A bigun.....

[baronn 111]

Group of 6 show up and and 1 of them is a guy who is clearly of the larger dimension. I ask him to step on the scale and he suddenly has to use the bathroom. OK, I'll take the smaller 1's up. Get them done and I then get Tiny on the scale. 340 lbs +. Puts me over 560 with the gear. On top of that, he has a hard time even walking. And he wondered why he couldn't go.....

[BASE841 3]

Funny thing, in my experience women lie the most often about their weight. But the person who lied the biggest (more than 50 pounds) was a guy. Go figure...

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baronn

Group of 6 show up and and 1 of them is a guy who is clearly of the larger dimension. I ask him to step on the scale and he suddenly has to use the bathroom. OK, I'll take the smaller 1's up. Get them done and I then get Tiny on the scale. 340 lbs +. Puts me over 560 with the gear. On top of that, he has a hard time even walking. And he wondered why he couldn't go.....

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[Bob_Church 7]

BASE841

Funny thing, in my experience women lie the most often about their weight. But the person who lied the biggest (more than 50 pounds) was a guy. Go figure...

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***Group of 6 show up and and 1 of them is a guy who is clearly of the larger dimension. I ask him to step on the scale and he suddenly has to use the bathroom. OK, I'll take the smaller 1's up. Get them done and I then get Tiny on the scale. 340 lbs +. Puts me over 560 with the gear. On top of that, he has a hard time even walking. And he wondered why he couldn't go.....

At Ravenswood in the 80s we'd often take off from the airport but jump down at the county fairground, which would be abandoned on those days. One day a group came including a young woman who was huge. But someone wanted her money so we watched them try to get her into a jumpsuit and give up, barely strap her into a rig and take her up for a static line jump. We looked at each other and said "this isn't going to end well."After awhile the plane comes back, we gear up and go up. The first thing we saw when we got over the courthouse was the EMS truck pulled down into the field where she'd landed. Well, for certain values of landed.

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[BIGUN 1,042]

Nobody has time to listen; because they're desperately chasing the need of being heard.

[JohnMitchell 14]

baronn

I then get Tiny on the scale. 340 lbs +. Puts me over 560 with the gear. On top of that, he has a hard time even walking. And he wondered why he couldn't go.....

Had your office staff actually taken his money already and told him he'd jump. Then one of THEM should have to take him.. I'm done with taking HUGE people. No more.

[Bob_Church 7]

BIGUN

Since I don't do tandems I'd often be hanging around and notice activity at manifest. I saw some t/m being egotistic jerks to the manifest people and some who were nice. I was amazed at how the jerks never seemed to catch the correlation between who got who as tandem students.

[keithbar 1]

I was down in Florida a few years back and they were running a ratings course . One guy said he actually wanted to take me as a passenger. I looked at him sideways told him he was fucking crazy. But I was up for it if he didn't mind breaking both his legs

i have on occasion been accused of pulling low . My response. Naw I wasn't low I'm just such a big guy I look closer than I really am .

[normiss 619]

Biggest guy I ever took, 348.
On military gear for a Wounded Warrior jump weekend.
Man that was the fastest tandem swoop ever.

[JohnMitchell 14]

normiss

Biggest guy I ever took, 348.
On military gear for a Wounded Warrior jump weekend.
Man that was the fastest tandem swoop ever.

Wow, sounds more like "Well Fed Warrior."

My hat's off to you. I wouldn't have taken him.

[FlyLikeARaven 0]

I'm at a point in my jumping career where people keep asking if I want to be a TI or AFFI. I don't plan on making this my day job, so I've been happy to be a coach and fun jumper. Also, I'm a small woman with back issues, so I assumed the DZ would give me the big guys who would hurt my back even more, so as to comply with the rig weight limits. Am I way off base here? I assume any DZ worth its salt wouldn't go over its weight limit regardless of who the TI is, but I don't know. It doesn't affect my decision to decline to pursue a TI rating, but I'm curious.

I'm not a lady, I'm a skydiver.

[gowlerk 1,901]

Many DZs with access to smaller female TIs will ask them to take heavier people for that reason. It almost always comes with a higher fee to the student and that extra usually goes to the TI. If you are up to it it can be a good way to make more money. For you it would be a terrible idea.

