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DSE

2013 US Performance Cup Competition

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In case you haven't signed up for the 2013 Performance Cup competition yet, and are wanting to show how bad ass you are in time/distance/speed, now is the time.

https://www.facebook.com/events/606000842756325/

If you're not aware, this year we have separated the wingsuit comp from the tracking comp, so wingsuit comp is on Saturday, tracking comp on Sunday.

We've also added a separate division, for ladies only. Ladies scores will be mixed in with the general scoring pool, but will also be separated for their own comp. Cash prizes for the Ladies Cup provided by Simon Repton/Wicked Wingsuits.

Sponsors include prizes from Paralog, Phoenix-Fly, Replay Cameras, and Sony.

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Quick reminder:
Wednesday is the last day for pre-registration, saving $$ and assuring you'll get a Tshirt, and a Flysight available for your use at the comp (if you don't have one of your own).

Competitor Requirements:
To compete in the Open or Intermediate divisions of the wingsuit competition, you must be a current wingsuit pilot and a member of the USPA.

Two Jumps per Category.
Pre-Declare your class/suit size. Intermediate Class suits may jump in Open Class; Open Class suits may not be used in Intermediate Class.

To compete in the tracking division of the competition, you will need to have at least 100 skydives and be a current member of the USPA. Tracking suits are permitted. The tracking competition will be held on Sunday.

There is a separate division for women-only this year, prizes provided by Wicked Wingsuits.
Ladies scores will be kept within the general scoring, but also tabulated separately for a separate cash prize pool.

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In case you're not watching/aware of the scoring:

http://www.paralog.net/ppc/showevent_compact.php?event=U.S.+Performance+Cup+2013

Speed round 1 just went up; looking forward to the scores.
Vitaly Frolov and Simon Repton are the guys to beat in this one, IMO. Kristiaan is hitting it hard too. Brian Caldwell currently holds the overall lead, but this round will tell the full story.

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This was a great event. Smoothest US Cup so far by a long way thanks to the organizers, DZ and participants, at least I thought so. Everything seemed to work and there was a great vibe.

A great show by all both Open and Intermediate.

Hope to see more people showing their stuff next year!
Summer Rental special, 5 weeks for the price of 4! That is $160 a month.

Try before You Buy with Wicked Wingsuits - WingsuitRental.com

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I didn't pay too much attention to the wind as we were all on the same load and it was close to calm. I heard we had about 10@300 which would be a tail wind but not by much. It certainly wasn't a head wind.

It does go to show the kind of sustained GR you get when wind is taken out of it. The best run was Lurch with a 2.335km at 2.7. My best was a 2.4.
Summer Rental special, 5 weeks for the price of 4! That is $160 a month.

Try before You Buy with Wicked Wingsuits - WingsuitRental.com

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This year's Performance Cup was terrific!
Great vibe, sweet sharing amongst the competitors, best variation of any year. Phoenix-Fly, TonySuit, Squirrel, and Redline suits in the mix this year. Saw the most intense competition ever, too.
What else was great was seeing the camaraderie between the competitors, and seeing the mutual respect everyone paid each other.
Weather was awesome, ridiculously warm compared to previous years, with temps reaching 92 on Saturday.
All runs were done downwind, loads 1-4 had uppers of 0-5, load 5 had 25-30 (according to gov website, but our pilot said it was zip, and scores more or less reflected it was 0-5)
Load 6 was 0, I rode right seat and watched the winds on the GPS and airspeed indicators myself (was also fun to chase/watch the last two competitors on their comp runs).

Thanks to all that participated, congrats to those that scored cups and medals. Kudos to everyone involved; judges, manifest, pilots, S&TA, competitors.

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The 2013 Performance Cup Competition was awesome. Great job and thanks to everyone especially on organizing, coordination and safety. Thanks DSE!

Hope to see everyone next year!

Redline Aerosports is a new company I just started and they are new tracking suits and the first competition for me. Bee Goncalves was also jumping a Redline Tracking Suit.



Walter Dec
Redline Aerosports
http://www.RedlineAerosports.com

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Thanks.

I was asking because many people seem to think that somewhere between 3:1 and 4:1 is readily achievable.

A year or two ago I reckoned that 2.5-2.9 was a realistic figure, but was wondering if that has changed much.

