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New AFF requirements.

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Your analogy blows mine away because I saw that happen back in the late 90's by a respected I/E of the time.
Again, keep in mind I am in NJ right now with 30+ inches of snow on the ground and doing what we do best in the Northeast, complain.lol The warm and fuzzy feeling I was refering to wasnt with myself it was with the new AFF guys/girls. Anyhow, your post is to the point of why if we had just a little bit of oversight of a new instructor, we can help them learn skills without almost killing someone. The old adage, no need to recreate the wheel. If I can debrief a new AFF and give them some help that would bnefit future jumps for them that is a good thing, hence the reason I am in favor of a probation period or JM rating. The example girl with the tata's should be under strict observation and be mentoring under a seasoned AFFI. Instead of just letting them go in the hopes thye dont really screw up. I know as a fact many DZ's do this already, so why not follow suit and make some minor adjuctments. This would be a much easier conversation over a cocktail after a day of jumping.
As far as Ozzy, we are trying to save you from yourself schmuck, in the most loving way possible.
I only have 5 freefly jumps because I have been babysitting you since you got your AFF. Wait a minute, kinda like I am suggesting to USPA, Why dont you post your first (Beer) off DZ landing for us to view? Let the rest of DZ.com enjoy the fine art of a 1 and a 1/2 front flip with a graceful face plant in the mud.

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... Three people running it and traveling the country gave it standardization.



...and one of them, no longer associated with USPA, was such an asshole, IMHO. He had no business running anything involved with dealing with real people.
My reality and yours are quite different.
I think we're all Bozos on this bus.
Falcon5232, SCS8170, SCSA353, POPS9398, DS239

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in a nutshell jumpers with less than 500 jumps must hold a coach rating or foreign FAI recognized equivalent for 12 months before receiving and instructor rating.



That's excellent.



It's good, but not great "yet".

It will be great when we can get it to address the "meat hauler" mentality of drive by coach & tandem ratings in a weeks time.
----------------------------------------------
You're not as good as you think you are. Seriously.

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So yea I find it funny as hell when people say and think time in this sport is meaningless, come back in 20 years if your still around and we'll see if your tune is changed.



Well here's the problem. I did talk to someone who had about 20-years in sport (according to the current definition used to determine if someone is qualified for a TI rating). They didn't have much to say other then that the tandem jump they did back in the '90s was fun (they weren't sure if it was '90 or '91). They haven't been at a DZ or touched a parachute since then so they didn't really have much to say beyond that. But hey, according to the USPA and the "time in sport" criteria currently used they have about 20-years in sport and meet one of the qualifications to get a TI rating.

It's not that time in sport is meaningless, it's just the way it is currently defined that makes it meaningless. If this is going to be used as a qualification then the "time in sport" clock should start from when you become a licensed skydiver.

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You hit the nail on the head. We can still run into trouble If you start the timer at a A.
A jumper could get his/her A, then not jump for a couple years then come back.
What is the difference from that and what your saying ... Nothing. So their has to be away to stop these loopholes...
Never give the gates up and always trust your rears!

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All right, as long as this can of worms is open . . .

Maybe we should do something along these lines:

Bill Booth and Ted Strong both said of tandem, "Now it's dual instruction! Just like how people learn to fly airplanes!" So maybe we should follow up on that. When a prospective flight student is ready to test he presents themselves to a FAA designated person for a check ride.

We could do the same without the FAA part. We could designate a number of people to conduct these "check dives" plus other things like can you pack, spot (or whatever passes for spotting these days,) can you do a proper gear check, perform in the hanging harness, plan a small RW jump, have a clue about the weather, know something about airplanes and what to do when it all goes sideways?

And if certain instructors keep signing off people for these check dives and their student's perform poorly it would be a clue to weed them out, or at least mark them for re-education. That's how it works if you're a certified flight instructor in airplanes. Send too many students for the check rides that flunk and you'll soon get a nasty phone call for the FAA FSDO.

It's like we have the whole instructing dynamic ass backwards. We test prospective instructors instead of their students. Or, at least we used to. We've now totally blown the way we certify new instructors so the only thing left is to hold them accountable for the performance of their students.

I've never liked, in total, how the "old" AFF certification courses were conducted. Even though I hold they were a 100% better than what's going on now. I always thought we should "teach" folks how to be instructors rather than have them just show up to be tested. I can't tell you how many times I watched otherwise competent AFF candidates blow their courses while biting my tongue. And I always got spoken to in those AFF Eval courses, for "sneak" teaching when I was just being paid to certify.

Before going further it should be said I believe about 70% of the current instructor corps is excellent and totally outstanding. Fifteen percent could benefit from some formalized "How to Instruct classes" and the last 15% needs to be stood up against a wall and shot.

Jay Stokes came the closest to a "fix it all" when he suggested some years ago a boot camp for prospective instructors. (Watch Professor Quade have a cow now!) But I think he was right. Prospective instructors should go somewhere where they live, eat, and shit skydiving instructor 101 for six-weeks at the hands of very experienced "sky-drill instructors."

