Is the AFF rating too easy?

[kallend 1,935]

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I walked uphill (both ways) to school every day, in heavy deep snow and only had PBJ sandwiches on Wonderbread.

You too? (Well, we didn't have Wonderbread, we had to eat gristle).

...

The only sure way to survive a canopy collision is not to have one.

[strop45 0]

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You too? (Well, we didn't have Wonderbread, we had to eat gristle).

You were lucky. We lived for three months in a paper bag in a septic tank. We used to have to get up at six in the morning, clean the paper bag, eat a crust of stale bread, go to work down t' mill, fourteen hours a day, week-in week-out, for sixpence a week, and when we got home our Dad would thrash us to sleep wi' his belt.

The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits." -- Albert Einstein

[DanG 1]

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You were lucky. We lived for three months in a paper bag in a septic tank. We used to have to get up at six in the morning, clean the paper bag, eat a crust of stale bread, go to work down t' mill, fourteen hours a day, week-in week-out, for sixpence a week, and when we got home our Dad would thrash us to sleep wi' his belt.

Your Dad had a belt?!? Lucky bastard.

Seriously, it seems the answer to the title question, "Is the AFF rating too easy?" is entirely dependant on the age of the responder. There have been many of these threads, none of them ever has any useful information.

Can someone please start bitching about the Coach rating? Those discussions are always fascinating, too.

- Dan G

[Para5-0 0]

Sure, I can accomodate,
The rquirements are absurd. 100 jumps, B license..are you nuts. I have been advocating raising it to 200 and a C. Nobody cares. I am told it has been brought up numerous times and voted down.
Figure of the first 100 0-25 working on A license, so that leaves 75 jumps to work on your skills to the point you can fly with a student and presumably assist them in learning.
There is no valid reason that I see not to raise the standard. Except , I do hear that small cesna DZ's will have trouble getting people that have that experience. OMG if you do not have a skydiver with 200 jumps who can take a coach course are you really a DZ or are you a small group of friends with a plane and a place to land.
How about we make a Coach Pre-Course and teach how to be coaches and then incorporate it with the coach course.

[wmw999 2,382]

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OMG if you do not have a skydiver with 200 jumps who can take a coach course are you really a DZ or are you a small group of friends with a plane and a place to land.

Maybe that's what a DZ is.

Wendy P.

There is nothing more dangerous than breaking a basic safety rule and getting away with it. It removes fear of the consequences and builds false confidence. (tbrown)

[ozzy13 0]

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Sure, I can accomodate,
The rquirements are absurd. 100 jumps, B license..are you nuts.

Wait a second here.. Mr. double standers.. You old timers were Jump Masters at 100 jumps.... So what you are saying is that was ok for you guys back then but now its not ok to get your coach rating at 100 jump which give less responsibly then back then with the JM rating? Make up your mind!!!

Never give the gates up and always trust your rears!

[flydog 0]

Back in the day JM's at 100 jumps were different. They had responsibility in the plane and dealing with S/L. They were not in freefall trying to fly themselves and supervise others. I see no double standard. In the aircraft is one thing in the air is another.

[kallend 1,935]

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Back in the day JM's at 100 jumps were different. .

I guess they walked uphill to school both ways through deep snow, and had only gristle to eat, too.

...

The only sure way to survive a canopy collision is not to have one.

[ufk22 33]

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Back in the day JM's at 100 jumps were different. .

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I guess they walked uphill to school both ways through deep snow, and had only gristle to eat, too.

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I think you're missing the point. The "old" jumpmaster rating wasn't a teaching rating and also didn't involve/need any freefall skills. A good jumpmaster needed to be able to gear-up and pin-check the students prior to boarding, make sure the S/L was properly connected, monitor the students climb out, and be able to see and remember what the student did after leaving the airplane.

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.

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[Para5-0 0]

First off, They didnt have a coach rating, back in the stone age. So I need not go further but to appeae you. The AFF JM requirements were BIC Course, 6 Hours FF.. for the most part, to explain it so you will understand the AFFJM rating, (It is you right now)(New AFF graduate with snot in his goggles, who is trying to get as much experience as he can by shuting up, watching, listening, and learning from an Old Timer)

BIC=Basic Instructors Course.

Where are you getting this 100 jump JM stuff? Are you talking about the Jump Master Rating? Where you were responsible for overall safety of the load, exit order, spotting,,,Etc? Okay, you win the argument, you can have 100 jumps and load a plane and spot for a load. But you are not ready to be a Freefall Specialist. You still have pie in your face, and need to wipe it off and worship the Ole Timers as you put it. And by the way you owe beer.

[ozzy13 0]

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And by the way you owe beer.

NOT AS MUCH AS YOU DO

Never give the gates up and always trust your rears!

[DSE 5]

I'd have to agree with you about the coach course for the most part.
Our DZ doesn't really use coaches for anything. We're too small. I've never had a paid jump as a coach for anything except wingsuit FFC's (me owning the suit and often owning the rig).

