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stayhigh

To get back from far spot under x-brace.

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Too bad this thread has been so badly hijacked, a simple intelligent question deserves simple intelligent answers.



Agreed.

I was deep one day really deep, I was on a jvx 79 2.4, I was one of the only ones on the later groups to make it back. There were grapevines so many opted to land about a mile away in a clear area. i had landed in the grapes before with no worries so decided to go for it.

I used my rears and pulled them to a point where I could feel the airflow being disturbed and there was an evident kink in canopy and a bit of a flutter.

From there I just let it up a little until it felt like it was flying smooth and locked my elbows in place for a few minutes, I made it to the landing area.... Just, with a flat turn approach.

I was working at Lodi at the time, doing a fun jump between work jumps and remember Bill dause saying I had better make the next load when I manifested.

LOL :D that gave me the incentive to try a little harder than the others but that flight taught me alot about the rears on my canopy.
"When the power of love overcomes the love of power, then the world will see peace." - 'Jimi' Hendrix

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Wow. Tim and Morris, you guys fuckin suck.



Looks like "don´t take this too serious(ly?)" was a waste of letters...

Tim:
We are having fun here, don´t we? :-)

Stu:
Thanks!!
The speedworldrecord you´re mentioning still stands as the europeanspeedrecord and regarding the new distance record, Spain was correct...

Dave:
Thanks as well!!
And an additional specialthanks for that comp at SD Houston, great job!!
Remember how it took Hans Paulsen the best part of the airfield to come to a stop after that downwind speedrun? :-)
Ian:
If you´ve already been gone by that time you´ve missed the best and most extrem part!
Hans:
Wow!!!

DocPop:
A warm welcome! Take your time...

And to the topic:
As we all know, a basic rule is that rearrisers are the better choice in no or light winds, toggles the better choice if a tailwind (from a certain strength on, in a light tailwind you might still be better off with rears) comes into the picture.
(And not always but many times a long spot will come with a tailwind - that´s the good news - as you likely will have been among the last persons to leave the plane.)
In a tailwind you are looking for the lowest rate of descent to maximize the time under canopy as you are receiving "distance-covering-presents" from/by the wind every (additional) moment you spend in the sky.
Now question is, how much of a toggle/brakeinput will "deliver" the lowest possible rate of descent?
On a 7cell of the eighties this would have been about 1/2 brakes. Any deeper than that and you just altered your glidepath to/for the worse.
For the average loaded and seized intermediate chute of today it´s for sure deeper than 1/2 brakes, lets say 3/4 brakes (just to say something).
Now with high or ultrahigh loaded x-braced canopies its different again, it´s even deeper.
My rule for this type of canopies:
The higher the loading, the closer to the stallpoint is the point of lowest rate of descent. (The point you are looking for if you have a reasonable amount of tailwind "on your side".) So at a loading of "just" 1.9 80% brake/toggleinput might be ideal, at a loading of 2.7 it will be more likely 95%...

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Considering the other answers given in the thread I would say you missed the point.



I'm not even sure this thread has a point, except to highlight the fact that people who don't know what they're doing are jumping X-braced canopies.

I don't think I'm being too optimistic when I say that anyone jumping an x-braced canopy should already be an accomplished high perofrmance canopy pilot, and the simple issue of min. descent rate should not be a question in their mind.

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We all know that you would not make such a mistake nor have you ever done so in the past



This brings up another good point. Of course I have been out before, but it was not of my own doing. Shooting video on a tandem or AFF getting out last is a prime example. In that case, the go/no-go decision is not mine, but the instructor in the door. I took the job and agreed to film the jump, so if they're going, I'm going.

The point that this highlights is that when you jump an x-braced canopy, and then put your spotting and exit decisions in the hands of another, you had better be that much more familiar with your canopy as your chances of needing to use the maximum performance in any aspect goes up, be getting back from a long spot or dropping into a potentially tight alternate LZ.

