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brokky

Night CF with firework

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Holy crap, that's insane. This is the kind of shit that looks super cool when it goes right, and turns into a massive, spiralling out of control clusterfuck with multiple fatalities when anything doesn't go exactly as planned. Blind luck that it worked out; I don't think it should've been attempted and I don't think the person(s) who planned and agreed to doing it have acted responsibly.
"Skydivers are highly emotional people. They get all excited about their magical black box full of mysterious life saving forces."

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mathrick

Holy crap, that's insane. This is the kind of shit that looks super cool when it goes right, and turns into a massive, spiralling out of control clusterfuck with multiple fatalities when anything doesn't go exactly as planned. Blind luck that it worked out; I don't think it should've been attempted and I don't think the person(s) who planned and agreed to doing it have acted responsibly.



Next time there's a CRW briefing at your dz, you should go listen to get an idea just how much training is involved. Successful (beautiful!) CRW takes a ton of planning and practice and this night jump with Pyro is an advanced move within a group of advanced canopy pilots. They push the envelope for sure, but I disagree that it is irresponsible.

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I'm sorry, I didn't mean to suggest that this was not planned and prepared ahead of time. I'm sure it works 9 times out of 10, probably also 99 out 100. The "blind luck" isn't in reference to "these people randomly jumped out of a plane and it just so happened that they did the most impressive CF". Of course it's all thanks to their immense skill and massive amounts of practice that they got back to earth in one piece and after doing everything they set out to do. The "blind luck" is in reference to the fact that it appears to be planned for the best case, rather than the worst case. Most of the time the best scenario is what happens and everything is well, but if anything doesn't go as planned (and it doesn't, it's skydiving after all), it's pretty much guaranteed to turn even the smallest emergency into a feedback loop rapidly leading to the worst possible outcome.

A wrap in a 16-way CF is a scary enough proposition in even the most straightforward configuration, but by making sure you have the experience and skill to handle the jump itself, and by having a plan for every imaginable scenario and minimising the risks taken, you can deal with almost all malfunctions and come out unscathed. Even then it might just not be your lucky day, which is why CF is considered more dangerous than regular skydiving, which is more dangerous than not jumping out of planes at all, but by anticipating the malfunctions and planning for them you can manage the risk and bring it down to acceptable levels. Now, how do you plan to deal with a 3-person spinning wrap, 2 of whom have industrial-strength sparklers attached? What's your EP for being covered in melting nylon? How about the bottom jumper getting into a spin and sending exploding fire rockets all over the place into the middle of the formation? How do you react to your harness being cut through with burning magnesium? Try going through the most trivial, expected types of CF malfunctions and counting the ones that don't end up as likely multiple fatalities on this jump.

A similar kind of thing, this time with a less happy outcome, was this funeral service demo jump injury (@ 13m33s). Does that mean these demo jumpers are not very qualified, hard-practicing jumpers? Nothing of the sort. Do I think this was an entirely preventable injury which had nothing to do with a random fluke and everything with indefensible, poor planning which could and should have foreseen this happening? Absolutely. And, as much as a single data point is not statistics and the plural of anecdote is not data, I don't think it's entirely coincidental that it happened during the funeral service for a Golden Knight killed during a demo jump a week earlier.

Unfortunately, Denmark has pretty much no CF happening at all, and I haven't found a DZ to call home yet in the US, so I have never been and it won't be very soon I am at a CF briefing. So maybe there are very good plans for the situations I mentioned and they're all amply prepared to deal with those and more. In that case, I'll be very happy to stand corrected. But I think of CF as of any other kind of skydiving, just more complicated with more to go wrong, and the basic rule of surviving in the skydiving I've been taught is that you assume, for every single jump, that everything that can possibly go wrong will, and plan for that. And from this perspective and my knowledge of the gear involved, I see a jump with no kind of plan other than "we'll just hope it won't go wrong". And no matter how badass you are, if you do that, sooner or later you will lose big time.
"Skydivers are highly emotional people. They get all excited about their magical black box full of mysterious life saving forces."

