pchapman

In another thread someone (dragon2?) mentioned another country's rules (Netherlands?) that were far too non-North American for my taste, but at least tried to tie camera use to performance. If you wanted to film 4 way or CRW or whatever, you have to have a certain number of jumps in that discipline first. It wasn't just camera or no camera. The issue hasn't been helped by people just parroting organizations' numbers, like the US "C" license and minimum 200 jumps, as if they were handed down from god. Yet organizations haven't helped. In more than one thread, I've mentioned how Canada (CSPA) some years ago went to a B license and thus min 50 jumps -- a deliberately progressive policy one assumes. That was in either 2007 or 2008. But to confuse the issue, out of the blue the committees just changed it back to 200 jumps (but just a B) this year. So much for what I had been saying. I don't know if that means they made a stupid rule now... or they made a stupid rule the last time. If I were to be a totally modern skydiver, I'd say we should ban all non-student jumping until you have 200 jumps! Safety first!

The manual says the only maintenance is changing a weak batter or a cutter if fired. It does "recommend" testing at every repack in an altitude test chamber but of course people didn't do that in the old days either. In one Q&A I read this, which is an interesting take on AAD approvals: This is different than what rig companies have done -- e.g., with approvals for the Vigil when new, or "dis-approvals" for the Argus. FXC argued that the rig companies only have jurisdiction over rig modifications, implying that they cannot express their opinion on whether they think the AAD will work or not or jam a loop or whatever.

If it is a Cypres, probably "Pretty Damn Old"?? If it is a Cypres 2, I dunno. Sorry, that's one of my least helpful answers ever...

And of course it is "proof". A student may find it hard to believe that he had a particular body position issue, no matter how amazing the instructor's moment by moment memory and instructional technique. Actually seeing it on video is different, "Uh yeah I guess my legs weren't even, jeez I can't believe I did that, guess I really will have to work on that like you said."

Just how "silly" some of the thread's injuries are, is open to debate. High speeds and forces and risk taking and occasional bad choices do result in injuries... I did once see a jumper join the 'diamond club' when he was assisting an insturctor's course and he had student gear on, pretending to be a dumb student. He played the part with great dedication when he accidentally walked into the Cessna trailing edge without his helmet on! But anyway here are my tales, although not as good as my fellow Canadian forgetting about snow. 1. At a new DZ many years back I had gear on and was going to the plane. I jumped over a small ditch that didn't have a bridge over it yet, and rolled an ankle in the taller grass on the other side. Ended up on crutches for a couple days, my first real skydiving injury but not during the actual skydive. Naturally it didn't help that I still did a couple jumps that day until my ankle convinced me it had already had enough. 2. Tandem recurrency jump when I was a pretty new instructor: Took up a buddy as the passenger but we forgot to get him a frap hat. So I ended up with a bloody nose on opening from his ProTec. Well duh. 3. An uninjured-but-close story: Swooped in with a Cobalt 75, saw I could get right to the tuffet, so for a lark I thought I'd land sitting right down on the foam. My accuracy was good, I didn't drop down hard, but with the small canopy I still had residual speed. A worn tarp on the tuffet had a ton of friction so instead of me just sliding, it grabbed me. This pitched me forward into a half front flip. Wham! I landed again upside down just off the tuffet, head tucked, on the back of my head and neck and upper back. I was OK but landing like that could be very bad for one's spinal cord... 4. Just a couple years ago after testing some student gear for the DZ, I came in for landing on the Solo 250 canopy. Wanting to have some fun I did multiple toggle spirals to the landing, but despite often doing swoop turns on any style canopy, I misjudged, hammered on the brakes but still dove into the ground not even close to planed out. Those watching didn't think I'd get up from that, but I managed to. Stiffness and bruising take some time to develop! While nothing was broken, I still wasted a lot of time on doctors visits checking things out, and dealing with a skin infection after the dirt rubbed skin on one shin somewhat raw even through my pants. So it was a little embarrassing pounding in on a 250. Back to my usual crossbraced 88 after a couple weeks of hobbling -- those swoops I have dialled in! 5. I was hanging on the side of a raft on a raft dive, organized by my friend "Freak". The grips hadn't been figured out as well as they could have been, with some ropes removed "for safety". Thus the three girls in the raft couldn't hold on and pitched out soon after exiting the Skyvan. Now the raft had a ton of drag but no weight, and hangers-on started letting go very quickly. AFF instructor instincts of mine served me poorly here, as I held on just a little longer, last man holding on. The raft flipped up, collapsed, and spun like crazy, trapping two of my fingers on the right hand in a plastic oarlock that had been one of my grips, pulling me up and away from the other jumpers. I managed to shake free after a very long few seconds. I was still able to pull, and no bones turned out broken, but with ligament damage it took half a year for the fingers to work right again. I made a t-shirt with a still from the video, captioned "I survived... Freak's raft dive". (All in good fun between friends - we set the raft up the best we knew and took the risks.) Yay, raft dives.

