Full Stalls for USPA B license - how stalled?

[pchapman 261]

I notice in the USPA B license card, the Canopy Proficiency card, jumpers are required to do a Full Stall both on toggles and risers.

In the SIM, a Full Stall is defined as where the canopy 'begins to fly backwards', 'collapses', etc.

Are people actually teaching that way?

I personally like the idea of learning about stalls (and have done stalls on a wide range of canopies) but am not used to people being actually taught to fully stall their canopy. However, I'm not in the US so don't see how things are taught there.

I'm used to most people only exploring the stall to the point of the edge of a full stall, where the canopy begins to rock back, and then immediately recovering. That's quite different from actually having the canopy fully stalled for a few seconds before recovery. One gets into the philosophical issue of whether one is in a "full" stall if one is in the edge of a full stall for a split second only.

Anyone want to comment on how the B license stuff is taught? Are jumpers only passed if they do have their canopy in a good stall, bucking around, pulled into a horseshoe shape for some canopies, etc.?

[excaza 1]

When I was going through the card with one of my instructors, she had me work up to the full stall. I spent a few jumps bringing myself right to the edge of the stall and recovering, because it's an important point to know itself. After that, I spent a couple jumps putting it into the bucking full stall and learning how to recover from it.

Personally, I think they're both necessary things to experience and learn how to recognize, but I'm still a youngin'

[TracyS 0]

Yes, you do fully stall the canopy to the point of it collapsing. It is to teach you what it feels like, how to deal with it and at what point in your toggle or riser travel it will occur.
It is also part of a canopy course.
If you are going to try it on your own, please be sure to discuss it with your S&TA and instructors so that they can give you guidance on what to expect and how to do it properly.
I am still too new at this to give you any other advice than that.

Edited for spelling.

Canopies must all be female. If I treat mine good, she gives me a good ride. If I slap her in the bag, she will dump me like a turd.

Courtesy of PRE7117, love that line.

[dthames 0]

I tried several times to actually make mine collapse. I could get it right to the edge but it would not (on the rears) collapse. Well, not with the input I was applying. After about the 4th flight when I tried it, I reached up really high on the risers and really hauled down on it. That worked. Some on the ground gasped as they didn't know I was training.

I think I would have been passed with less than a full stall. But I expected what I was learning had some real value.

Instructor quote, “What's weird is that you're older than my dad!”

[excaza 1]

I would hope with 3200 jumps he knows what a stall is

[TracyS 0]

My apologies for not seeing that in the OP's info.
I am clearly out of my league posting in the same thread as you.
I would think the OP also knows they are necessary things to learn as you pointed out.

Canopies must all be female. If I treat mine good, she gives me a good ride. If I slap her in the bag, she will dump me like a turd.

Courtesy of PRE7117, love that line.

[excaza 1]

TracyS

I am clearly out of my league posting in the same thread as you.

A little high strung, are we?

[TracyS 0]

Not at all.

Since we were in a mood for pointing out what I missed, I thought it only appropriate to offer my humblest apologies.
You were clearly correct that I should have noticed that the OP had 3200 jumps and that my post was therefore unnecessary, unlike your wisdom of pointing out that learning stalls is a necessary and valuable thing.

Again, my humble apologies for not noticing that the OP was clearly not in need of my input.

Canopies must all be female. If I treat mine good, she gives me a good ride. If I slap her in the bag, she will dump me like a turd.

Courtesy of PRE7117, love that line.

[excaza 1]

TracyS

Again, my humble apologies for not noticing that the OP was clearly not in need of my input.

Yep, because that's clearly what I said. Perhaps some reading comprehension before the snark would be prudent.

Lighten up, damn...

[TracyS 0]

Nothing wrong with my reading comprehension.

You wrote "Personally, I think they're both necessary things to experience and learn how to recognize, but I'm still a youngin' "

Do you somehow think that, or anything else in your post was not stuff the OP, with 3200 jumps, did not already know?

It was you who chose to respond to my post with your commentary. You should have just kept your fingers to yourself and let the OP take whatever was of value from either of our post. If you're going to start pointing out the obvious, you should make sure that your own post was truly of value to the conversation.
Why don't we just let this die here and now so that the OP can get some feedback from people with more experience than either of us.

Canopies must all be female. If I treat mine good, she gives me a good ride. If I slap her in the bag, she will dump me like a turd.

Courtesy of PRE7117, love that line.

