or canopy drag profile changes (pulling the toggles, or changing the shape of your body) Then, yes, things can happen but it's difficult to predict exactly how especially since it's hard to understand clearly what the wind is doing (it tends to be swirly in three dimensions). The steady state is very important for understanding flight dynamics, but many spout it as law without realizing that often we are not in steady state flight. I'm asking because I notice on final approach that I often have to make small adjustments to maintain my heading, and I'm wondering if that is caused by being slightly cross-wind. BTW, my canopy is a Sabre2 170 loaded at 1.1 lbs/ft2. For the most part, what you are experiencing is probably deceiving you. You think you are going off heading, because you can't maintain the ground heading you want, and all you can see is the ground. The tendency is to compensate with very small toggle input, even if you aren't consciously doing it.

You guys are very very wrong. Equilibrium, yes. But you are in equilibrium standing on the ground. In equilibrium, all forces are in balance. The state of equilibrium has motion at a constant velocity (which might be zero). That's Newtons First Law. Forget 9.8 meters per second. That's in a vacuum anyway. We've got air resistance to contend with. At terminal velocity, the force of air resistance balances the force of gravity and produces motion at a constant velocity. Sure it's dependent on shape, which is why we can speed up and slow down, but the steady state is constant v. On the ground, the force of the ground pushing up balances the force of gravity and produces motion at a constant velocity of 0. The situations are identical so long as you aren't accelerating. And the forward speed of the aircraft doesn't prevent us from having the sinking feeling of falling, except as a way that it fools our body into not noticing. Perpendicular vectors are independent. In the downward direction you accelerate at exactly the same rate regardless of whether you are exiting from a hovering helicopter, an otter at 80knots or a c130 at 160knots. This is physics 101, people. Don't post fake science. Some of us have engineering degrees.

A fantastic boogie at a fantastic dz in a fantastic place. I'd traveled to many places in australia and the only kangaroo I ever saw was roadkill until I got to toogoolawah. In the AM the landing area is full of them. In '00 they had an odd way of "spotting" They basically programmed the GPS to the pea pit. Contrary to every other place where the red/yellow lights are some combination of standby/open the door and the green light means go. Here the red light meant 1 mile short of the peas, the yellow .5 miles, and the green, right over it now. The organizer of the first group out was supposed to decide when to go. So whereas the GPS could actually be used to relieve them from this task of spotting every single load (which they did a poor job of), it was just wasted anyone can look out and spot the peas, but jump run and exit position are a bit more complicated. As a freeflier getting out last, I rarely made it back to the DZ even when jumping a caravan. In the skyvan, forget it. Oh yeah, and the flies - you can't even imagine. When you return from landing, your canopy will be COVERED in them like a blanket. They will fly into your mouth while you are talking. Constantly in your ears, nose, eyes. If you land out watch for snakes. They are frequent, and they are all poisonous, most of them deadly. I nearly stepped on one. It heard me coming, and didn't flinch when I approached. It didn't even coil up, or look menacing. Just stared at me, as if to say "one step closer, Bruce and you're dead" Buy your beer. Australian beer rules are strictly enforced.

A non physical suggestion, is stop thinking like that. You aren't stagnant, you are at a plateau in your learning. This is a normal part of the learning process of any physical discipline. You are still progressing, even though it doesn't feel like it. Keep jumping, keep working on stuff. If side sliding isn't coming, even after getting some coaching, move on to something else. At some point you will break through another level and be side sliding all over the place, you will pick up a whole bunch of new techniques very quickly, wonder why you ever had difficulty with them, and then hit another big wall. It's natural. It's a journey not a destination, love the path that you are on. And you can always fall back on this: "Hey, I'm pretty good for my skill level"