Voila: https://youtu.be/gahWGOgX5to

I'll try to get to posting it tonight & will let the thread know.

I have a video downloaded that has the original title plus my notes: "Fucking_manija (Skyhook RSL catch on door, pop reserve, shredded, pull main).flv" ~10MB, file date 11 August 2009 I think that is the one you are thinking of? If you can't find it with the original title, I could probably post it somewhere. (Screw "the cloud". Always download the good stuff in case it disappears!)

AAD fire in a descending aircraft? If you are talking about "normal skydiver" ones, I don't recall hearing of cases. Student and pre-Cypres ones are the ones that tend to get set off by fast descending aircraft. Somewhere in between are tandem settings: Back in '06 a C-182 in Ontario got caught in haze and thunderstorm related weather, got a wee bit out of control, bent the wings/fuselage/tail, and popped one or two Tandem Cypreses, which needs 78 mph at 1900 ft. The plane and jumpers did pull out in time. (Who knows if the actual vertical speed was that high; it is possible that cabin pressure changes partially fooled the sensor. Still, the aircraft was in a very dangerous situation.)

Broken seal threads: I don't want to go off topic in this thread, so do you happen to have a link to a dz.com thread on the topic? I didn't find one in a quick search. We've probably had one at one time? (What the %#& is a jumper or rigger supposed to do if one of the seal threads breaks or the seal falls off entirely? Rigger and jumper can end up in different places in the country. We're not in some FAA fantasy of a duty rigger at a military base, on call to service interchangeable military gear. Just get another rigger to seal it up and note that on the card? That sometimes happens here in Canada. But that would just mean looking good to the authorities when the rig could have been tampered with anyway. )

There are plenty of little details that one could argue about. One could interpret the AS8015 language as "applied in the direction giving {the highest pull load under normal design operations}" or as "applied in the {direction giving the highest pull load} under normal design operations" Thus possibly arguing for or against using a seal. In the Rigger Handbook stuff fcajump found, it sounds like one is expected to pop the rig and then reclose it. Nobody actually pops the rig these days, right, even with the pullup still in the rig? So then we have the issue whether one records the pull force at the first tiny bit of movement, or maybe pulls a little further to make sure the force doesn't go up more during the pin movement, but then one can't be sure whether it would ever go up more before the pin popped.

Hmm, interesting. Just under a month back gowlerk asked about high pull forces on a Spectra ripcord rig he was packing. http://www.dropzone.com/cgi-bin/forum/gforum.cgi?post=4734415;search_string=pull%20force%20spectra%20ripcord;#4734415 He called it! Bulletin summary: Recall for some Spectra ripcords built Jan 2014 through May 2015. Too much urethane coating makes them sticky. Only applies to certain lot numbers marked on the ripcords, not all production in that time period. Spray with food grade silicone according to their procedure before next jump. Then mandatory free replacement before end of 2015. Edit: Also interesting to note that they have 8 different ripcord lengths listed. A good reminder to check with a company when swapping ripcords around.

