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mdwhalen

Watch "World's Dumbest AFF Student"

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I think he was a lawyer, but I don't know if he sued


I believe some student who ended up in power lines sued Perris (or tried to). Hence the 2,436 pages release documents you have to sign prior to jumping there. I thought it might have been him.



Not just 2436 pages - you have to be videotaped too. I don't think I've done that anywhere else yet.

Which power lines did he hit? IIRC, it's a good ways off target to the roads and power lines.

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I am 99% sure the jump happened at Skydive Sebastian



The jump happened in Perris. He pulled the cutawaypad just a second before the JM threw him out. I can't speak for the mainside AFFI but I believe he was unaware of what happened and was getting him a canopy over his head.


The mainside knew what happened and dumped the main expecting it to activate the reserve with the RSL. The RSL shackle somehow got pull open and released, putting the student back in freefall with just a reserve still in the container. That is why all student gear here has rapid links on the rsl now instead.

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This video is great proof of showing why not to trust your backups.



peace
lew
http://www.exitshot.com

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I don't hink so. The RSL did not work.



I'm sure the RSL would have worked fine were it not disconnected. Sometimes, shit happens.

I had a student I put out of the plane come up to me after landing and their RSL was disconnected. I know it was connected because I go over the front of their gear in the Cessna right before exit.

This is why backup devices are not to be relied upon.
Sky, Muff Bro, Rodriguez Bro, and
Bastion of Purity and Innocence!™

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I've seen some places where on the student/rental gear, the RSL is connected to the riser's RSL ring with a rapide link. (I assume the link was tightened, but I didn't check. The DZ I'm thinking of is not within a mile of any water that I can recall.)

At the time I thought the rapide link seemed like overkill. Now I'm seeing a benefit. :S

-=-=-=-=-
Pull.

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No matter how many times I see that clip, I don't know what is more appalling: the fact that he was stupid enough to pull the cutaway, OR the idiot whuffo commentator. You would have thought he would have done at least a LITTLE fact checking.>:(



Actually I don't really hold anything against either action. Students freak out and do stupid things and commentators know nothing about the sport. What pisses me off though, is Lutz pretends that it wasn't his fault.

"There were power lines everywhere."

Yeah, right.

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I've watched Sparky Lutz video over a dozen times, and I am really impressed with his main side instructor. The guy looked like an aerial contortionist just trying to keep up with that bag of panicked protoplasm.

Do they simulate that when you're training to be an AFF-I? Do you have to demonstrate that kind of stuff or is it learned by experience?

Bob
Bob Marks

"-when you leave the airplane its all wrong til it goes right, its a whole different mindset, this is why you have system redundancy." Mattaman

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I think that you are taught to put your student first until a certain pull altitude and then after that altitude you pull regardless of what your student is doing....

If the student goes i, then they have not followed what they were taught. Why sacrifice your life for someone who will not listen?

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>>If the student goes i, then they have not followed what they were taught. Why sacrifice your life for someone who will not listen?<<

In my own experience the above is a good illustration of two things; how up jumpers, and sadly many Instructors, misread the student mind, and how the responsibility of being an Instructor has changed.

Nowadays reliable AADs have changed the dynamic of chasing a student past too late junction. Prior to that many Instructors, me included, are taught by example that your student's life came first, and except for the pilot, yours came last. Jumpmasters in those days are the ones who would keep chucking their charges from falling aircraft before any attempt was made to save themselves. We believed this was the price you paid for collecting a few bucks per student and for the right to be called a Jumpmaster.

We never really had the problem of chasing a student who didn't deploy in those days. All student jumps are made solo up until their first thirty second delays, where a jumpmaster might start jumping with them. But by that time, under the static line program, the student had already saved themselves 15 to 20 times. I never encountered a spazed out terminal velocity student at pull time until I started doing AFF in 1984. While we all were very excited about the new AFF program the above was reason enough many of us first started to doubt its very validity.

With reliable AADs still many years away the first generation of AFF jumpmasters carried over the same responsibility they felt as static line jumpmasters. (Sentinel, and FXE AODs worked alright in most cases, but this is a time when no up jumper wore or trusted them.) Ask any Jumpmaster in the early 1980s and they'd probably say they wouldn't give up on a student until a thousand feet. Some would tell you they'd never give up.