And the idea that instructors should be held to different standards depending on the DZ they come from is ludicrous. Sure, DZ circumstances are varied, but students are the same all over. The inverse of that flawed thinking is over or under jump-suiting a student to make up for lack of flying skill on the part of the instructor.

Sure, there's Skydive University and that thing over in New Zealand but they aren't working, other than they exist. USPA can't do it either. Someone on their own dime has to take a chance and start up a boot camp for skydiving instructors. And sooner of later just like the FAA found a scapegoat to wash their hands of regulating skydiving (USPA) the USPA will defer and endorse this new thing.

There are hundreds of us out here. Instructors with the accumulated knowledge of the last 40 years. I wouldn't mind rotating in and out of such courses as a part time retirement career. If it doesn't happen it means all that accumulated knowledge goes to the grave with us. Over my time as an instructor I've worked for the best and the worst in this sport, but I learned a little bit from each and every one of them.

I learned about the sky from Frank Mott, Leo Orlowski, Don Balch (with him it was mostly how to get girls) but he did invent the "second check" so he gets a pass, from John Brasher, Al Frisby, Pat Works, Gary Douris, Bob Ceylia, Jim Wilkins, T Bird, and a hundred other guys.

My dream solution is 50 young prospective instructors stepping off a bus at 'o dark thirty in some godforsaken Arizona desert. "My name is Sky Drill Instructor NickD! And for the next six weeks your ass belongs to me! Look at the person next to you! In three weeks they'll be gone!

Yeah, we could fix it. If we just had the balls . . .

NickD :)

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You hit the nail on the head. We can still run into trouble If you start the timer at a A.
A jumper could get his/her A, then not jump for a couple years then come back.
What is the difference from that and what your saying ... Nothing. So their has to be away to stop these loopholes...



Could always do something like 3-years as a licensed skydiver and a minimum of 600 jumps in the last 3-years.

Then you get some time actually in the sport and a certian level of currency.

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And the idea that instructors should be held to different standards depending on the DZ they come from is ludicrous. Sure, DZ circumstances are varied, but students are the same all over. The inverse of that flawed thinking is over or under jump-suiting a student to make up for lack of flying skill on the part of the instructor.



No one suggested as much, so if that's what you got out of it, maybe your reading glasses are dirty.:P

Requirements for instructors across the board need a standard that prospective and recurrency allows for dropzones that fly multiple planes and dropzones that offer only a 182.
Bottom line.... If you're instructing at Podunk Skydive in Tama, Iowa, you can't get enough jumps with AFF students to stay current if the requirements demand high numbers that only big DZ's can sustain. At least that's some of the thinking behind "Time in sport" requirements.

The rest of it, we've been round and round. The hell of it is, I'm hearing the same BS in the production industry. "These kids are gonna kill somebody someday, they don't know how to rig tracks like we learned. We learned before lunchboxes and 10K's and blah blah blah." The old-timers in any industry bitch about the newbs not knowing as much. Funny thing, fatality rate in the production world has almost dwindled to zip, not terribly unlike skydiving. Maybe the sky isn't falling after all.:P

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Just a thought, how about an average jumps per year number?



I think the difficulties lie in the size and location of the drop zone. I am at a small midwest Cessna drop zone. I made almost 175 jumps last year. That was A LOT.

My guess is that many out there would look at that number and laugh. [:/]
Kim Mills
USPA D21696
Tandem I, AFF I and Static Line I

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Just a thought, how about an average jumps per year number?



I think the difficulties lie in the size and location of the drop zone. I am at a small midwest Cessna drop zone. I made almost 175 jumps last year. That was A LOT.

My guess is that many out there would look at that number and laugh. [:/]



It also depends in large part on the ability of the jumper to pay for all those jumps. Do we only want to allow people who can afford X number of jumps per year to be instructors? Of course they can offset the price of jumps by packing or working manifest or some other extra job, but all of those would severely limit the number of days left for accumulating all those jumps, making the above poster's point about fitting those jumps in even more valid.

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It also depends in large part on the ability of the jumper to pay for all those jumps. Do we only want to allow people who can afford X number of jumps per year to be instructors? Of course they can offset the price of jumps by packing or working manifest or some other extra job, but all of those would severely limit the number of days left for accumulating all those jumps, making the above poster's point about fitting those jumps in even more valid.



I would not want to have only Instructors with money as you put it.
Currency I think is very important. You guys are talking about smaller DZ's and jump numbers. You need 6 hours of free fall for AFF and 500 jumps for tandem. So I dont understand your argument.

You don't want to put a currency requirement on ratings but as you say its hard to get 250 jumps in a year.
So lets say the average jumper does 100 jumps at your DZ. It would take five years before they could get a Tandem rating. That's what you guys are dealing with now. I don't think anyone here wants to make it harder on the smaller DZ's at all. Just want to put out better instructors. Putting a currency requirement would not change anything at your DZ. If I guy/gal only does 10 jumps one of those years. I really don't think getting that said jumper current before going for their rating and last If they cant afford to jump , how the hell will they afford the course?
Never give the gates up and always trust your rears!