I've seen claims of sustained 3.1:1 and even 3.5:1, and a base jump with a mandatory 2.7:1 requirement (pretty hardcore if the skydiving world champion is only getting 2.7 with a slight tail wind)

I guess it hasn't changed much, perhaps more people are now achieving the upper end of that range.

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WickedWingsuits

It does go to show the kind of sustained GR you get when wind is taken out of it. The best run was Lurch with a 2.335km at 2.7. My best was a 2.4.



If I am reading this right you are saying Lurch got 2.335km with a GR of 2.7 right? Could you explain that to me, wouldn't it be 2.3? If the "window" is 1km then the distance flown is his average GR no?
All my runs on GPS come up showing the same numbers for D and GR. Was this just a mistake on your part or am I missing something?

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There results are attached.

These competition figures are skewed because of the tactics element, diving and flaring etc. It looks like he nailed the timing of the flare round 1 so the score benefits from 25 seconds of boost. On round 2 the flare was a little premature so the peak wasn't included in the scoring window.

The sustained GR after the flare looks to be about 2.5 on round 1 and 2.2 on round 2, both of which seem a bit on the low side for a (slight) tail wind.

[inline 14535-Chart.png]
[inline 14600-Chart.png]

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WickedWingsuits

I didn't pay too much attention to the wind as we were all on the same load and it was close to calm. I heard we had about 10@300 which would be a tail wind but not by much. It certainly wasn't a head wind.

It does go to show the kind of sustained GR you get when wind is taken out of it. The best run was Lurch with a 2.335km at 2.7. My best was a 2.4.



But Jarno claims it takes no skill to obtain a high GR, just a big suit.

What am I missing here?:S:S
...

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

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Quote

But Jarno claims it takes no skill to obtain a high GR, just a big suit.



All I said was that the chance of a noob in a big suit getting a good glide, without actual skills/experience, is quite possible. As shown in several comps, where relatively new people set amazing scores with low experience.

You'll never hear me say you cant get better and set even higher scores.
But guess thats a point you'll ignore for the sake of (again) having something to bitch about;)

Quote

What am I missing here?



Less time on dz.com and more time spent in a wingsuit;)
JC
FlyLikeBrick
I'm an Athlete?

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kallend



What am I missing here?:S:S




That you're being pissy and useless in an otherwise productive and positive conversation?

I don't recall Jarno saying one way or another, but for the sake of argument...
Brian is very lightweight in a very large suit. That tends to support the idea that a large suit makes a higher GR possible. Therefore, if the larger suit tends to lend itself alone to a higher GR, and then said larger suit is wrapped around a lightweight pilot, you'll get yet another gain in GR, right?
Toss in an exceptionally skilled pilot like Brian, and you've got yet more gain.
It ain't exactly rocket science.:P

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Some observations and notes:
This year I've been having some difficulty with my audibles and accuracy relative to the flysight's idea of where exactly the entry gate is. Last year training for Hungary and all through the event, I never missed and had been fine-tuning the apex of the planeout +/- about 75 feet to see where was the most efficient place to put the peak of the energy exchange, vertical speed/horizontal speed. I had been building an attack setup in which the highest scores in distance or time I could get were dependent on a rather elaborate series of events detailed below, with accurate planeout as the foundation. This year my old pro-track started beeping 500 feet too soon and in training I was planing out 500 feet above the gate. Frustrating. At first I blamed it on my altered dive attack but the inaccuracy is way bigger than the change in timing implied. Something else was going on here. I figured maybe the alti was dying of old age... it dates from 2003.

I bought an N3... tried it... seemed accurate... then started getting the same effect: Beeper was going off somewhere around 10,500 ft even when set to go at 9,900 so the same timing that was accurate last year missed repeatedly this year. I still haven't found out precisely what is causing this effect but it ain't the alti's fault cause both of em are doing it. Cost me $300 to troubleshoot this only to get a negative answer and no real solution but it almost certainly has something to do with deleting the full-freefly element from the setup attack. Something about a slightly slower approach throws off the beeper. Air pressure? Angle of airflow? Unsure.

Finally, in training I set the thing to go off lower, only to find that when the effect intermittently vanished, now my planeout was 500 feet too LOW. In the end with it costing me 1 run per data point just to debug this and only 3 weeks to train for Hungary I set the beepers in between the two extremes of its' variance and started introducing my own delay, shooting by a mix of instruments and intuition... *beep* (one...two... HIT IT.) It worked in Hungary anyway.

Then I focused on other elements of comp attack.