That's a pretty broad request, given all the different styles of tv people like. I'll note that Spooks and MI-5 are the same thing; just different titles for different national audiences. To throw a few others out there (not having any idea whether they are on Netflix etc), that have impressed me in the last year: -- Archer -- Well that's on netflix. Awesome fast paced adult cartoon comedy for when you are brain dead and don't need a serious drama. Ok, some shows were a little low on meaningful plot, but it has been fast paced and outrageous enough to be a lot of fun. Definitely YMMV. Archer: Oh my God, you killed a hooker! Cyril: Call girl! She was a call girl! Archer: No, Cyril, when they're dead, they're just hookers! -- Babylon - Just a 7 part or something Brit mini series about an American Public Relations consultant in a British police force dealing with all the usual scandals and issues. Shifts between the cops in action and the higher ups dealing with the fallout. Everyone swears a lot more in office environments than I normally hear, but I thought it was hard hitting. -- Veep - Comedy in the dog eat dog, backstabbing, sometimes disillusioned world of high stakes politics. A few seasons in, this show with Julia Louis-Dreyfus is a lot of fun. (Although it isn't what attracted me, they happen to swear a lot too in that show....supposedly hiring a consultant for creative swearing.)

You getting possible spam email, supposedly from Eric Fradet of the French parachuting federation? I got one about a day back. The spelling of the actual gmail address is not quite the same as his name, and the message is vague. Fishy but unclear what the situation is. Although Eric did use something of mine in his rigging book, the chances of him asking me out of the blue for assistance are slim....

Thanks for the replies and opinions. Sounds like convention hasn't changed much .... although there is a desire by some of the riggers here to go a little longer, as numbers like 5 or 6' were mentioned. @crapflinger2000: I'm not sure about tucking under the apex either. I had gotten the impression it was to keep the mess of crown lines out of the way, off of the outer surface of the packed canopy. (Even if there isn't anything specific for them to snag on.)

Traditionally the reserve bridles on round reserves were quite short. (e.g., 4 ft) Would that still make sense as current practice? I wonder if a slightly longer bridle might help the PC clear any burble easier -- by letting it jump further. And maybe even occasionally avoiding the PC from being 'held back' for a moment just as it is about to escape the burble. The most common use of round skydiving style 'reserves' at the moment is pilot emergency rigs. I haven't seen enough recent ones lately to recall what kind of bridle lengths are used but I think they still remain relatively short. (And haven't gone through all the bailout rig manuals.) But how much of the short bridles is just tradition, and would one design or even pack a system differently today? =========== More details and thoughts for those that care: Now we don't need the often around 12' (?) bridles as became common with the square reserve freebag system in order to provide for its anti-horseshoe rationale. Once a nominal 4' bridle is attached and the top of the canopy is stowed in a certain part of the pack, crown and crown lines tucked under as in many packing instructions, only 3' of the bridle might be really free to extract with really low drag. I just popped an old 2-pin piggyback rig open for a repack and I wasn't too impressed with the pilot chute launch because it came to the end of the bridle so soon. The PC is an old 357 Magnum so not like the stronger modern reserve PCs. (But strong ones don't always work with old rigs -- I tried a Vector reserve PC on an old 2 pin rig and its strength really distorted the flaps, and put a lot of stress on the backpad too, built in an era with plastic reinforcement around the closing loop base area rather than solid aluminum plates these days.) Modern skydiving reserve systems don't always have a ton of bridle set up for instant extraction unencumbered by flaps either, often 3 1/2' to 6', but there's plenty more ready to be staged from under flaps. There are exceptions of course. On the one hand nowadays many bridles are tied down with seal thread at a certain point -- Skyhook equipped rigs -- while a rig like the Javelin had the bridle packed for decades (not now) without any bridle tucked below a further level of flaps. Round reserves nowadays don't have open mods so a pilot chute won't get caught in them causing a mal, as with the turn slots on a fast flying ParaCommander. So as long as the bridle didn't get so long that it could drop the pilot chute down around the canopy skirt it would be fine. So would a bridle of maybe 6' or 7' be better overall? One could also wonder if a wider bridle (2" or 3") would be better than the typical 1" square weave. While wide bridles don't magically extract freebagged reserves, their width may give the bridle a little stability and less likelihood of knotting up in the air. But that's quite debatable too, to what degree it helps.