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You don't want to put a currency requirement on ratings but as you say its hard to get 250 jumps in a year.
So lets say the average jumper does 100 jumps at your DZ. It would take five years before they could get a Tandem rating. That's what you guys are dealing with now. I don't think anyone here wants to make it harder on the smaller DZ's at all. Just want to put out better instructors. Putting a currency requirement would not change anything at your DZ. If I guy/gal only does 10 jumps one of those years. I really don't think getting that said jumper current before going for their rating and last If they cant afford to jump , how the hell will they afford the course?




Maybe they afford the course by doing 50-100 jumps that year instead of 150-200? Or maybe they are lucky to have a kind DZO like I did who will allow them to "charge" the course and associated jumps on their DZ account and work it off once they get the rating?

(I did actually do 150-200 jumps/year plus some tunnel time the 2 years before getting my rating, but as a student it wasn't easy. It helped that I worked manifest and was able to do some coach jumps. But I was getting paid to go to school. I'd imagine it would be much more difficult for someone who wasn't.)

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Just out of curiosity who ever said being a skydiving instructor was easy and cheap. Ask a commerical pilot taking passengers how much he paid for his ratings. Why do we have to be the gentler, kinder, generation.. It reminds me of socialization. Lets take all the jumps out there and distribute the number evenly thoughout the skydiving community so we are all equal and then everyone can become an instructor. Distribute the Jumps...I am starting a movement. OOPS I forgot I am a right wing conservative.

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Ok I just got my Parachutist.
Here we go:
56 people got their coach rating this month.
Out of the 56. Three of them got their AFF rating
Also one guy got his IAD rating, Tandem rating,and Coach rating in the same month.
Discalmer: I dont know any of them and also dont know the Circumstances behind it.
The guy with three ratings is from Poland or thats what it states.

Food for thought....

If you are wondering if I have too much time. The answer is yes, Its winter B|

Never give the gates up and always trust your rears!

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Just out of curiosity who ever said being a skydiving instructor was easy and cheap. Ask a commerical pilot taking passengers how much he paid for his ratings. Why do we have to be the gentler, kinder, generation.. It reminds me of socialization. Lets take all the jumps out there and distribute the number evenly thoughout the skydiving community so we are all equal and then everyone can become an instructor. Distribute the Jumps...I am starting a movement.


+1 I dont think we should go down that road. If so then why not give raitings to all the 200 jump # jumpers regardless of ability, lord knows not everbody can be natural flyer.....:S
Nothing opens like a Deere!

You ignorant fool! Checks are for workers!

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Here are some currency / time-in-sport requirements that don't seem to restrictive to me:
"3 years as a current USPA member" - ie, if you let your membership lapse, that time doesn't count. So if you made a jump, then took 10 years off, chances are you didn't keep up your membership. Only the first of those 10 years is likely to count.

"6 hours of freefall with 200 jumps in the last 18 months" - similar to the wingsuit currency requirement. Not too hard to do if you're motivated. Not too expensive if you can afford to take an instructor course.

"500 jumps in the last 4 years" - yeah, technically you could get around this by making 30 jumps the first year, 10 the second, 10 the third, and 450 the fourth year, but then you'd still be somewhat current.



Just some food for thought.
Brian

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Here are some currency / time-in-sport requirements that don't seem to restrictive to me:
"3 years as a current USPA member"



I don't think that's reasonable. Experience and currency are experience and currency. We either trust the signatures on a person's logbook or we don't. This is little but economic protectionism and bullying on the part of the USPA. It's chickenshit like this that makes people resent the USPA.

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"6 hours of freefall with 200 jumps in the last 18 months" - similar to the wingsuit currency requirement. Not too hard to do if you're motivated. Not too expensive if you can afford to take an instructor course.



Personally, and this ties in with what KMills posted, I think that's a bit on the stiff side for people with only a moderate amount of time and money, especially those who jump at a small Cessna DZ.

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Im not say that small dz's dont have great instructors.


Your not the only person bring this up but when you are learning something/ anything. Do you go to a moderate instructor or do you go to someone that is the best at what they do? These students are paying a lot of money.

Do you have to jump full time to get a rating? NO. I just think their should be some kind of currency prior to attending a course.

My biggest grip with the way it is, is how someone can get their coach rating one weekend. Never teach a student and get their AFF or Tandem rating the next weekend. I don't understand how USPA allows this to happen. The change that just happened is a step in the right direction.
Never give the gates up and always trust your rears!

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My biggest grip with the way it is, is how someone can get their coach rating one weekend. Never teach a student and get their AFF or Tandem rating the next weekend. I don't understand how USPA allows this to happen.



The focus these days is on air skills. Knowledge has been thrown under the bus. It explains why there is so much stupid shit going on. We're doing a piss-poor job of instilling knowledge and safety in the youngsters.
My reality and yours are quite different.
I think we're all Bozos on this bus.
Falcon5232, SCS8170, SCSA353, POPS9398, DS239

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