A plea for help - landing

[dorbie 0]

Flaring is not an all or nothing transition.

Once you start to flare where you think you should you can ease into it gradually or increase the rate of input based on your judgement. Don't finish your flare early but use your judgement throughout your flare as to your rate of descent & altitude to adjust how much you should flare, and at what rate that should be as you start to plane you out. In other words use your senses to feed back an assessment of how the flare is progressing and adjust accordingly, but don't let up on toggles at any point or you will rapidly lose lift and surge into the ground. As others have said it should be the same height but that requires a consistency you lack and nobody is 100% consistent anyway.

It might also help you assess how high you are more consistently by raising your gaze. If you're staring at an approaching patch on the ground instead of perceiving the bigger picture that may be hindering your evaluation of altitude. Note that you can widen your mental perception without necessarily raising your gaze but raising your eyes a bit might also help.

Finally my theory craft on landing into wind as it applies to your tale, you do lose some ability to exploit the bottom end flare due to reduced ground speed into wind. You still have that flare in terms of air speed but if you use it you could flare your airspeed to below wind speed and fly backwards and I have a natural tendency to stop as ground speed approaches zero, this is probably the factor influencing you while flaring into wind. To arrest your rate of descent you need enough airspeed above the wind speed to execute the first stage of a two stage flare. If you are not conceptualizing a flare as a 2 stage flare then it is just going to feel like you have tighter margins for your flare which in practice you do. This gets worse if you are in wind high enough as to inhibit even a 1st stage flare, in which case you have a choice of PLF or landing backwards, that's probably not your issue though.

Finally, run all this past an real canopy control instructor at your DZ before putting ideas into practice.

[dreaming13000 1]

I've jumped a tri 150 loaded at 1.13 for about 200 jumps now. The flare SUCKS. Not always mind you, but it really has a picky non forgiving flare. I'll get tip toe stand up landings 98% of the time and then eat shit the other 2%. there is a line modification (line mod 4.0) search it on here. I've actually jumped a tri 135 with the mod done, but not enough jumps to notice the flare difference much. The Tri is affordable and a good predictable flying, nice opening, all around canopy, but is not well known for its fantastic flare!

I have a 9 cell semi elliptical Volt 150 on order now, so I am looking forward to having a little more flare power so to speak.

"A man only gets in life what he is believing for, nothing more and nothing less" Kenneth Hagen

[Croc 0]

Some canopies are easier to land than others, and that depends to some extent on how you flare. I could never flare a Spectre or a Storm. In fact, I found it easier to land a Lightning than my Storm. I have no trouble landing a Pilot. This does not mean that a Pilot lands better than a Storm--just that it works better for me. A well known world record CRW dog with thousands of jumps had trouble landing her Storm, and no trouble with a Lightning. Go figure. The longer I jump the more I suspect we each have a "natural flare" in our DNA. The trick is to match our tendency with the right main.

Try some canopies that most people find have good landing characteristics--Pilot, Sabre II, Safire II.

"Here's a good specimen of my own wisdom. Something is so, except when it isn't so."

Charles Fort, commenting on the many contradictions of astronomy

[jumpsalot-2 2]

My Storm always planed out nicely. It just didn't do well on long spots ...... so I got rid of it. Now I miss it ....

Life is short ... jump often.

[ufk22 32]

Ditch the Triathalon. It landing flare is most comparable to an old F-111. It's really hard to stage it, generally needs to be full flight to full flare, and the window for getting it right is thin.
I've got a few hundred F-111 jumps and can do it, but why?
I've also known a few experienced jumpers that could never consistently land their triathlons.
We all thought they were just could've land until they got different canopies.
Usually, something designed to be ok at a lot of different things aren't really good at anything.

This is the paradox of skydiving. We do something very dangerous, expose ourselves to a totally unnecesary risk, and then spend our time trying to make it safer.

[billyz222 0]

Hey a lot of good recommendation and ideas so heres my point of view on what you can do to help make smoother landing.

To give you a nackround, I worked all summer as a Certified GCI (ground control instructor) basically Im the person talking to the new AFF students over the radio under canopy from the time of opening until landed. Did over 100 student and about 9-12 jumps each.

That being said, I had all kind of student. The ones that had amazing landing, and the ones who had less amazing and those are the ones i liked to work with because once I was able to make them land safely and smoothly it was my reward knowing I succeeded in teaching them.

Most commun was that they were scared or had the same problem as you, misjudged their heigh from the ground.
what can help first is "SCANNING" the ground, what i mean by that is once you're in final, you look far far away and work your way back closer to you, to get a bette idea on the speed and how fast you're losing that altitude. Also remember you should start the flare roughly at 12 feets from the ground. (get on a roof or something with about the same hight to have a better idea
) once you start the flare, you have to be gentle and have a constant flaring motion (you can always stop the flare if you judge you are a little high but its VERY IMPORTANT to remember once you initiate the flare movement, your hands can NEVER go up, the reason is if you do, the canopy wants to gain more speed and it plunges forward and thats when accidents happen)
once you thing you're at the right hight and the flare is started keep the smooth motion going al the way down and you want to have you hand fully extended downwards in front of you at about 1-2 feets above the ground, and then you'll have the standing up kinda of landing with that feeling that you have one step to touch the ground. also keep in mind to keep your hands down until the canopy have touched the ground, its commun that if you let go a little early, on a windy day, it can drag you back.

Hope its clear and helpful, if you have any question please feel free.

Blue Skies

[MichelleC 0]

jimjumper

Get a thorough eye exam. Especially have your depth perception checked. It is not usually checked on an average eye exam but if you have perception difficulties a lot of the standard canopy instruction will be hard to put into practice. I have practically no depth perception and even after 30 years I have to really pay attention at flair time for the visual cues. It will be much easier once you discover any type of vision impairment and then learn to compensate for it but that is a lengthy subject. Get checked first.

I'm not the original poster but saw your response. I have some depth perception issues. Where can I learn what to do to help on landings? I'm a new skydiver with 47 jumps who has only stood up 12 of those jumps. Thanks.