Slowly over the years that mindset changed mainly because we moved up the student pull altitude and we have AADs that we trusted and wore ourselves. Helmut Cloth, who designed the Cypres AAD, will tell you the device can save a jumper without even firing because up jumpers have become more afraid of inadvertently going low and facing a two canopy out situation then they are of the ground. He's right, but the downside is it took a gizmo to fix the lack of altitude awareness in our newly minted up jumpers. We are still plugging the holes in the AFF program with stop gap measures like coaches which sometimes is little better than one new jumper jumping with another new jumper.

The other point is too many Instructors today don’t comprehend the student mind. Most of the up jumpers dissing on the student Lutz (AKA, Sparky) don't realize how many students are exactly like him. Too many up jumpers can't or refuse to remember when they were just like Lutz. I know many competent, even famous, experienced jumpers today who can’t, or refuse, to remember when they couldn't put one foot in front of another or look out the door without turning green.

Part of our problems is we turn our Instructors loose way too soon. This was made worse when USPA did away with the Jumpmaster rating. That was the apprentice program where future Instructors got their feet wet working with students under the control of experienced Instructors. The reason all the negatives in the above hasn't produced a large spike in fatalities is because the gear and the AADs we have are so much better. The fact I know there "is" a problem is in general the fatality rate is the about the same today as it was 30 years ago when I started jumping. That's not progress. That's just us kidding ourselves.

Some get this and some don't because we have denuded the term, "Instructor." We call people who do only tandems, instructors, when pilot is a better term. While many are very nurturing most operate on the same principal as airline pilots. If my ass gets there, there asses will get there. That not a skydiving Instructor.

I cringe, but usually say little, when I hear an AFF Instructor say at this or that altitude I'm outta there. While it may be the prevailing attitude I always end the AFF certification courses I worked in with the following speech.

"It takes the personalities of three distinct people to be an effective AFF Instructor. You must be a Boxer, you must be a Fighter Pilot, and you must be a Mom.

1. You need to be a Boxer because you are in the ring with a man that can kill you. You must watch his center of gravity and know ahead of time if he's going to weave this way or that.

2. You need to be a fighter pilot because you must keep a scan going. You must know at all times what your altitude is and how much fuel and ordinance you have on board.

3. And finally, you have to be a Mom . . . because the student TRUSTS YOU!"

How do we fix it? We have to go back to a time when the bottom line in student instruction wasn't the bottom line. To many of today's DZOs, many who hold no Instructional ratings themselves, are only concerned with making a quick buck.

We are strangling the sport with fees. We must make the AFF program longer and cheaper per jump. We can leave the AFF FJC at current levels but we should have twenty jumps with AFF instructors at half what the costs are now. We aren’t really teaching skydiving anymore. I can’t teach spotting on one or two jumps, so the sport did away with spotting. I can’t teach a student to pack with all the others things that must be addressed, so we did away with people packing their own gear. I can't impart all the things I've learned about skydiving in 30 years in the span of seven jumps. Hell, I don’t even make all seven jumps with a student. At larger DZs it's common for a student to have several Instructors which makes the training piecemeal and the quality different from student to student.

Lastly, we must have some kind of ranking in our Instructor ratings. Right now an AFF Instructor with a week of experience essentially has the same responsibilities and privileges as another AFF instructor with ten years experience. In my travels I've seen too many DZOs who favor the less experienced Instructors as they are less likely to balk about the winds, crummy equipment, lack of training aids and other issues . . .

I look at DZs that are tandem mills and DZs that don’t teach real skydiving no better than the scum that publicize and burn sites with their BASE jumps. Skydiving is on fire. And somebody better get a hose and put it out.

LOL, I made the coffe a bit strong this morning. I know many won't agree with all of the above, some won’t agree with any of it. But I know in my heart we aren't skydiving Instructors anymore, we are merely skydiving facilitators . . .

NickD :)BASE 194

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Nick,

Wow, turbo caffeine!!:D Actually, for me that was a very informative and interesting post. Thanks for taking the time.

