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docjohn

Please Check The Spot

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Lesson learned: What can happen when you rely on GPS instead of spotting

King Air load. 2 novices and 3 tandems, I was going to video one of the tandems. The novice jumpers were making solo exits before the tandems. They each were recent AFF grads with about 12 jumps each. They asked me to video them as they exited.

On jump run, the green light unexpectedly came on while my helmet camera was still sitting in my lap. I
quickly turned on my camera and put my helmet on while the novices were heading out the door. After
watching them fall away, I decided to check the spot before climbing out to video the first tandem. I
didn't see anything familiar. No airport. Looking around, I finally spotted the aiport.... about 3
miles ahead.

Fortunately, the novices found nice big fields to land in and landed without incident. We found them
about an hour later.

The pilot admitted to making an error reading the GPS (unfamiliar plane). But, I (and the novices) should have checked the spot. I'm not an instructor or jumpmaster but I would have felt very responsible if either of them had been injured.

PLEASE CHECK THE SPOT!
Doc
http://www.manifestmaster.com/video

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I got out in cloud (Spanish DZ), last to exit as 2 way, also pulled a tad low and had no chance of getting back to DZ.

Hindsight...

GPS isn't always 100%,
Check where you are before pulling on the lower end of your comfort scale,
If the clouds are black stay on the ground, you can't see a thing and the rain stings like fuck B|

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There was a big way that got hosed by the pilots who mis-read the GPS or something. McMinnville, TN in 1997 at the world record 60 way star attempts. Casa, Otter and King Air formation loads. We all exit, do the dive, break-off and track, and we're all doing the "what the fuck??" Airport was 3 miles away. :| If somebody on the ramp had looked down, we might have noticed the problem. Everyone landed safely though.

Another big way (I wasn't there that time) at McMinnville, 30 way out of the Casa. Green light comes on. My friend looks down off the ramp, sees airport nowhere in sight and yells at base captain "I'M NOT GOING! LOOK!!" Captain looks, sees no airport, agrees. Meanwhile some asshole skygod at the front of the plane is yelling "GO!! GO DAMMIT!!" It was about 20 more seconds before my friend could see the airport just ahead of the plane (hard to see looking under the plane with someone holding his legs down!) They all exit over the DZ and the dive goes as planned. Back on the ground my friend sees the co-pilot and goes right up to her to discuss the spotting. She got all defensive and bitchy and he cut her off "look, I have to jump, you don't! I'm going to make sure the spot is right, whether or not you say it is!" The pilot heard everything and made the co-pilot go back to my friend and apologize.
"Mediocre people don't like high achievers, and high achievers don't like mediocre people." - SIX TIME National Champion coach Nick Saban

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I'm not an instructor or jumpmaster but I would have felt very responsible if either of them had been injured



Presumably they were cleared to self-supervise, so I can't imagine why you would feel responsible (other than, of course, you're a good guy who hates to see bad things happen to people, which is of course a wonderful trait).

I'm assuming these guys had a nice chat with their instructors after that. Glad it turned out to be a safe lesson in checking the spot and choosing alternate landing areas for the newer jumpers.
"There is only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please. And with it comes the only basic human duty, the duty to take the consequences." -P.J. O'Rourke

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Good point.

That story shows my biggest gripe about GPS... it tells you EXACTLY where you are... but it doesn't do DICK about where you want to be.

Its a tool. Tools make work easier, but you still have to know how to use it.

Too bad it was a couple of low timers that got burned; glad they're okay.

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Presumably they were cleared to self-supervise, so I can't imagine why you would feel responsible.



Correct... presumably they were cleared to self-supervise, but we should still look out for each other and help each other out.

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I find it simply amazing how many people have no idea whatsoever where they are.

It's not even a matter of checking the spot. It's a matter of just being situationally aware.

Obviously oblivious.
quade -
The World's Most Boring Skydiver

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That story shows my biggest gripe about GPS... it tells you EXACTLY where you are... but it doesn't do DICK about where you want to be.