First: A full-on headdown freefly in the Apache XRW/Rebel suit. This is like trying to drag race in a dump truck. The suit is designed to be the slowest possible wingsuit and will fight you if you try to drive it hard. It required a whole set of management tricks to keep it under control for this stage. Top speed vertical: 178 mph.

Second: Assuming perfect planeout timing the next step is efficiently converting the built up speed. My first year at Spot's game I was used to having 3000 feet to set up the attack and tune it at my leisure and found the 1000 foot runup restriction cramped my style a bit. Played the game anyway of course. I love a challenge. In the 2 years between, I got better at setting up and dialing in a max attack quickly and no longer really needed the luxury of the full runup anyway.

In testing awhile back I eventually discovered the 178 headdown terminal was excessive and unnecessary. First year winning in Hungary was a binary attack, all-or-nothing, this year I made it more analog and began working on in-between variations, learning a boatload of detail I knew nothing about the first year in the process. I got the same distances and times at a slight angle and topping out no higher than 140-ish. All the rest of the energy was lost in the planeout. But when I did this and began using it as my technique, my accuracy at the gate suffered. I'd been doing it as a very very fast move with 100 feet notice from full headdown. Gate@ 9800, beeper at 9900. (as high as a Protrack goes.) Reaction time was a major factor. Beeper goes off, release the suit and bring up the nose, sweep back and pick up the grippers, (let anyone observant figure out what the hell I was doing with my hands if not holding the grippers, which I never do for that part... Hint: anyone who saw how I exited for my second speed run will have seen this trick, I threw it back in there just for the hell of it) then drop the hammer on it while holding the nose down hard to restrain it from flaring off into a climb... all in 100 feet starting from 178 mph. The G force was intense... like a full-body shockwave punch. Kick off the shock at the right angle and its all but invincible... -if- you do it right. The timing was repeatable and precise. At a given speed this ninja move was pinpoint accurate. But only from a consistent arrival speed.

Slow down some and it threw me off wicked, but bought me more time to fine tune in other areas. In training last year I had this down so perfectly that when I came up with a dive attack that let me keep the grippers in hand AND a leash on the suit, it shaved ~750 mS off my planeout timing, deleted the "sweep back and pickup grippers" move, the different arm and airflow angle caused my armwing zippers to pound loose, come undone and my wings to blow clean off, and caused me to repeatedly planeout 50 feet above the gate. Disgusted, I went back to the older, cruder, but more accurate way I'd been doing it because I neded to put that precise delay time back into the attack for it to work right. Hey, what the hell, it worked. And reassembling my suit in midflight when my wings blew off was a bitch. The one time I decided to let that slide, the first time it happened, unsure quite what to do about it, the right wing waited till deployment to unzip entirely, THEN blew off, right when I let go of the gripper to go for the pull, making for a rather interesting deployment sequence. As I made the throw, one wing vanished. (!!!) I fell over heavily headdown and toward the right just as I released the PC. Avoided line twists and/or barrel roll though my own lines only via an insane split-second hail-mary corkscrew left-wing and tailtwist move with the remaining 75% of the suit to get back level under the canopy before the risers loaded up.

After that one, I always took the trouble to go back, hand one gripper to the other hand, and rezip the wings in between gate exit and deployment while I was experimenting with that set of moves. When I ditched the grippers-in-hands approach as a failed line of research this zipper effect went away on its own anyway. Interestingly, making runs with my wings partially or fully unzipped didn't cost much performance. But it did get windy in there.

Third: converting from either steep or full headdown to boosted distance and time. With a fully overcharged suit this is trickier than it looks. Very easy to overdo it and the trick was in keeping the nose down and gradually applying power so as not to blaze away most of the energy in a recoil climb.
After winning a couple of these events I felt I could experiment some more so I've started trying to see how close I can shave this move and it shows clearly in the results. I got a clean accidental climb in Time run 2... I let the suit slip the leash a little too much, there. A pity I wasn't more accurate, I'd have quite liked to see how the software would deal with it if I climbed back out of the gate and had 2 gate entries in one run. Damn near got it this time, too. :)

Edited for excessive content.
-B

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

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mccordia

Quote

But Jarno claims it takes no skill to obtain a high GR, just a big suit.



All I said was that the chance of a noob in a big suit getting a good glide, without actual skills/experience, is quite possible. As shown in several comps, where relatively new people set amazing scores with low experience.



