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mbohu

In order to get a canopy into horizontal flight at landing...

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I'I know this has been taught and discussed many times, but I still get confused when I read different things about the best way to flare. For example from (clearly very experienced and always great answer-giving Chuck)
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ZP canopies do not "land best" using a 2-stage flare. 2-stage flaring is a technique taught to assist jumpers in flaring higher performance wings, but does not result in the canopy performing any better.



To clarify: For myself on my favorite rental canopy--Navigator 240 at 1:1--I am not really confused. It seems that if I want to go into horizontal flight, at zero to low wind, I have to pull relatively quickly and sharply down on the toggles just high enough to give the canopy time to adjust its flight direction. Then I smoothly finish the stroke to slow down the horizontal flight as much as possible before setting my foot down.

If I start with a smooth slow stroke, it seems like the canopy does sink down more slowly but it never actually changes its direction of flight to horizontal. It keeps sinking down.
I used to land that way initially and almost always PLFed (not because I necessarily absolutely had to but because I'm old, heavy, chicken and like using my ankles without pain)
I listened to some of Brian Germain's videos and he said you had to give a sharper input to change the canopy's flight direction (vertically) and it made sense to me. i then tried it and really trained this in a canopy course. It changed my landings. I clearly go into horizontal flight mode for a while before setting my feet down (I DO have to be more exact however with the timing of the stroke than with the "old" landing method)

But I still keep hearing very different advice from other's some time. Recently a very experienced jumper suggested the opposite: smooth slow flare to start and then sharp fast at the end to stop the forward movement.

Again, I plan to continue to go with what works for me and take more canopy courses where I can be taught in person and have time to experiment, but I am wondering why jumpers with so much experience seem to have different advice/opinions on that.

...well and I wanted to try the poll feature as well :P

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There is no right answer to this. It all depends on how the canopy flys with you in the harness. What might be slow and smooth for me might be hard and fast for you. The only way to figure it out is to try it out several different ways until you find what works best.

One other thing if I remember correctly, navigators are f-111 and depending on how many jumps it might not have much flare power left to begin with. also the different in the flare between that and a zp canopy is huge. I could stall a 210 nav but I could never get it to plane out. My sabre 170 on the other hand I can give it a quick half brake to plane it out and then slowly shut it down.

The only way to really figure this out is to try different things up high before you enter your landing pattern. See what feels like more lift

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husslr187

One other thing if I remember correctly, navigators are f-111 and depending on how many jumps it might not have much flare power left to begin with.



Technicality:
The Navigator is actually a hybrid. Zepo topskin, F1-11 bottom skin. The flare power should not suffer over time as much as with an all F-111 canopy.
"That formation-stuff in freefall is just fun and games but with an open parachute it's starting to sound like, you know, an extreme sport."
~mom

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In my (limited, granted) experience - there's a number of factors in play, and it takes some experimenting to figure out what works best. During my canopy course, we had a wide variety of wingloads and canopy types, and what worked for one person didn't work for another.

I recently downsized from a 215 canopy WL ~1.12 to a 185 (~1.3). My immediate observations were expected - much quicker response, much more speed, and much more ability to fly horizontally. The canopies are both the same type - and the inputs to land them are dramatically different. The 215 I found planed out best with a sharp, fast first stage, and an almost as quick finish, enough to actually "pop up" a bit before shutdown - and a lot of the time I could not shut it down in low winds, so I slid a lot of landings. The 185 I can plane out more slowly and depending on the wind can sometimes shut down just by finishing in one smooth stroke. It took a few jumps, and a lot of playing with the canopy at altitude to figure that out.

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Good to see that you're questioning the information you receive and find what works for you. Regarding conflicting advice: I'd probably be inclined to attach a bit more weight to what Brian Germain's says, he seems to know what he's talking about ;).

As for the advice you got from that experienced jumper, are you sure that you understood what he meant?
If he intended to say: "flare smoothly instead of jabbing the toggles down, then shut it down at the end": I'd agree with him.
If it was: start "slooowly with flaring at 30ft up", not so much, as I think it's generally not a good idea to flare slowly.
You observed yourself what happens, the canopy slows down but you keep travelling at the same glide angle, it keeps sinking. By slowing down the energy needed to plane out and reduce vertical speed was lost: you can't flare effectively anymore.

