Apr 5, 2012, 2:08 PM
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SAVE THE POND
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Fron Danny James Koon
SAVE THE POND SAVE THE POND!!!! This just in... They are planning on filling in the swoop pond with dirt at Elsinore. We have to stop this from happening*** Any suggestions?? — with Lelo Mras and 5 othe
In what ways, because I don't see them. Don't get me wrong, swooping is fun and among skydiver, cool as hell, but as far as the 'good of the sport', I'm not sure how swooping fits in.
It's probably done more harm than good. Swooping pushed the performance limits of canopies to where they are now, and the trickle down effect is that newer jumpers are looking at smaller and smaller wings as just being 'moderate' as opposed to HP. When three guys on the load are jumping canopies under 80 sq ft, it's hard to convince a new jumper that a 150 or a 135 is a HP canopy.
Swooping has also raised what people think of as HP landings. When swoopers are regularly pulling 270s, 450s, or more, and pushing 60 or 70 mph, new jumpers don't see double fronts or 90s as a 'big deal'.
I'll be the first to admit that if these levels of performance had been properly handled from day one, we wouldn't have these problems, but the fact is that we do. What's the incentive for a DZO to spend the money to build or maintain a pond, when it's nothing but a magnet for swoopers (or wanna-be swoopers)?
How about the double femur in Zhills earlier this week? Don't you think TKs life would have been easier without the drama, ambulances and reporters? I wonder what he's going to think when the ground keeper tells him the pond needs some costly maintenance? Spend the money, or save the aggrevation?
Because of its visible nature, there would appear to be a way to harness that spectator appeal for competitions.
I get that it has limited marketability, because a six year old can't just go grab a rig and swoop a pond...but the visibility is there. Unfortunately, for a DZO running a business outside of swooping, there is very little if any return for them.
Maybe I should say that swooping doesn't have potential for the sport of skydiving. Swooping has potential for swooping community. Maybe sometime in the not so distant future, swooping will have its own swoopjumper.com site and we'll get cast aside. Unfortunately, up until this year, people were not dieing during competitions...it was folks swooping during normal skydives. Only a complete ban of swooping ( a la Perris) will keep that from happening.
(This post was edited by jacketsdb23 on Apr 6, 2012, 8:39 AM)
hmmm...guess that will take Elsinore out of the "where can we hold swoop comps in SoCal" discussion.
Sad to hear.
AFAIK, the Perris pond is history too.
As one young gun there said to me Wednesday, "swooping is a dying sport, in more ways than one."
Or to update what Skratch Garrison said a few decades ago after a dozen people bounced in two years at the Gulch, mostly from sub-1000-foot deployment altitudes:
"Pulling low Swooping is a rush; it's just not practical."
I get why people compare low pulls and swooping, but I don't think they are even close when you compare the mechanisms involved.
Swooping is not conservative, its not safe, and if you fuck up you can die. There is a proper progression, a proper way to do it, ways to minimize the calculated risks involved.
Throwing a pilot chute into 120mph, low, leaves a lot to chance. I just don't see the correlation on that level. Swooping gets a bad rap...but unless DZ's start banning swooping completely ( and it sounds like some large DZ's are well on their way) the canopy related landing accidents will continue.
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Apr 6, 2012, 9:13 AM
Post #17 of 77
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>>>Swooping is not conservative, its not safe, and if you fuck up you can die. There is a proper progression, a proper way to do it, ways to minimize the calculated risks involved.<<<
Would you agree that swooping is similar to putting on a camera or flying in a wingsuit; very few of the "instant gratification" culture follow that line of proper progression?
I'd hate to see the pond go, it's a great gathering place.
Throwing a pilot chute into 120mph, low, leaves a lot to chance. I just don't see the correlation on that level.
Depends on the gear you use. BASE jumpers do it all the time. And the gear that people used in the 60's opened a whole lot more consistently, with many malfunctions being either landable, or at least ones that you could hand-deploy a reserve into.
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