Actually...it does do both very well. The problems happen between the GPS and the A/C seat when the meat puppet fails to use it correctly. If I can fly under canopy from 25K , at night using a GPS to guide me to the landing area, the pilot damn well better know how. But, pilots are human too and make mistakes sometimes. Which all goes back to the fact that as a skydiver, you and only you are responsible for deciding to get out of the aircraft and all other associated and implied tasks that go hand in hand with skydiving.
"It's just skydiving..additional drama is not required"
Some people dream about flying, I live my dream
SKYMONKEY PUBLISHING

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This brings up a gripe of mine. When the green light comes on, and I'm checking the spot, everyone at the front of the plane is yelling "go" or "green light". God forbid if I delay my climb-out because of the spot.

The bottome line: If you're in the plane (not in the door), and you don't know for sure that the spot is good, quit your yelling. [/rant]
There are battered women? I've been eating 'em plain all of these years...

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The novice jumpers were making solo exits before the tandems. They each were recent AFF grads with about 12 jumps each. On jump run, the green light unexpectedly came on... novices were heading out the door. I didn't see anything familiar. No airport. Looking around, I finally spotted the aiport.... about 3 miles ahead.



This is the 2nd time this week this recent speech of mine has shown itself to be relevant:
"You new kids are from the video game generation - you've been trained like sheep to trust electronics without question. I watch with amusement as the new guys exit the plane when the green light comes on, without bothering to look out the door to check the spot or see if there is another airplane underneath. You new guys trust gizmos so much that you don't even bother to double-check the facts for yourself. You don't even look at the ground - you just wait for an electronic beep in your ear to tell you the alititude. You're like Pavlov's dogs: green light comes on - you respond like a robot without thinking."
Rookies: Please quit proving me correct!

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PLEASE CHECK THE SPOT!



Another story, with a different ending.

We were doing demo jumps into a government facility, had a NOTAM for that area, and were taking off from an airport about five miles away. (Details withheld to protect the guilty.) On one jump run, the green light comes on, and the spotter, a highly experienced jumper, looks perplexed. We're over the airport from which we took off, and not over the government facility, where we were supposed to jump.

Apparently the pilot had just pulled up the wrong waypoint on his GPS, and didn't notice.

Fortunately, the experienced jumper in the door refused to let the group exit on green, and got things straightened out and headed in the correct direction. So all it cost us was a couple of extra minutes at altitude.

If that jump had proceeded, into an airport for which there was no permission to jump, there would have been all kinds of hell to pay, especially by the pilot.

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It happened last weekend - high winds, first load of the day a formation 50-way attempt. Don't know what was going on in the planes, but on the ground we were all looking in one direction waiting to see canopies and then I glanced over my shoulder and saw them starting to pop way down wind - no chance of making the DZ with the winds.

When someone jumps on a big way - everyone has to follow if the formation has a chance of working. If the key doesn't spot and goes on green the results have a chance of getting multiplied. Sure, veryone should look but what just happened at Couch Freaks with the Cypres fires would suggest that they don't. A 50-way landing off takes a long time to collect and check in.

---------------------------------------------
Every day is a bonus - every night is an adventure.

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I hadn't jumped that day yet. My FS4 team had, sans video. I'm doing video so I'm at the door, spotting. Green light comes on at a weird place, to the west with I thought northen winds. No proper jumprun either, we never flew right over the landing area as usual. So I stay put in the door. Then I'm just about getting physically pushed out the door by my teammate.... I'm guessing, huh they've been jumping all day, guess the uppers are different? They are sure insisting to GO. So I climb out....

In freefall, we drift to the south quite a bit :S Everyone except one birdman who actually looked out the window and flew himself back landed out. Turns out the pilot gave us the perfect GPS spot, for the CRW formation that had been jumping all day [:/]

Boy did i feel stupid for jumping against my better instincts... Reaction of teamate when asked why he pushed me: well no I didn't look out the door but the light had been green for some time......

D'oh [:/][:/][:/]

Next time I won't be such a wuss.... The entire Grand Caravan load had A licence or better though, and only ONE looked out the damn window, so I don't feel too sorry for them...

ciel bleu,
Saskia

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Actually...it does do both very well. The problems happen between the GPS and the A/C seat when the meat puppet fails to use it correctly.