My simplistic reasoning is: speed is energy: more speed equals more flare power. I usually wait with toggle input fairly long and then transition smoothly into horizontal flight.
And then: full flare, staged flare, smooth long flare? It all depends on the speed I came in with, how much room there is to 'play' with.

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There is a lot of "it depends".

Someone might recommend "slow and smooth" because landings are usually easier if you have some time to react to what the canopy is doing and progressively adjust one's input. Assuming the canopy has the flare ability to stay planed out when one does that.

Rather than waiting until the last moment low to the ground and then hammering the brakes.

At the same time, "slow and smooth" can be too slow and smooth - Then you don't get the canopy fully planed out, and/or you run out of speed and energy.

And what someone says may depend on the nature of the canopy. Is it a typical modern ZP canopy at a typical wing loading for that design of canopy? Is it a slow boaty canopy without a lot of speed and energy to plane out with? Is it an F-111 reserve that is heavily loaded, and if so, is it an older design with a flatter trim or a more modern one? Is it a fast ZP canopy but overloaded?

Some of these situations may require a lower, sharper flare to not waste the limited plane out ability.

A smooth finish to the flare may be good if you have slowed down enough to easily jog out the landing on a smooth surface. If you are able to get to nearly zero speed, then you might drop down a little lower and then finish off with a harder flare at the end to pop up, to drop down standing on your feet.

I think Chuck's statement, that I think I saw recently in some other thread, was a little controversial. But it is more about the definition of the term:

There can also be endless debate about the meaning of "2-stage", whether that means robotically flaring to one arm position and then to another, and nothing more. Or whether it encompasses all flares more complex than a robotic slam-it-down 1 stage flare. In which case one might call a typical flare actually 3 stage flare. Begin the pullout from ones descent, to a very gradual descent (not quite planed out) to get down the last couple feet, until transitioning to fully level flight feet just off the ground, plus maybe a popup at the end. Oh wait, is that 4 stage? So then "2-stage" flare might as well be called an "infinite stage flare" as one is always getting feedback from the canopy and adjusting as one goes.

I like seeing 2-stage flare used as a generic term covering everything beyond a 1-stage flare. An actual landing can be something more than the most simplistic of 2-stage flares, but so that we actually have a term for it, keep the term 2-stage flare to cover all flares that have separated some sort of plane out from a second segment of flight that exists before touchdown.

On a typical canopy, you don't want to be so slow and smooth that you start so early that you run out of energy at the end and have a hard, fast landing. But you don't want to be so fast on the flare that you have to time the flare just perfectly every time to avoid slamming into the ground.

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There is no "one answer fixes all" here. Although, sure, a good flaring technique will probably work OK in all cases, better in others, but generally speaking at least get you to the ground safe in most if not all situations... anyway:
It depends.

The first big discriminant is 7-cell vs 9-cell, generally speaking the flare characteristic is very different. But even there, because of construction choices, materials being the most important one but not the only one, there could be a 9-cell that behaves more like a 7-cell and the other way around.
Secondly, there are at least 3 different flare techniques I can think of, one-stroke, two-stroke, dynamic. Each one of those works best with certain canopies/situations and worse with others. Sometimes you might be "force" into using one vs the other. For each one of these technique, your ideal sequence might be different (from "quick then smooth", to "smooth overall", to "smooth then quick", which is the less common one so I'd take this one with a grain of salt, I'd say this is really used only in a couple of circumstances to savage other errors in your setup, but not generally what you should be shooting for).
tl;dr: canopy classes, canopy classes, canopy classses :D
I'm standing on the edge
With a vision in my head
My body screams release me
My dreams they must be fed... You're in flight.

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pchapman

There is a lot of "it depends".
I like seeing 2-stage flare used as a generic term covering everything beyond a 1-stage flare. An actual landing can be something more than the most simplistic of 2-stage flares, but so that we actually have a term for it, keep the term 2-stage flare to cover all flares that have separated some sort of plane out from a second segment of flight that exists before touchdown.



