bbrockwell

Thanks, everyone, for your responses. The reactions that this jumper received after this last incident seemed to have struck a chord with him, and it's this that makes me think that he'll eventually realize that he's got to calm down. A few of the local jumpers, too, have told me that they're no longer willing to fly with him until his actions improve, and that's a start. What I don't want anyone to think, however, is that this jumper is heartless, or callous, or is being purposefully reckless. I do honestly believe that he just doesn't know what he's doing, and that it's his inexperience that's leading him to take certain risks that he can't yet handle. Part of the issue, too, is: How much risk should we allow him to take, and at what point during his progression as a jumper? Different people are willing to take different levels of risk, and everyone has their own degree of risk tolerance. This jumper has always been a risk taker. To be fair, to some degree we have to allow individuals the freedom, within certain reasonable bounds, to take certain risks; it is, after all, how progress is made. But this guy, though deep down he might not mean to, has crossed the line. I feel that it's on us, then, as his skydiving peers, to teach him to take the right risks, for his ability and experience level, and to teach him to wait until his ability and experience improve before taking certain other, more dangerous ones. And, after this last incident, he definitely has to learn that there are some - like those that endanger other people completely unwillingly - that he should never take. I just hope that, if he wants to be a risk taker, that he can learn to do it the right way. And he certainly can't be endangering anyone else in the process... ever. bsbd, ben

He's been talked to before, repeatedly. This is part of the problem. Maybe he hasn't been talked to so harshly, but he's definitely had it laid out to him that his behavior is out of line and dangerous. But it almost seems as though, every time he's talked to, he looks at more as a badge of honor, another notch on his belt, than a serious warning. But you can't just kick him off the DZ. He's a good guy, firstly, and we don't want to ostracize him. But more importantly as regards safety, if you ban him from the DZ, he goes to another DZ and does the same thing around new people that haven't already been warned about him and don't know who he is. Correcting his behavior so that we can keep him around and keep him in the air is the right solution in my opinion. But how do you do it?

Believe it or not, he's had complaints about him in all three of these areas.

The large-way was a tracking dive. Most of the local jumpers (including me) consider it a safe practice to invite even relatively inexperienced jumpers, with a proper briefing, onto such jumps. My focus in this thread, though, isn't so much to discuss the merits and inadequacies of this philosophy as it is to discuss managing the DGIT. What should we do about him??

I'd like to avoid going into too much detail at the risk of revealing this person's identity in a public forum. My point in making this post isn't to embarrass or degrade him but to find a way to help him make himself - and all of us - safer. That said, suffice it to say that my opinion is shared by many of the local experienced jumpers, and has been for quite some time. Sorry :)

I was on a large-way recently with a local DGIT, and he scared me. This post is made as much in his interest as it is in mine. He's in the skygod phase, and we've all been there. But the problem is: what do we do about him in the mean time? How do we see to it that he gets the necessary experience, makes the necessary mistakes, but at the same time prevent him from killing himself or one of us? His behavior has been worrying the local jumpers for quite some time, and after this recent jump, it's worrying me enough to make this post. Have any of you dealt with a DGIT? How?