[pchapman 261]

FlyLikeARaven

Also, I'm a small woman with back issues, so I assumed the DZ would give me the big guys who would hurt my back even more, so as to comply with the rig weight limits.

Rig weight limits are pretty generous, and some DZ's just don't take really big students. Eg, 230 or 250+ lbs. Others do, but it depends on who they have on staff who can handle that.

Note that if a rig is about 50lbs and the max is say 500lbs, that still allows for a 220 lb instructor and 230 lb student. (That's the sort of simple calculations a DZ might make, although technically one might be over the limit as the rig might be a little heavier, people heavier than claimed, and PD for example lowers their weight allowed according to deployment altitude. I'm most familiar with UPT Sigma rigs.)

While DZ's vary, I have often seen the smaller female TI's get given the smaller students.

Sometimes that's because it's just a real bother to take people up who are a lot bigger than you. (And more so, if in Cessnas not a turbine with a bench for example.) And a safety issue if you haven't worked up to those weights.

Sometimes it is because a female TI is inexperienced, so it would apply to a male TI of similar weight just the same. And there are always more TI's who only do it for a few years than those who stick around and become more experienced.

Still, there are female TI's with lots of longstanding experience and they may go up with anyone.

It will definitely depend on the DZ who they expect you to go up with, but I highly doubt they'll force you to jump with someone extremely heavy that you're really not comfortable with.

If someone is at 500 tandems and doesn't want to take anyone over 180, then that might be a pain in the ass for the DZ when it comes to scheduling jumps. Students of such a weight are common and not like a special exception.

(And it can annoy the male TI's because you might be 'stealing' the light girls they would like to jump with occasionally!) But it's not like one gets the 250 lb guys just because one is 150 lbs.

So don't worry about taking up the big guys. Just think about whether you are good for taking up, say, 180 lb guys 10 times a day and flaring the canopy each time... or whatever would apply at your DZ. There will be differences of course between a big turbine DZ where every cog in the system better be pretty standardized, vs. helping out for a few tandems here or there at a smaller DZ.

[normiss 619]

Had I not had access to a military rig with a higher weight rating, I wouldn't have either!
IIRC, I think were were at 485-ish full weight.
Fortunately the manufacturer was there and we had quite a meeting discussing that rig.
I felt like I owed those veterans something.

[riggerrob 558]

If you have back issues, forget about becoming a TI. Lots of TIs retire after a year or three because of bad backs, bad knees, bad shoulders, etc.
I have found that hanging more than 400 pounds of human meat under a tandem is difficult. Since I weighed 180 or 190 pounds for most of my jumping career, I only took students up to 220 pounds (100kg).
The difference was that I took big students all day, so manifest kept me in the fast rotation and I consistently did 8-12 jumps per day.

I have only jumped with one student who weighed 270 pounds. Most of his extra weight was muscle! He was a retired rugby player, with thighs like tree trunks! So I was not worried about breaking his leg bones.
We had a fast freefall, hard opening and ended with a firm slide landing in wet grass. Once I had proven my machismo, I cut back to students no heavier than 220 pounds. Most of the schools - that I have worked - limit students to 220 or 230. Most were too embarrassed to charge a fat tax. The plus side was that big guys tip better and often buy the video.

[normiss 619]

Except multi-million dollar NFL stars.
They tip NADA!!!

[keithbar 1]

Well of course just being in their presence should be tip enough after all they like spoke to you .

i have on occasion been accused of pulling low . My response. Naw I wasn't low I'm just such a big guy I look closer than I really am .

[keithbar 1]

I love the story Chris Martin ( rip bro ) told over a a few beers one night at tullahoma. Someone asked him who was the biggest student he had taken. He said he had a semi pro football player once. Chris said he was sitting there filling out the paperwork asked him how much he weighed . The guy told him. Chris asked how tall he was. And the guy looked down at Chris and said 6'11" and 3/4 . Chris looked up at him and repeated 6'11" and 3/4 ??? Why don't you just say 7 ft ? The guy looked down at Chris and stated. cause I ain't

i have on occasion been accused of pulling low . My response. Naw I wasn't low I'm just such a big guy I look closer than I really am .