Does it perhaps then make sense to think it's more important (or at least, to some degree important) to understand what's actually happening during the flare process (whether the stages are distinct or dynamic) as a means of coming to understand how a particular canopy flies for a particular pilot? It certainly seemed what once I'd done some coaching and read Germain that I had a much better grasp of what should and does happen.

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None of us are going to provide a complete answer within a reasonable length reply, but everyone is explaining some aspects of the puzzle.


Another factor to consider is brake line setup and characteristics of particular canopies.

One might have a lot of brake line slack on a particular setup, so then clearly moving quickly past that is useful, as there won't be any flare until the slack is taken up.

Then some canopies have their "power band" higher or lower in the flare position. That's not a scientific term, just a reflection of where in the hand range you feel more effect.

Someone used to having a lot of flare effect with hands still fairly high up on a particular canopy, say at their waist, might think a different canopy flares like crap -- until someone reminds them that that new canopy gets a lot of its flare deep down low in the hand range, so that they have to be sure to get their hands way down to get a good flare.

So if a lot of flare power is lower down in the hand range, naturally you'll want to move through the higher hand ranges quicker and get to the good stuff, more flare power, down low.

Perceptions of higher and lower are naturally also affected by how you fit in your harness and whether you have shorter or longer arms.

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This is copy/paste from a post by "Spizzzarko" a while ago. I thought it was a very good explanation of how to achieve the thread title.




Here is a post I made about two stage flares:

"I think when people are talking about staged flares they are just passing on bad information! Think of it this way. In its simplest form there are three areas to a landing.

1. Approach
2. Plane out
3. Stopping

To transition from your approach to plane out, you need to give input to the canopy whether it is toggles or rears. Now do you stop from there? NO. You have to give more input to the canopy to transition from plane out to stopping, correct? Now I'm going to introduce a little bit more of a radical concept here, so everyone take a second and catch your breath...


Let's first of all get rid of this concept of a two or three staged flare. You don't come in flare halfway, stop, and then flare the rest of the way do you? If so you are doing it wrong. Does that method work? Yes, sometimes, but we are a little more advanced than that, aren't we? I believe this concept was brought about by the old timers who were transitioning from F-111 to ZP canopies. They used this when their canopies would balloon up when they flared all the way like they were used to with their F-111's.

Let us take the three areas that I spoke of earlier and make them into just one.

1. Landing

You need to start thinking this way because, when you are transitioning to smaller faster canopy's, landing doesn't just happen when your altitude reaches zero. Many of the high speed low drag dudes here will probably agree with me that landing for them starts just after they get everything stowed away after opening. Watch them, and talk to them, and you will soon see that every maneuver they make is to set up for landing. There is really no more "Playing Around" when you get to small canopies. Now let us get back to Landing. Your approach flare and stopping should all be one smooth movement. Only flare as much as you need to maintain the altitude above the ground that you want.

Try looking at the horizon during this part of you landing. I want you to standup right now and look at a far doorknob or something out your window on the horizon. Now stand on your toes, and then back on your flat feet. Do you see the difference in your sight picture? Now how much have you actually moved? 3 to 4 inches if that.

Now that you have that mastered, think about continuing your flare only as much as you need to, so that your sight picture does not change! I told you it was going to get radical! Now that we are flying flat and level over the ground we eventually need to stop. Well just keep flaring, and maintaining your sight picture. Eventually you will have flared so much that your canopy will no longer be able to produce the amount of lift required to hold your body in the air. This is usually when you put your feet down on the ground.

I can't tell you how many people I see that don't fly their canopy to it's fullest potential, and then complain that their canopy doesn't have enough flare to support their fat ass's, and that they need to get a Velocity because it has a more powerful flare

Learn to flare your canopy all of the way. You should not have to run out your landings very much if you are flaring it correctly, even on low wind to no wind days.

If you change your thought process, and learn to fly your canopy to its fullest then you will be unstoppable!"

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It’s like asking how to brake for a stop light. This is a dynamic situation that has even more variables. Thankfully your on-board computer is amazingly powerful and learns quickly to adjust on the fly. Keep your wing level and pointed into the wind throughout landing and you’ll get the best and most consistent results to add to the database. Those last twenty feet are the crux of it all.

Jon

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