There is a real lackadaisical attitude about high performance canopeis and their use in this sport. Jumpers seem to think that becasue they want to be a high performance canopy pilot, all they have to do is buy one and jump it, and Bob's your uncle, you're 10x cooler then you were last week.

That's bullshit. The same rule that we suggest newbies follow, that being to jump only what you can safely land given the worst case scenario, should apply to all jumpers. Nobody jumping a high performance canopy should be asking questions about how to achieve min decsent. That's like a guy buying a Ferrari, and then asking which gear to start off in. These are lessons that should have been learned on much lower performance canopies, and utilized and rehearsed ad nauseum over the course of 100's of jumps.

I'm not suggesting that people reach a point where the know how to fly every canopy at every loading, but they sure as hell should reach a point where they know how to evaluate the basic performance of a canopy, and then they should apply that knowledge to the first couple of jumps on any new canopy.

To make an even more direct comparison, how would you view the pilot of an Extra 300 who had questions about trim settings for landing? This is an ultra high performance aircraft, and the question itself is with regards to basic airmanship, not about the purpose for which the aircraft was built. If a guy new to the Extra has questions of other aerobatic pilots about snap rolls, or how the Extra behaves in a negative G pushover, then those would be valid questions that even an experienced aerobatic pilot might have if transitioning from a Pitts to an Extra, but if a pilot of such an airplane has questions about basic airmanship, that pilot is clearly in the wrong airplane, and their real problem is not their wonderings about trim, it's their choice of aircraft.

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Do all your answers to simple questions come with a free soapbox?



Did I not make a fair response to a question about basic airmanship on a very high performance canopy?

Should a person jumping such a canopy have those type of basic questions, or should they have learned those lessons prior to jumping a high performance canopy?

If someone asks what I believe to be a flawed question, I'm going to point out the flaw, not perpetuate the flaw by providing an answer. These threads are here for discussion and learning, and on this topic this is what I have to contribute. If you don't think it merits discussion, or that you (or anyone) could learn from it, then I guess I've failed you personally, and I am sorry. Hopefully someone out there understood my point of view and was able to take it into consideration.

"Keeping my fingers crossed":)

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I don't understand why there'd be any difference to these answers for x-braced canopies as opposed to any other type of canopy. Unless it was just to see if there was a pattern in flight behavior across some canopies as compared to others like velo works better on brakes and JVX works better on rears. I obviously don't know the answer to this question but I find myself wondering if responses to a more general question about any canopy would be any different?

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The question isn't about airmanship, your opinions of who should be jumping HP canopies or your other various opinions. If you'd like a disuission outside the OP's question, whether you think it is flawed or not, then start another thread.

Judging by the varied responses of very qualified pilots I'd say the question is valid. By inference I'd also say you believe that rear risers are the only answer on a long downwind run. OK that may work for you. Even if that was the case on my canopy it wouldn't matter because I can't hold the rears down as long as long I can hold the brakes down. Could my results change using different techniques? Very possibly, I don't have that much x-braced experience. Is the answer the same for steep trimmed canopies like the Velo and Xaos-21 versus flatter trimmed canopies? I don't know and I may learn something by reading other pilots replies. Telling me I'm not qualified, pull higher, stay in the plane etc. does fail me because I don't learn about other pilot's skills from that kind of response. If you'd rather not provide an answer to the original question that's fine, if you'd like to discuss other related matters I'm interested in that too if you post outside this thread.
Sometimes you eat the bear..............

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I just wanted to hear people's experience under different canopies.
No shit they all fly Diffrent and needs diffrent technique on diffrent wind situation. And i just wanted to know what each individual did to get the best results.