To an extent, I agree with the idea that AFFI's just off the course need to spend time being mentored, too. In the AFFI course, emphasis is put on Cat C and D jumps, and you're *supposed* to know how to teach already. I've shadowed many AFFI courses in the past 10 months...and am knocked over by how many people can't teach, and by the number of people who have spent their skydiving career on their ass or head that have few belly skills.

I still don't agree the course is "easier" as opposed to different. A big part of my basis is discussions with nearly 200 years of skydiving experience from DZO's, five AFF CD's, and current AFFI's. You used to have 6 opps to get scores in various portions of the course. Now you have 27 opps to fail in four jumps. Yeah, it's different, but an UnSat is still an Unsat. The scoring changed, but it's still not easier from what I've read and have been told. Just different. FWIW, I watched 50% of a class unsuccessfully complete the course only this morning. Isn't that was the no-pass percentage was in the "old days?"

[Para5-0 0]

If I understand the New course, and I am sure someone will explain it better you have four opportunities to get three satisfactories. Two Cat C and then one Cat D. So you need to be at 75%. pass 3 out of four attempts. If you pass both cat C's with a partner(alternating Main/Reserve) then you have two shots to pass a Cat D. So hypothedically if you bomb your first attempt at the cat D you get another chance, and you have to declare it. Meaning you can take time off to practice it the jump. Something that should have been done before you got there. Sounds like a coin toss to me.
The old system once you started you started the evaluation jumps, Period. You had 6 jumps to aquire 12 points. Each jump was worth 4 points. As I mentioned earlier I have heard of very few 4's ever being given. (another problem for another story)
So you need to avg. 2 points over 6 jumps. Lets say you bust your hard deck or lose your student, that is an automatic 0. Forcing you to get a 4 or at least two 3's if you have time. By dragging the evaluation process out to six jumps it most definately will rear any dificiencies in your flying.

The new course is most definately different, it sounds like a coin toss to me. Sounds like an Obama course to me. (like having swimming or track in the olympics not use stop watches because it is unfair to have someone lose.)(Share the ratings, we should all have them)(The new socialistic approach to the world).
I assisted a second grade class at our DZ the other day and had the class come in and sit in a room and watch some videos explaining the sport, I told them to sit on the floor "Indian style" Oh we dont use that term anymore. We wouldnt want to offend the indians. Are you F'in kidding me? We dont play dodge ball anymore because we do not want the weak to feel as if we are picking on them. Same here we do not want those not ready to be a full AFF Instructor to feel bad about their flying skills so let make a pre course to help everyone, and then let give redos and more practice jumps, and lets eat cupcakes before we get on the plane, and when we land we can all hold hands and play ring around the Rosie if of course it doesnt offend Rosie.
I beleive the AFFI course should be the most challenging course in the sport. End of my discussion onthis topic. That will do two things.
1. If you earn it give respect to you at your dropzone.
2. Give respect and integrity to the rating for those who have it.
Tell me the negatives of the older method. I will even help everyone out, I heard it was too subjective. What exactly was a 3 or what exactly was a 4. Different i/e's with different scores for similar jumps.
If there is one AFFI who recently got his/her rating and admitted that deep down inside they were a bit ashamed or embarrassed to spread the great news of the rating around the DZ, why would that be? Wouldnt we elliminate that if the course had integrity, legitimacy, and was repected by the skydiving community.

[pilotdave 0]

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you have four opportunities to get three satisfactories. Two Cat C and then one Cat D. So you need to be at 75%. pass 3 out of four attempts. If you pass both cat C's with a partner(alternating Main/Reserve) then you have two shots to pass a Cat D. So hypothedically if you bomb your first attempt at the cat D you get another chance, and you have to declare it. Meaning you can take time off to practice it the jump. Something that should have been done before you got there. Sounds like a coin toss to me.

Not quite true. Once you start evals, practice time is over. You don't just declare which jumps are evals.

My course did cat D evals first and moved on to Cat C after we passed.

Here's some of what I think can be different between a course now and a older course...

We were able to "go hot" from the 20 minute call to the climbout on a practice jump. So all that in-plane stuff got evaluated on a practice jump. For the first actual eval, we went hot in the door, so we didn't have to do all the plane stuff. The Cat C eval brought it all together and had to be complete from 20 minute call to debrief. But for the first eval, pressure was way off because we could spend the plane ride thinking about the jump and not worrying about a mock student the whole time.

In the plane, evaluators were good students. The fun didn't start until exit. Not like in my coach course where my evaluator handed his goggles to someone else behind by back, turned his altimeter so it looked broken, etc. That same evaluator did AFF evals a long time ago and really messed with students bigtime. There was really none of that at the AFF course.

The intensity level was lowered a bit for evals. No idea how the eval difficulty compared to other courses. But I do know they challenged us much more during practice. Not that there's anything wrong with that. But I have my doubts that eval jumps were any easier than practice jumps at the old course.