[excaza 1]

TracyS

Do you somehow think that, or anything else in your post was not stuff the OP, with 3200 jumps, did not already know?

The question was "how is it taught?" I answered.

Yep, your reading comprehension is just roarin' along.

[TracyS 0]

You still miss the obvious point that your original commentary to me was unnecessary. You offered your input to the OP as did I. Your input may have had more relevance, in fact I believe it did.
Your reply to me did nothing to answer his question and was simply a smartass comment to someone else who dared to offer input that you saw as inferior to yours. I did not set out to start a pissing contest with you.
Let the OP take whatever he finds of value from the input that is offered.

As I said, my apologies for posting in the same thread as you. I was clearly in the wrong.

Canopies must all be female. If I treat mine good, she gives me a good ride. If I slap her in the bag, she will dump me like a turd.

Courtesy of PRE7117, love that line.

[pchapman 261]

TracyS

I thought it only appropriate to offer my humblest apologies.

No problem, we're all just discussing stuff here, and the audience is more than just the original poster.

Yes I like doing stalls...but they are going to be intimidating to newer jumpers, and those who have never been taught much about them.

If someone has downsized a bunch and has never done full stalls, I am not yet sure to what degree I would advocate the jumper trying them. If someone has never done them, they should start on a docile canopy. So (as the USPA seems to be doing) it is easier to start with the newbies and at least give them some exposure to stalls, whether or not they want to play with them down the road, beyond just testing the stall point.

Hearing from people who have recently gone through the USPA B license requirements is useful!

[TracyS 0]

pchapman, thanks.
I am going through the B license requirements right now and recently went through a Flight-1 canopy course.
It was a lot of fun and as part of the course, we had to go up and do riser stalls and then toggle stalls.
To pass the course, we had to completely stall the canopy to the point of it folding back on itself. Wow!, that was quite a ride!
Part of what is being taught is that every time you go to a new canopy, you should go back to the basics to see how the new canopy performs, such as where the stall point on that particular canopy is, and how it behaves in the stall and recovery.

Canopies must all be female. If I treat mine good, she gives me a good ride. If I slap her in the bag, she will dump me like a turd.

Courtesy of PRE7117, love that line.

[excaza 1]

TracyS

Your reply to me did nothing to answer his question and was simply a smartass comment

Agreed.

Quote

to someone else who dared to offer input that you saw as inferior to yours.

The hell? No. Lighten up.

[TracyS 0]

Dude!,

As I suggested before, why don't we just let this die where it is and let the OP get on with getting useful input instead of having his thread hijacked with irrelevant pissing back and forth.

I'm done.

Canopies must all be female. If I treat mine good, she gives me a good ride. If I slap her in the bag, she will dump me like a turd.

Courtesy of PRE7117, love that line.

[skybytch 259]

We teach in our course to hold it until they feel it start to stall - ie when it starts to rock - for both toggle and rear riser stalls. The point of the exercise is to know what it feels like just prior to stall (both ways), so if they ever find themselves feeling the same thing they will know what is going on and how to react.

[mistercwood 287]

pchapman

Yes I like doing stalls...but they are going to be intimidating to newer jumpers, and those who have never been taught much about them.

I guess it's about the way they're taught, too. My instructor had me do a complete stall on Stage 1, we fell backwards for maybe a second before I let the toggles up - quickly. The diving surge afterwards was interesting... During the debrief I asked what the point of doing the stall was, instructor pointed out the safety aspects, and why I needed to know how the canopy felt just before the stall so I could avoid it at low altitude. He then grinned and said it was also something to do for fun (with adequate height, of course). I guess my point is that because of the matter of fact way it was presented to me, I never saw a reason to be intimidated, just another piece of information to better help me understand how a canopy flies.

You are playing chicken with a planet - you can't dodge and planets don't blink. Act accordingly.

[popsjumper 2]

If full, folded up, stalls are not taught at any DZ for the early-jumper progression it very well should be, IMO.

What TracyS was taught and experienced is top-notch training as far as I'm concerned.

Students not only need to know what an impending stall feels like and what to do, but they also need to know how to recover from that folded up, "flying backwards" mess above their heads.

You can see why in the post above this one...."the surge forward was...interesting".

I teach stalls to post-AFF students....starting with impending and working up to full, "fall-out-of-the-sky" stalls on both toggles and rears. The sign-off says "stall". It doesn't say, "impending stall".