So if you are under x brace you shouldn't have any questions about canopy flight???? I don't think so.
Even between pd factory team, the question about canopy flight exist. They critic each other and they question one another for better technique.
Bernie Sanders for President 2016

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Xaos21 108 @ loaded at 2.2
This is a new canopy to me and it LOVES the ground! Usually, for me a long spot is due to high winds and or work jumps. which is no big deal as long as I take note of the spot at exit and in freefall so I can pull accordingly
High tail wind - toggles
light tail wind - rears

I have flown a velo 120 and the thing floats awesome!! using toggles, I can hang with students! The canopy seemed a little big though.
I would like to try the velo 103 to see how it Floats compared to the Xaos
Skydivers are nothing but a bunch of Narcissistic A$$holes!!
Front risers were made for pulling! Pal
MuFF#5640
D.S. # 2012

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Okay question: In a canopy course I took taught by Luigi Cani, he told us the best input for a long spot was 3/4 brakes. he related that he thought for years that rear risers were best, and someone (forget who, I think a PD Factory pilot) told him it was brakes. they did several test jumps on the same canopy loaded the same, and the PD guy got farther in brakes every time. Luigi said that when he finally rode brakes, he matched the distance the PD pilot was getting.
When he was asked, he said this concept applied to ALL canopies, x-brace to Manta.
Comments?

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

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I firmly believe there is not one single input that does the job for all situations.
It has been mentioned before in this thread that if you have a strong downwind push, brakes will most often give the best result, minimising decent rate and riding the wind back home.
With no downwind push, or very little, rears is often better, so any cross or head wind component and rears is the better option to extend the glide.

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I really hate to disagree with a canopy pilot that is much better than me on my best day

but after doing many crw jumps with x-braced I know the glide on my fx to be as flat as a braked but to be faster at the same glide angle, having a body your going to dock on to use as point of reference really teaches you what your achieving with whatever input your using.

Roy
They say I suffer from insanity.... But I actually enjoy it.

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I agree with Matt.

I would hope that, if you were coming back from a long spot, you would be going downwind (aircraft likely to have been running into wind, after all).

So, with a tailwind, max glide will be closer to min sink on the canopy than it would be in nil winds. IIRC, max glide on a parachute is around half brakes; min sink would be somewhere between three quarters and full brakes. The canopy is trimmed like that to provide decent forward speed for a flare (try standing up from a flare beginning at half brakes), and to penetrate higher winds.

Rear risers deform the canopy in a different way and they do not reduce the sink rate as much as control line inputs. As a result, using rears to lengthen glide in a slight headwind would be beneficial, whereas three-quarter brakes would actually reduce glide.

Anyone reading this should do some searching around "polar curves" if you want to know more.
--
BASE #1182
Muff #3573
PFI #52; UK WSI #13

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Anyone reading this should do some searching around "polar curves" if you want to know more.



Yeah! When teaching canopy control classes, I tried to avoid introducing glide polars, as that seems to be getting overly technical. But that whole relationship between headwind, tailwind, descent rate, forward speed, and glide angle just goes by people unless they have a mental framework into which to put all those factors together.

So in the end I do show the concept of glide polars. Not as a dry aero engineering graph exercise, but trying to relate it closely to canopy flight -- a side view of how fast you are moving and descending.

The concept doesn't say how a particular canopy flies, but it's a good start for understanding the age old question of how to make it back to the DZ.

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I fly a Velo 103 WL 2.1:1

With any sort of tailwind I will use deep brakes. While also While also streamlining my body position in my harness.

With a headwind and any penetration whatsoever, I add a little brake or rear risers to extend my airtime and cover more ground. If I am not penetrating, I will 'stairstep' with my front risers. They won't get more penetration but they will reduce the exposure time in the high winds. You might be able to gain a little more penetration on the 'flat' portions of the stairstep.

My other canopy is not crossbraced and I fly the same way. Crossbracing doesn't make that big of a difference in flying technique when it comes to simply gliding.
"Any language where the unassuming word fly signifies an annoying insect, a means of travel, and a critical part of a gentleman's apparel is clearly asking to be mangled."

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Xaos-27 90 - Rears
JVX 82 - Rears
Currently Velo 79 - Rears

The only time I dont use rears is if there is a strong tail wind, the deep brakes.... this has always worked for me....
-----------------------------------------------------------
--+ There are 10 types of people in the world: Those who understand binary, and those who don't.. --+

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