Ideal configuration for full flight deployments...

[skydiverkeith 1]

Opinions?

Blue skies,
Keith Medlock

[DSE 3]

symmetrical arms/legs?

[skydiverkeith 1]

Sorry for not being specific. I was referring to a gear configuration that would help with deployment hesitations...

Blue skies,
Keith Medlock

[lurch 0]

Ideal configuration is, reconsidering the wisdom of attempting full flight deployments if you're still new enough at the physics to be thinking a student cypres might be a good idea or asking questions like this one.

On a more practical note, the gear package best suited for that particular act is the same as the well known typical wingsuit mods in use for the last decade: 10 foot bridle, increased pilot chute size of pilot's choice, and the cut corners rig mod if rearward bag extraction tends to be an issue for you.

Without trying to be a dick here, if you have to ask this question, if the most basic of wingsuit knowledge such as the three mods above and what they are good for and why are unknown to you, what the heck are you doing flying the biggest production suit on the market?

After I mastered fullflight pitching I quit doing it. It pointlessly maximized the hazards of deployment in exchange for looking cool which nobody could see since I'm often the last to deploy anyway. There is really no other benefit to it in a skydiving environment. It just jacks your odds of a hesitation.

I'd be the last guy to scold somebody for asking questions on the net, thats what this place is for and its where a lot of us learn stuff like this including me. But the nature of the questions you are asking and what they say about how thoroughly you did -not- do your homework before scoring the biggest suit money can buy raise concerns. Reminds me of the stereotypical guy with 150 jumps who just bought a sub-70 VX and shows up on the canopy forum asking how to swoop it or what exactly do I do with the front risers anyway? You're catching flak for your questions because with an X2 you're expected to have known this stuff already.
How many flights you got anyway? Again, by the time you reached an X2 you should have had multiple hundreds of flights in which to have done experimentation with different PCs and bridles and worked out a package that suited you.

I'd suggest playing around with learning how to fly the deployment in not-full flight. There is an amazing depth of knowledge and technique available to learn about using the wingsuit's tail to control the canopy during openings. Some prefer to use the arms but for me the tail is the way to go, with a little arm if needed. Play around with THAT long enough and you get a giggle as you easily defeat and tame a canopy trying to twist up by commanding it through subtle tail inputs. That big ol' 7 cell of yours will be slow to respond but you can still learn to boss the thing all over the sky any way you want without so much as touching a riser. Much more useful skillset than full flight deployments, and then you won't need that big canopy to protect you from bad body position.
-B

Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

[The111 0]

Quote

After I mastered fullflight pitching I quit doing it. It pointlessly maximized the hazards of deployment in exchange for looking cool which nobody could see since I'm often the last to deploy anyway. There is really no other benefit to it in a skydiving environment. It just jacks your odds of a hesitation.

+1

www.WingsuitPhotos.com

[skydiverkeith 1]

Wow, thanks Lurch. As for your question, I'm not sure how many wingsuit jumps I've made. Its all I do and I know I've made more than 200 primarily on a P2 and R-Bird, but honestly, I don't even own a log book. ALL of my flights have been with my G4 and NO wingsuit mods. I don't have problems with body position during deployment, but I DO get horrible hesitations often.

Edit to add:

And yes, you're right in comparing me to fast downsizing swoopers. I'm not nearly as safety conscious as 99% of the skydivers I've met. To each their own...

Blue skies,
Keith Medlock

[lurch 0]

To each their own, up until their choices start seriously endangering others in the sky with them. Be as reckless as you want, it's your carcass and its a free sky, but understand that when you do stuff you don't necessarily know much about such as megasuits, you may be endangering the shit out of everybody and totally unaware of it.

I'm exactly your weight and build and fly a suit of similar but somewhat lesser scale... S-Bird. So I know the issues you'll have backwards and forwards and aside from the fact that guys built like us really have no need for suits that big anyway, one thing really screams out at me.

Its a combo of 3 things that explains your problems.
1: asking about full flight. I'd bet you're already habitually pitching if not FULL full flight, certainly with wings at least partially open. 1.5: That megasuit is going to make things much, much worse than they were already. It is a good idea to try scrunching for a couple seconds -before- the pitch so you slow down forward and speed up downward. Consider it pre-priming for the pull. If you give it a solid 5 seconds, it will solidly eliminate hesitations, but that solution is a bit clunky used alone. As part of a technique for managing deployments though in conjunction with the right gear it helps a lot. 2 to 3 seconds is usually sufficient.
2: Your G4. I assume you mean the popular Mirage. Its a great rig, no doubt, but its designed heavily for general purpose jumping and specifically freeflying. Tight bridle protection, rounded corners, tightly wrapped and shaped main container box. That main container, unmodified, especially combined with full flight deployments is very likely to have such a good grip on the Dbag that the pilot chute has to tug and wiggle at it for some time before it pops out. Bridle pulls pin, container opens and reveals the Dbag, PC hits end of bridle, and the bag just sits there not-launching being held in place by nothing except a nice tight fit and fabric friction because the PC is barely strong enough to lift the thing in a burble. I've watched exactly that happen a zillion times in midair but most of the time its brief enough the pilot doesn't even know it happened.

I watched it happen to Phil Peggs who has so much experience and was so used to it that he casually reached back grabbed some bridle and chucked the Dbag by hand without missing a beat or even wobbling in flight. It was an amazingly impressive demonstration of being not-flustered by such an event, but after we landed I was like "Uh, bro, that was awesome, but you REALLY gotta do something about that deployment setup..."