My reality and yours are quite different.
I think we're all Bozos on this bus.
Falcon5232, SCS8170, SCSA353, POPS9398, DS239

[ufk22 32]

This used to be pretty easy. All students were flying really big really slow canopies.
These days, how far to allow the canopy to go into a stall is really dependent on the type of canopy the student (or B licence candidate) is flying. With a big slow canopy, taking it into a full collaping stall is a good thing.
If someone is flying a Sabre loaded at close to 1-1, coming out of a full stall cna easily get them into massive line twists.

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.

[DocPop 1]

popsjumper

If full, folded up, stalls are not taught at any DZ for the early-jumper progression it very well should be, IMO.

What TracyS was taught and experienced is top-notch training as far as I'm concerned.

Students not only need to know what an impending stall feels like and what to do, but they also need to know how to recover from that folded up, "flying backwards" mess above their heads.

You can see why in the post above this one...."the surge forward was...interesting".

I teach stalls to post-AFF students....starting with impending and working up to full, "fall-out-of-the-sky" stalls on both toggles and rears. The sign-off says "stall". It doesn't say, "impending stall".

I agree. Teaching someone to go to the edge of a stall but no further has some value, but it doesn't teach how to recover from a full stall, or provide the confidence that having experienced a full stall provides.

"The ground does not care who you are. It will always be tougher than the human behind the controls."

~ CanuckInUSA

[ShotterMG 0]

Serious question; other than returning to full flight, what else is "learned" about how to recover from a full stall? Thanks

[davelepka 4]

Quote

Serious question; other than returning to full flight, what else is "learned" about how to recover from a full stall? Thanks

Nothing, but that's the most important part. If you dump the toggles to full flight out of a stall, the canopy will dive before returning to full flight. Do this on final, and you would pogo yourself into the ground. Learn to do it the right way, by easing up on the toggles, and you can recover from a low-altitude stall and not break your legs on landing.

Isn't that enough?

[popsjumper 2]

ShotterMG

Serious question; other than returning to full flight, what else is "learned" about how to recover from a full stall? Thanks

Along with Dave's explanation, I'll offer this as a real-life example of what can be learned for recovering from a stall.
(Warning: Do NOT do this like I did.)

When I came back to skydiving it was to a different world than what I had previously experienced. Relearning canopy control was a major to-do goal for me. Part of that was stall recovery.

Well, they told me what to do and how to do it and all was well and good....until I did it. Take note: They did warn me about this.

The stall, the feeling of the floor dropping out from under me and the feeling of falling backwards scared the shit out of me. I screamed like a little school girl and slammed those toggles all the way back up....major mistake.

I realized I screwed up when the canopy dove out in front of me and below me and I'm looking down a canopy with slack lines thinking I'm going to fall into it and get wrapped up like a Christmas present. I screamed the school-girl scream again.

The sudden jerk of the lines getting taut was not pleasant but the realization of having missed the canopy was just great!

So, I landed and went into the hangar. The S&TA said, "You did it. You stalled it didn't you?" "Yeah, how did you know? "I heard you screaming....both times."

Lesson learned: Don't let 'em up fast and uncontrolled. Smoothly, gently and evenly is the way to go.


And to the poster about line twists: Yeah, if you don't let them up evenly, line twists are likely regardless of canopy size or wingloading. That's why we teach (tell and demonstrate) smoothly, gently and evenly.

My reality and yours are quite different.
I think we're all Bozos on this bus.
Falcon5232, SCS8170, SCSA353, POPS9398, DS239

[pchapman 261]

ShotterMG

Serious question; other than returning to full flight, what else is "learned" about how to recover from a full stall? Thanks

This may well be in line with what you are thinking, who knows:

I figure it is to add practical experience to the book learning. The book learning on stalls is a start, but not necessarily easy to apply when someone actually stalls. (Exhibit 1: popsjumper's tale above) Therefore the procedures should be put into practice in an actual stall, rather than just learned as theory.

Learning to approach the edge of a stall and then back off is good too, as one should know the stall point of a canopy. But going the next step and actually stalling allows for more to be learned.

Beyond the recovery, there probably isn't really any vital reason to explore stalls? It can be interesting, fun, and expand one's knowledge, but not really vital at all to regular skydiving. One might say the same of CRW for example.
(And I say that as someone who likes CRW, so that's not a slight.)