What you ACTUALLY wrote was:
"Meanwhile the lousy wingsuit pilot will be getting 9:1 and the good one light skinny guy in a way big suit 15:1"

Clearly emphasizing pilot size and weight over skill in achieving a good glide ratio.
...

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

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A while ago, someone sent me this excellent article on the difference between barometric and GPS altitude:

http://www.xcmag.com/2011/07/gps-versus-barometric-altitude-the-definitive-answer/

In a nutshell, there's potentially a difference on the order of 200 meters between GPS altitude and barometric altitude. Some of this depends on where you are--i.e., differences due to the definition of the geoid vs. MSL--and some of it depends on the weather--i.e., differences due to the definition of the "standard day" for barometric altitude.

Given the abruptness of your plane-out, one other source of error comes to mind... Any GPS has an internal model of the sort of motion it expects--usually things like "pedestrian", "automotive", and so on. FlySight includes a handful of "airborne" models which are what we most often use. These models assume a maximum acceleration, with three different pre-set levels: 1 g, 2 g, and 4 g. For wingsuiting, we usually use the "1 g" model, since we don't usually see accelerations larger than that. However, I'm wondering if your agressive plane-out might be exceeding these limits. I'll take a look at some of your data from the competition to see if that might be a factor.

In general, I think we'd see more reproducible results in competition if competitors could use the FlySight itself to indicate the start/end of the competition window. Naturally, we don't want audible feedback used during competition, but I wonder if there is some value in making sure that the feedback a competitor gets comes from the same source we're using to judge their flight...

Michael

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You DO realize you're a quote on 15:1 glide ratios serious, while bitching about the part of the text that's actually correct?

Though lan-knowledge on glide indicates we should all have the same glide, regardless of weight. In real life situations, its usually the skinny people who are favored. And by accident you do see people with low/no skill put on huge suits and do quite well falling super slow. No control aside from flying in a straight line, and even that not by skill but luck and some wresteling. But good distance and slow falling still. By accident.

Im not saying there is no skill in performance flying. Thats the old grumpy muppet in you, again taking things way out of context. The finetuning of the top 20 to 30% performance will always be about skill.

But the base performance, you get that largely as a present from the suit/body build combination. Try telling the 120kg guys flying wingsuits that they can fly the same glide as Lurch with practice. Simply not true. While even Lurch wrote before about new kids, fresh on the scene making him work from jump #1

Quote

Clearly emphasizing pilot size and weight over skill in achieving a good glide ratio.



Noop..not emphasizing pilot size and weight is more important over skill. Just saying pilot size and weight CAN be a more important factor than skill. Surely a professor should get the difference between those two statements.
JC
FlyLikeBrick
I'm an Athlete?

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Quote

In a nutshell, there's potentially a difference on the order of 200 meters between GPS altitude and barometric altitude.



With aggressive flares/directional changes, the barometric ones can give big deviations as well. When doing carves around formations, my estimated speed varies from about 160 mph dives to about 20/30 mph on the relative 'up'. Yet the readings from barometric logger show climbing of up to 20 mph in some cases. And thats flying a small suit. Its the actual over-pressure under the body thats creating the illusion the barometric alti is a lot lower than it is on the flare, and than suddenly shooting back 'up' to the normal/actual altitude.

Its sometimes hard to trust all the gizmo's when we're using them for anything else but straight-line flying.
JC
FlyLikeBrick
I'm an Athlete?

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Lurch, damn it!!!!

I am waiting the time to come when you will get the skill to express yourself in 5 to10 lines maximum. I know that you like to read again and again what you wrote here but good teacher and experience person are recognized by skill of saying little but important .
Practice please to write less and say more ..
It is cute skill
:)
Robert Pecnik
[email protected]
www.phoenix-fly.com

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crwper

A while ago, someone sent me this excellent article on the difference between barometric and GPS altitude:

http://www.xcmag.com/2011/07/gps-versus-barometric-altitude-the-definitive-answer/



That's a good article. It's reminiscent of several conversations Klaus and I had about this topic back when he and I were discussing the addition of GPS into Paralog circa 2004-ish. The conclusion section of that article sums it up very well and as such, it should come as no surprise that be it GPS guided munitions or GPS guided bundles, all rely ultimately on a barometric altimeter in the scheme of things when determining true altitude.
"It's just skydiving..additional drama is not required"
Some people dream about flying, I live my dream
SKYMONKEY PUBLISHING

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