That right there may be the source of all your hesitations. Look up the "cut corners" mod. It just opens up the stitching on the bottom edges of the container and allows the bottom of the container to flop open like a truck tailgate instead of remaining box shaped where it can grab and flip or tumble the bag as its being dragged out and over the "windowsill" of the rig. It also causes the rig to let go of any grip on the bag it may have had.

I don't have the cut corners mod because I jump a somewhat floppy old non-freefly Javelin that doesn't even have a bridle pocket. A lot of wingsuiters can and will get away with a G4 unmodified because with smaller wings higher fallrates and heavier birds tending to do more straight-down deployments, its effect is trivial. But with a light bird in a huge suit at low fallrates pitching without a shutdown and without changing direction to straight-down fall, that rigid rig box is gonna fuck you up bigtime. A rigger can do this in a half hour or less. Cut your corners and watch what happens to your hesitations.

And 3: your NO mods... see above. For the combo you're using you need at least 8 foot bridle, 24 to 28 inch PC and preferably a ten-footer. And at that, it will still hesitate UNLESS you use proper deployment technique and scrunch like a mother. My daily driver setup is a 26 incher on an 8.5 footer and it would hesitate or just plain tow every time if I didn't pitch, and then get as small and skinny as humanly possible, twiddling just the tail with my toes for steering, body position and canopy control as detailed above.

When you have problems like this you must systematically identify all possible causes and then work your way through them one at a time till you've eliminated the phenomenon and this is how. Hesitations are one of the easier phenomena to beat because we know all the wingsuit-related causes, and we already have gear and techniques to address them. Start by cutting on that hardbox rig of yours and back it up with an appropriate PC and bridle combo plus a decent scrunch both before and after you pitch and your hesitations will disappear. Count on it. Oh... and the cut rig mod will also get rid of or at least cut down on those pesky random line twists you will have been getting from time to time that you couldn't explain. A wingsuit-tuned packjob and good body position will eliminate the rest. I haven't had more than a single 180 half-twist in over 1000 jumps.
-B

Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

[Titanium_Gecko 0]

Keith,

Have you actually had bad hesitations on all your suits?

Do you have a "weak throw" - Have you seen it on video?
How old is you pilot chute?

To each there own....
Of course, I have the metalwork for life too!

However, I feel compelled to bite for which I apologise to everyone else.

Please just think about:
1) Impact on work, friends and family if injured (to any extent)?
2) Being grounded for a while for one too many low pulls etc. (assuming hesitations are that bad)?
3) Why deliberately use up your luck bucket to fill up your experience bucket (to paraphrase Jeb, I think?
4) Earning wingsuiters a bad reputation at your DZ or further a field and/or contributing to them being band, potentially?
5) People not wanting to fly with you?
6) Not being able to prove your experience at other DZs with no log book? Fly in different parts of the world, making new friends is one of the best things ever!
7) Running the risk of extra paperwork for staff at your local DZ?

Blue Skies & Soft Landings,
Ross

www.gathhelmets.co.uk
www.flyyourbody.com

[lurch 0]

Hey Ross
Keith and I have been having a detailed pm discussion about gear and technique. He's not even flying the X. Hasn't received it yet. So I gotta give him credit for seeking to resolve the problem and letting us know about it before taking it up another notch...problem arose from scale of his R-bird and the fact that nobody'd shared some of the tricks of the trade with him. Theres a bit of a hole in wingsuit community technical education here, guy can't ask for the technical knowledge if he doesn't know it exists. And frankly I gotta admit "doing your homework" isn't as easy as it used to be what with the scale of suits available these days.

When I started you didn't need all that much tech knowledge to fly a GTI and you could get away with a lot. Same no longer true of some of the bigger suits where things like pull technique get a bit more complicated. There really isn't all that much comparative info to look up to tell a guy to expect things like pull problems and how to tune them out for bigger suits. Especially as he flew a smaller suit with no issues.
I've given him an upgraded pull procedure and some gear mods to get and explained both... think he'll make out alright. Maybe I'll do an article on wingsuit deployment physics, thinking the community might have a need for it after this.
-B

Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

[kallend 1,623]

Quote

Hey Ross
Keith and I have been having a detailed pm discussion about gear and technique. He's not even flying the X. Hasn't received it yet. So I gotta give him credit for seeking to resolve the problem and letting us know about it before taking it up another notch...problem arose from scale of his R-bird and the fact that nobody'd shared some of the tricks of the trade with him. Theres a bit of a hole in wingsuit community technical education here, guy can't ask for the technical knowledge if he doesn't know it exists. And frankly I gotta admit "doing your homework" isn't as easy as it used to be what with the scale of suits available these days.

When I started you didn't need all that much tech knowledge to fly a GTI and you could get away with a lot. Same no longer true of some of the bigger suits where things like pull technique get a bit more complicated. There really isn't all that much comparative info to look up to tell a guy to expect things like pull problems and how to tune them out for bigger suits. Especially as he flew a smaller suit with no issues.
I've given him an upgraded pull procedure and some gear mods to get and explained both... think he'll make out alright. Maybe I'll do an article on wingsuit deployment physics, thinking the community might have a need for it after this.
-B

I haven't seen much published "technical knowledge" out there since Scott C's book, and that was a bunch of years ago. Maybe it's time.

...

The only sure way to survive a canopy collision is not to have one.

[Titanium_Gecko 0]

Cheers, Lurch! You answered my question.

Kudos to you and Keith for going public as odds on others have the same question.

Ross

www.gathhelmets.co.uk
www.flyyourbody.com