I can tell you that as one who has very recently graduated to solo status, I completely agree that the AFF program is too short. I remember looking at the syllabus, and thinking "Seven jumps till I'm on my own???" I remember feeling like the course was going too fast for me, and although I did well, I did self repeat one jump, and had an instructor hold me back on another.

As to the Lutz video, what kills me is his attempts to blame the instructors and the DZ by suing them. Plus, even given the fact that maybe he was paralyzed with fear in freefall, he didn't even attempt to steer his reserve away from power lines.

My original question had to do with the main side chasing our wayward friend down in free fall. As part of your certification as an AFF-I, do they have someone act like an out of control student and then teach you how to chase them down? I thought it amazing to watch how the AFF-I was able to keep up with someone back to earth and folded in half, as the annnouncer intones "And his instructors watch him go bye-bye."

Bob
Bob Marks

"-when you leave the airplane its all wrong til it goes right, its a whole different mindset, this is why you have system redundancy." Mattaman

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I'm sure the RSL would have worked fine were it not disconnected.



The shackle does sometimes fail. They are a lousy mechanism for the application.
People are sick and tired of being told that ordinary and decent people are fed up in this country with being sick and tired. I’m certainly not, and I’m sick and tired of being told that I am

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Nick, thank you.

I have - unfortunately - been a spazzed out terminal velocity student who went unstable and lost it at deployment (and kept trying, rather than only trying twice.) [:/]

I had a totally amazing instructor who continued to come after me when I clearly could not get my shit together. He is the one who has taught me what it is to be a skydiver, when he turned around and said but you were my *student* and I was responsible for you. I didn't learn from that incident that oh, my cypres will save me - even though my cypres *did* save me.

What I learned from him were the right lessons about responsibility, both my own to get a canopy over my head, and ours for each other. I learned the hows of my EPs and not in a theoretical way, and I am a way safer jumper now than I might have ever been otherwise, unfortunately. I learned more than many people might ever learn about how and why not to panic, and it has changed my life. I know what that edge looks like now. It's not that I trust my cypres now, it's that I have been well-trained and learned where to be confident and what questions to ask and how to *respond* in that critical moment.

It's funny, when I watched this the first time, it just made me feel better for not being quite that stupid.

But you have reminded me that the lesson here, the really good one, is about what makes a good instructor in this sport. I am still in skydiving, and will continue to be, because of how my instructor responded to me in that incident, how he came after me, and how he taught me through it. He could have written me off that I just didn't listen. He taught me how to be a *skydiver,* and I am thankful.
life is either a daring adventure or nothing at all.
(helen keller)

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Teaching a student to --Arch "LOOK" reach pull-- has caused many students to grab the cutaway handle instead of the main ripcord.

If a student is taught to look, the only handle in view is the red cutaway handle. Why look at it if your *not* supposed to pull it.

Think about this as well ... arch.. look... barrel roll ... pull !!!! In addition to looking at a handle you're not supposed to pull yet, it also has a tendency to cause the student to twist and attempt a barrel roll.

I was in instructor for 2 whole weeks before the look part of the sequense was removed from the curiculum. Much of the stability problems went away, Attempting to grab the cutaway handle first happened on a much less frequent basis too. It still happens, but not nearly as often.

Lutz was a bit shy on smarts to land in the power lines. Target fixation is all I can think of. There was a large field on both sides of the power lines, but he chose to stare at exactly where he didn't want to land.

His freefall doesn't surprise me all that much though. I've never had a problem with what he did in freefall. It's what he did after the whole ordeal that made him an ass.

Getting back to the pull sequence. I don't know how many dropzones still teach the *look* portion of the pull sequence, but it's a tradition that needs to go away.

Another one is the chest mount altimeter for students but that's a different subject.
My grammar sometimes resembles that of magnetic refrigerator poetry... Ghetto

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Getting back to the pull sequence. I don't know how many dropzones still teach the *look* portion of the pull sequence, but it's a tradition that needs to go away.

Another one is the chest mount altimeter for students but that's a different subject.






Mine still uses both of these.