I completely agree with this. There is nothing wrong with GPS spotting.
At my DZ I know the pilots pretty well. If pilot X is flying I trust his GPS spot completely (will go out over massive clouds), but if pilot Y is flying I always check the spot.

Jacques

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I completely agree with this. There is nothing wrong with GPS spotting.
At my DZ I know the pilots pretty well. If pilot X is flying I trust his GPS spot completely (will go out over massive clouds), but if pilot Y is flying I always check the spot.



Like ZigZag said, there is nothing wrong with using a GPS to "help" spot. But it has to be used correctly to be useful. It is just a tool. If the pilot uses it to only locate where the plane is it is not much of a tool. I can look out the door and tell where I am at. For the GPS to work really well the pilot should use it to determine what the upper winds are doing and adjust his run-in and the point he hits the light accordingly. By reading the ground speed it will let him know how long to a release point that will put the jumpers opening point within reach of the DZ.
My idea of a fair fight is clubbing baby seals

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There is nothing right or wrong about GPS spotting. It is simply one part of the current best practices for spotting. It's not perfect. Usually, it's really, really good - as long as the equipment doesn't have a problem and the user doesn't make any errors. But while GPS knows exactly where you are, and it usually knows exactly where you want to be, it knows nothing about who else may be between you and the landing area. That's where looking out the door comes in really handy.

Of course, I can say the exact same thing about humans spotting. I've landed in some really interesting places thanks to friends who are usually very reliable who happened to be testing out the Stevie Wonder spotting system. And I've seen airplanes suddenly appear out of thin air a lot closer than I was comfortable with. Electronics aren't perfect, but then neither are we.

The sensible compromise is to use GPS, and check the spot by eye. Trust but verify and all that. Some day when us dinosaurs are decomposing into fossil fuels there will be perfect computers that will spot your load from 100K and you can just get out without worrying about anything. Until then, I like the combination of GPS and human eyeballs (tools and fools).

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GPS isn't always 100%,


Actually, yes it is.



Actually, no it's not. It's pretty good, and the slower you're moving the better it is, but it's not 100%. If you have a GPS receiver, and you can convince it either to log your position every so often or to send the position to a PC every so often, set that up and then put the GPS out in the back yard somewhere, not moving. Let it run for several hours. Plot the positions you got back and you'll get a fuzzy circularish blob. The points will cluster towards the middle, but you have to go a long way from the center before they really thin out. Plus there will be a few "WTF?" outliers.

The blob is smaller than it used to be, thanks to "Selective Availability" being turned off sometime between about 1998 and 2000. The Department of Defense was concerned that the bad guys would be able to use GPS too, so error was deliberately added to the GPS signal that can be received by "civilian" receivers. This was switched off as a policy decision. The President could wake up tomorrow and say "OMFG! Terrorists!!!1!" and switch it back on, which would make GPS spotting even more interesting. (As an aside, SA was also switched off during the Gulf war in 1991. Then, it was because GPS was pretty new and the military didn't have enough mil-spec GPS receivers; Army guys were going down to Circuit City and buying every civilian GPS on the shelf and mailing them to Iraq. Sometime around 1992-1993 it was switched back on.)

Eule
PLF does not stand for Please Land on Face.

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>Actually, yes it is.

No, it's really not. We had one demo where we went to the LZ and got the coordinates, then fed them into the aircraft's GPS. (a handheld attached to the yoke.) Took off and started flying towards the coordinates. After a few minutes the pilot realized that the GPS was telling us the spot was 60 miles away! The antenna had become disconnected, and it was using the last good fix.

Fortunately we had people onboard who could spot the load.

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The antenna had become disconnected, and it was using the last good fix.



Thats not a reflection on the GPS receivers accuracy but a problem with the end user not ensuring the equipment was properly assembled. Again, the tool is only as good as the person using it.

I am too tired right now to get into the technical aspects of GPS accuracy but I will say that if it wasn't accurate we wouldn't use it on precission guided munitions or to aid in aircraft landings among other things.
"It's just skydiving..additional drama is not required"
Some people dream about flying, I live my dream
SKYMONKEY PUBLISHING

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