Yay Canada. The video has made it to the front page of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's news website (in the Offbeat section) so should keep getting views. "Encore!" she keeps saying. There are plenty of adults who would do a lot lot worse. I think the dad did try to keep the G's down a little -- no sharp edged 4.5g pullups. :-)

It seems like a good time to scan and upload the canopy volume chart (packing volume chart) from Para Gear's 1990 catalogue, the earliest I have. It covers mains and reserves. Others with actual experience with particular belly mounts have answered already, but it might be useful to have a little packing volume data, even if the exact numbers are always debatable. Unlike other charts I have found online, it has enough old data to include things like Navy Conicals or 24' T-10, as well as early sport round reserves.

That's a neat one dthames, a little different but something to ponder. To try to relate that to other methods that have been used, it is similar to the idea of modulating your turn in to final (although with the plan to have a slightly angled almost-final leg rather than an ideally straight into wind final): a) If you think you might fall short, you turn in a little early from base to final, "cutting the corner" of the rectangular pattern. b) If you have extra height to bleed off, you can swing a little wide, taking up more time and distance, before bringing it in onto final. Compared to a rectangular pattern, that's basically doing a mild S-turn.

If one can't get a lot of glide path control with a modern well-gliding canopy at different brake settings, while going in a straight line, the answer is of course to not fly straight but to fly S-turns to bleed excess altitude! An excellent tool for accuracy, and used all the time for accuracy control in sport accuracy competition. (Where people are doing standup landings on grass with regular canopies and not accuracy canopies.) .....But -- see another thread -- S turns are highly frowned on at most DZs in the normal pattern / in the normal landing area / on a normal load. So how you may be able to find the airspace to really shoot accuracy is another matter. Other odds and ends tips: Your accuracy can be better on moderate wind days. High wind days may be too variable and gusty, depending on where you are. Low wind days give you a flatter glide path which makes any miss be more of a miss, and using brakes can be complex. Adding a some brake on a low wind day can just float you further, while adding some brake on a moderate wind day can reduce the glide angle over the ground. Yes you may need to aim a little short, anticipating a certain distance of flare over the ground (depending on winds) before touchdown. You may want to try partial brake approaches so you have some control range either way for adjusting for error. (Subject to the issues of whether adding brakes makes you fly steeper or shallower that day.) Of course, you'll still want to reserve some altitude before landing to accelerate to a speed and steady state glide angle sufficient for a normal flared landing. If you're going for the C license you'll presumably already know the 'accuracy trick' for seeing the spot on the ground that isn't moving, and be used to getting a feel for what your glide angle is on days with different wind conditions. Not being able to get good feedback on your flightpath or having knowledge of the canopy behaviour makes the accuracy task harder.

Who makes something like that? (available to sport jumpers?)

There was a Pioneer Tricon as Jerry says, but also an NAA Conical. Maybe you were thinking of one of them? Strong LoPo's are nice. They may not be an ideal modern round with slider reefing or anything like that, but they're still relatively available, a decent design still in production*, and not a super lightweight reserve like the Phantoms. Landings do vary a lot with the surface winds, but at least these days one can usually pick nicer days for vintage gear jumps. ------------ * In Mid-Lite form. Sounds like the same rating as the regular LoPo but 400lb and not 600lb lines. Not sure of any other changes.

Re: the cypres 1 internals You mean unimpressive now, or for initial production in 1991?

I didn't check the videos, but the skydiving definition differs from that in the rest of aviation. Our "barrel roll" is just a "roll" for aircraft. Well, with the exception that we're also dropping 120mph at the same time, so it is a "horizontal roll" only in the sense of a horizontal axis of orientation, and not a horizontal flight path. The flight path difference is just because we don't stay level very well, and the "barrel" part must just have been some casual terminology early in skydiving that stuck.

We could go on forever about the different contributions to the war, but the US Lend Lease numbers are impressive -- more than 400,000 jeeps and trucks, 11,000 aircraft, and lots more food and fuel. They wouldn't have helped the Soviets stem the Nazi tide early in the war, they had to do that largely alone, but would have helped later on. How much effect that had on the war effort can be debated a lot, and it is hard to get a handle on that without digging into real research and getting past any biases in opinions on both sides.