Downsizing - no patronizing please

[hookitt 0]

I've yet to see freeflaw do anything terribly dangerous so read his comments as you will

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

[AggieDave 6]

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I've yet to see freeflaw do anything terribly dangerous so read his comments as you will

It brings up a couple of points, though.

With all canopies you can reach a point in which you are no longer contributing to the building of speed/power from the canopy. You can actually reach a point where you can't counter the drag of the canopy, PC, lines of the canopy and you're not gaining speed. Not only are you not gaining speed, the canopy has begun it's recovery cycle and the canopy is trying to re-achieve neutral flight.

So you're left balancing time in turn, aggressiveness of the turn/dive and the number of rotations. Think of those three things like a triangle, you can adjust either of the three, but it has a direct effect on the other two. Those three things together can equal the potential max speed of a canopy, and you can achieve that max speed with varying changes in either of the three, but you will reach a point where one will over power the other two. When that happens you lower the potential max speed of the canopy. You will eventually have to find a balance to reach the full potential of the canopy. Then complications to adjust the max potential of the canopy come into play. RDS, line types, riser length, body position, etc.

There is an order to this progression as well, you work from easiest to fix to the hardest to fix. The easiest to fix is the aggressiveness of the turn/dive. If you get this wrong, it doesn't matter if you do a 90 or a 2880, you'll either hit the ground, be in the corner or be high. The journey to master the aggressiveness of the turn/dive starts with the very first time you pull on a front riser and will continue to be refined until you hang up your swoop pants.

The time in turn is the next item to approach and adjust. Some will teach that the longer time you can spend in your turn/dive, the more speed you will be able to generate. I argue that there is a point where you no longer have any gains and another point where you start losing power/speed. Some people would argue that you should shoot for around 4 seconds from riser pull to roll out. I argue that it depends on your canopy and loading. Very few people loaded a 170 as high as I did and I learned some important lessons. Even with an exceptionally high wingloading, the canopy will only handle so much before it starts a recovery cycle regardless if you want to or not. A four second dive to rollout on a Stiletto 170 just isn't in the cards, even when loaded at 1.7. So this is another one of those times that I'll say you'll have to figure it out on your own.

The number of rotations is used to adjust the first to items discussed in this post. You use the higher rotations to build time in turn while giving the ability to build a turn to a more aggressive dive. If you're going to start your turn with half-brakes dumped to double fronts as you crunch over into a turn that you pull in to a tight release through to roll out, you only have so much time to accomplish all of this before you run out of altitude and time. To increase both altitude and time you increase the number of rotations. The downside is that your accuracy for roll out altitude drops as does your directional accuracy, both of which can mean the difference between being a beer-line hero or having an ash dive.

Questions or thoughts?

--"When I die, may I be surrounded by scattered chrome and burning gasoline."

[Freeflaw 0]

So in order to maximize the aggressiveness of the turn and time spent in turn, as these two things run counter to one another, you add more rotations. You argue that at some point, given a static first input that is then held, the canopy, albeit remaining in the rotation, will start to recover and loose speed (for any given wing/loading combo this will be different but constant for that combo)

So the goal is to find that point, constrict the rotation there (like an ice skater pulling in his/her arms) and use this momentum to fling yourself as high as possible thus achieving the greatest dive: as the tighter the rotation the higher the centrifugal force, the higher the centrifugal force the higher the dynamic loading, the higher the dynamic loading the longer the dive?

I imagine that this is not a: a ok max speed reached, whip it around on harness type thing? Ideally this tightening of the turn should occur as one smooth transition from a big wide initiation to as tight as possible 90 (do you end up on the same horizontal plane as the canopy or in fact higher)? This means an ever increasing loading as the centrifugal force increases due to the constriction of the rotation and thus an increase of speed? The max loading coincides with the radius of the rotation being zero? [confused]

What I have done so far with my 270s: Start with a double fronts, dive for 3 seconds. Slight riser offset. Carve the 180. Whip the last 90 degrees of the rotation around as fast and hard as I can. (All on my storms...I am back to very gentle harness 90s on the Katana)

p.s. Ironically this has now turned into a thread about canopy piloting in general.

[DocPop 1]

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What I have done so far with my 270s: Start with a double fronts, dive for 3 seconds. Slight riser offset. Carve the 180. Whip the last 90 degrees of the rotation around as fast and hard as I can. (All on my storms...I am back to very gentle harness 90s on the Katana)

That is more or less the approach I am using on my Katana, plus I am trying to release the risers slowly and smoothly after the final 90.

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

~ CanuckInUSA

[AggieDave 6]

It is important to clarify "add rotation" to singular increases in the turn with the addition of 90 degrees. In other words someone should not say "ok, I need to increase the time in turn so instead of a 270, I'm going to do a 720 on this jump."

You're right in that achieving the maximum speed and time in turn is a dynamic thing, it isn't something that you reach and then release to swoop. If it were, then we could hold the RPMs at a constant and drop the clutch to launch, so to speak.

I can understand why all of this is confusing, it is complicated and difficult to do. Look at our greenie Ian, he's on the biggest and best know swoop team in the world, he has completed thousands of swoops and every single jump he's still working on nailing down perfection.

Break every part of the turn down into very specific pieces and then understand how they relate together. That's going to delve into a level of detail that I really don't want to do here, but by trying to look at the entire sequence as a whole it is easy to get lost in those details and how the effect you.

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whip it around on harness type thing? Ideally this tightening of the turn should occur as one smooth transition from a big wide initiation to as tight as possible 90 (do you end up on the same horizontal plane as the canopy or in fact higher)? This means an ever increasing loading as the centrifugal force increases due to the constriction of the rotation and thus an increase of speed? The max loading coincides with the radius of the rotation being zero? [confused]

Think about how we make our canopies go fast (please bear with my simplified explanation, I'm not a physics teacher). We use gravity to increase our velocity. The centripetal force we use to get there only apart of the total equation. The force increases with time, velocity increases at a constant rate (gravity) and is countered by drag induced by the friction of the air around us. Our canopy also adds complications with the forces present by nature of it's design. Entire college semesters are spent exploring all the forces and how they interact in our example here, so a sub-1000 word post on the internet just isn't going to cover it all very well.

Here's you're take away, why I started down this path in the first place: there are many canopies and loadings out in the wild in which continuing to add turn rotation reaches a point where no more speed can be generated. The canopy tries to start the recovery process and a decent swoop is lost. So you'll have to find what turn, time in turn and turn style works the best to generate the highest maximum output that you're capable of with you and your setup.

--"When I die, may I be surrounded by scattered chrome and burning gasoline."