Finally, ground evals. Ya couldn't fail. Literally. I don't think teaching ability was evaluated in any way. It was thoroughly debriefed... a very good learning experience. But I don't think the old course would have passed so many people through, based on ground evals alone. I know that my course was not the same as other modern courses in this regard though.

Dave

[DSE 5]

In my course, we were "time in" from the moment the evaluator said we were "time in" til after we hit the ground and had a walk n' talk.

One guy in our class had to spend an extra two days learning to teach the ground stuff.

We also did Cat D first, Cat C second.
If you do well, you can avoid the second Cat C.

We don't have 6 opps to pass the ground, either, but in the old days, you could have two good, two bad, and two good. And numbers were apparently more arbitrary.
One example of why I feel the old system needed to change;

Two guys went through the course at the same time.
One didn't have six hours of freefall when he started the course, he crossed six hours freefall during the course. The other had over 30 hours freefall and had been instructing as a coach for years.
The guy that has 30 hours is a no-BS guy. He called BS on the instructor sleeping with his student. He didn't pass. The six hour guy passed. The instructor had a hard-on for the 30 hour guy.
30 hour guy is a great AFF instructor, tremendous mentor, and very good tunnel coach.
But he didn't make friends nor kiss ass with the evaluator. With the new program, it's somewhat harder to be busted for that, given the very clear chart and Sat/UnSat opportunities.

[legalize1966 0]

how did you do that don't you need to do a Main side AND reserve side? OR did you mean you do Cat C first and cat d second and if you do good on the tw oc's and the first d you avoid the second d?

[tdsnyr99 0]

Pre-course is pre-course and evals are evals. Once the evaluation process starts you are doing just that, evals. You don't flip back and fourth because you need more practice. Once you start evaluations usually Cat-D's first that's it. Now, once we start the pre-course we can do as many jumps as you think you need or that time allows. But like I said once you start the evaluation process thats what we're doing. We don't stop in the middle and go back to practice. At that point if you think you need more practice schedule a rating course at a later date.

[DSE 5]

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how did you do that don't you need to do a Main side AND reserve side? OR did you mean you do Cat C first and cat d second and if you do good on the tw oc's and the first d you avoid the second d?

Cat C. Cat D, Cat C was how my flow went.
I should have been more clear. Yes, you can avoid the second Cat d.

Just finished up my seventh AFF course today (shadowing), watching the same 50% unsuccessful rate that seemed to be the norm for the old course.

[kmills0705 0]

Have you been through the "new style" AFF I Rating course? If not, then you have no basis of comparison. Period.

Kim Mills
USPA D21696
Tandem I, AFF I and Static Line I

[Para5-0 0]

TDS,
If what you are saying is true, I do not think all the I/E's got the memo.
I know as a fact that courses are given with practice jumps in between evaluation or "Hot" jumps. If you get an unsat on a jump, students are now doing practice jumps to gear them up for attempt 2.

[kmills0705 0]

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TDS,
If what you are saying is true, I do not think all the I/E's got the memo.
I know as a fact that courses are given with practice jumps in between evaluation or "Hot" jumps. If you get an unsat on a jump, students are now doing practice jumps to gear them up for attempt 2.

I just finished the course last Wednesday with Bram Clement. Once we are hot we are hot. There are no more practice jumps.

Kim Mills
USPA D21696
Tandem I, AFF I and Static Line I

[Para5-0 0]

K,
Please do not take anything I am saying personal, I am sure you did well and Bram put on a good course. My problem with the course is continuity. Like I said if Bram ran the course that way, not all I/E's are drinking the same Koolaid.
Also, do not let the discussion discourage you or take it as a shot at the rating you earned. We should always be looking to improve the training.

[JohnMitchell 16]

I got my AFF-I in 1983 the first time. A few years later it expired when I moved to a non AFF DZ. I took the course again in 2007 and got my rating back. Seemed like a lot of work both times. I was surprised to find that someone could bust out of the course, come back in a few weeks and pass one more jump to get the rating. That still doesn't seem right to me.

BTW, in 1983, AFF was still pretty new and none of us knew what to expect. There was a lot of learning during the course, not just evaluation. I don't think there's anything wrong with that. If you want to evaluate someone, you must first let them know what to expect. Also, those course directors have a ton of knowledge. I'd feel cheated if it wasn't shared with me.

[kmills0705 0]

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K,
Please do not take anything I am saying personal, I am sure you did well and Bram put on a good course. My problem with the course is continuity. Like I said if Bram ran the course that way, not all I/E's are drinking the same Koolaid.
Also, do not let the discussion discourage you or take it as a shot at the rating you earned. We should always be looking to improve the training.

I wholeheartedly agree with this. There should be a standard. Definitely.

Kim Mills
USPA D21696
Tandem I, AFF I and Static Line I

[wmw999 2,382]

What he said about AFF in 1983. Except that I haven't gone to get mine back yet. At least I think it's yet...

Wendy P.

There is nothing more dangerous than breaking a basic safety rule and getting away with it. It removes fear of the consequences and builds false confidence. (tbrown)