I was taught to count off: Arch thousand, look thousand, reach thousand, pull thousand, arch thousand. I did look the first couple of times, but as a student of psychology and a college athlete as well, I know how important muscle memory is. The first time I made a PRCP, I made a note of where the practice ripcord was, and I'd practice my pulls even when not at the DZ sometimes. When I did my first honest-to-god freefall, I got up to terminal and knew exactly where my ripcord was. I have yet to miss a pull.

As for the chest mount altimeter, I agree wholly. I really do not like several aspects of it, primarily the fact that when I'm in my stable arch, I can glance at a wrist-mount alti with little or no movement, and thus I do not compromise my stability, which is damned important for a student, in my humble opinion. With a chest mount altimeter, I have to look down at my chest, thereby changing the airflow over my head. Is it a huge deal? Probably not, but I'd prefer a hand-mount alti. After talking to my instructors, they said if I want to bring one, that's fine. Hence, I am ordering an Altimaster Galaxy in the next couple of weeks.

Under canopy, I have a mixed feeling on the chest mount. On the one hand, the harness is higher-up when you're suspended, so the alti is right in your face and easy to read. On the other hand.... it's right in your face.

I think once I get my Galaxy, I'll wear both that and the chest mount while I acclimate myself to the idea of looking at my hand, but once I've got it after a few jumps, to hell with the chest mount.
cavete terrae.

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Newbie post or not.. it's a good post. You have good sense to be aware of your handle placements. That's not always the case when taught a method that is out dated.

In My opinion.. and many other people share it...Get rid of the look .. it's does no good. It's a tradition passed on from when the ripcord was on the outside of main lift webe right next to the cutaway handle.

At some point, ask the instructors why they use the look part? Mention the part about arch look barrel roll pull. Ask them if they honestly look themselves.

When it's time to pull the cutaway, the first thing your supposed to do is look at it right? In the first jump course, the emergency procedures start with look at the cutaway handle grab the cutaway handle...

An AFF level one student doesn't necessarily seperate the 2 procedures. Come pull time, he arches... looks.... sees a big red handle ... grabs it and pulls it thinking he's done.

Looking often leads to an assymetric body position too. Ask any instructor who has done a bunch of AFF level ones if it sometimes gets squirrely at pull time. If the exact same thing happens to many different students, it's not the student. It's the method in which they were taught.

Often simply keeping the left hand in front where it belongs for stability takes care of that. If you're going to look somewhere.. keep a heading. Look at the hand. That's where the altimeter should be anyway so that offers a touch of convenience as well.

A good practice technique is to lay on the floor with your hand almost straight out in front palm pressing down on the floor. Stay arched and you can see the back of the hand. It's symetrical and very stable.

I've seen students look all the way past the cutaway handle trying to find the main ripcord. Imagine the possible body positions. I sure appreciate a good reserve side jumpmaster during those moments.

As for Converting to a hand mount, it's easy. When you look for the chest mount and it's not there, you'll clue in right away.

Thanks for your post Grue. I'm not suggesting to make waves or anything but it's something to think about.

Cheers
My grammar sometimes resembles that of magnetic refrigerator poetry... Ghetto

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Now did he pull his reserve or did his Cypress Fire? Given what I see he was a moron. I'm a student and when I did the AFF course my instructors drilled me more about emergency procedures than anything else. They also made me do practice pulls in freefall maybe this guy is the reason why. BLUE SKY'S

Don't ask me I'm just a student!!!!
Some day I will have the best staff in the world!!!

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Teaching a student to --Arch "LOOK" reach pull-- has caused many students to grab the cutaway handle instead of the main ripcord.

As soon as our DZ switched to BOC mounted ripcords, "Look" became "Locate", using the hand, not the eyes, same as experienced jumpers.

How do they teach it at Perris, where that Klutz guy was?

And this whole thing certainly shows that the news guys on TV will not let the truth get in the way of a good story. I've seen other skydiving stories just as fake, just as sensational. :|

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first time i have seen the video, what an idiot. i could overlook pulling the cutaway, and freaking out, but that line in the interview: "There were powerlines everywhere..." from the ground angle it looked like if he had turned in ANY direction other than continuing straight he would have avoided them.:S

As for me and my house, we will serve the LORD...

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