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Personally, I don't have a problem with the bottom guy on a diamond doing the sparkling pyro since the fire is trailing and away from the canopies.

Its the shooting off fireworks to either side that concerns me. Sure, maybe they planned everything down to the last detail, but fireworks aren't always perfect. You never know when one piece is going to go the wrong way or blow up too soon...

I've done 30 way diamonds but I wouldn't get on this load even if I was qualified, but kudos to those who did it.

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Wraps tend to happen due to a few known causes:

1. Weather: I've seen a formation wrap due to an air gremlin, which resulted in a pretty nasty cutaway (everyone walked away without more than a few small cuts though). The weather that day was iffy and a bit turbulent, with generally high winds. If you absolutely positively don't want a wrap, don't jump in that type of weather.
2. Poor formation engineering: A poorly engineered formation typically wraps because the wings outrun the centerline. So a properly engineered formation has slightly faster canopies in the centerline, and slower ones on the wings to ensure the formation bulges forward at the center. Getting this right is a matter of experience and practice. Figure out how fast people fly and put them in the right slot of the formation. Try it out and tweak as necessary.
3. Poor docking skills. If you dock the formation like a garbage truck on steroids, guess what's gonna come out... Exactly. This is down to the skills of the flyers. To minimise the chance of a wrap, they must know how to approach for a soft dock, and must know how to abort and reset if their approach looks iffy.

All this can be practiced and optimized before you do a demo-jump with fireworks and stuff. Also, the firework rigs can be optimized. Get a thick steel pipe, weld it shut on on end and fix it on a properly designed harness. Now firework has only one way to go, and with a proper harness that one way is always away from you, even if the pyrotechnics inside malfunction.

These type of jumps are not planned with "lets just hope nothing goes wrong" in mind. We CRWdogs do think thoroughly about the risks, how to minimize them and how to handle them should it happen. But if you plan everything for the absolute worst case, the only sensible plan is to stay on the ground.

Also, if you're in the US, there's a pretty active CF scene going on over there. I think the Raw Dogs do CF-coaching mainly in the new england area, or you can join us in Florida for the Spring Fling in March 2016. In europe, we also like our CF. We occasionally have events in the Netherlands, and I know there are groups of CRWdogs in Germany and Poland active as well. Try to contact Henk Lunshof via Facebook, he might be able to help.

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Usarig

I don't think it should've been attempted and I don't think the person(s) who planned and agreed to doing it have acted responsibly.

Just relax and enjoy the show...;)



The fireworks don't scare me.... a CRW jump into a large city with virtually no outs AT NIGHT? These guys did a great job making it look easy. Nicely done!
B|
Birdshit & Fools Productions

"Son, only two things fall from the sky."

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The team that does 500 to 1000 practice jumps a year before the demo. The amount planning and safety that goes into a demo like this didn't come about overnight it came with 30 years of experience from the organizers. Is dangerous yes, but by comparison there are people out there who think skydiving is dangerous and never be attempted.

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The purpose of the jump is to produce a dramatic and visually stimulating show. Clearly, it succeeds in this. The folks who planned the jump and designed the equipment are very experienced and highly qualified. Procedures have been developed, discussed and trained and participants are carefully vetted as to their individual suitability for the jump.

Having said all that, there is no doubt that it is an extremely hazardous jump. As has been discussed, there are worst-case scenarios that could produce tragic outcomes. All of skydiving contains jumps that are more hazardous than others. We all participate at our own level of comfort. More can go wrong on a big-way than on a solo. More can go wrong on a swoop than on an accuracy jump. As much as we successfully complete even the simplest of jumps, none of us (hopefully) thinks the hazards are zero.

Many people allow themselves to be influenced by the WOW value of a particular jump. Flying a wingsuit even closer to a rock wall than the previous YouTube flyby may be one example. The biggest challenge seems to be rationally evaluating the risks without being swayed by the fact that the jump will be so incredibly spectacular that it will be seen and cheered by the whole world. That's a strong influence to try to ignore. People jump from deadly stratospheric altitudes, people jump without parachutes into a net, or land a wingsuit onto a pile of cardboard boxes. All of these folks have made that evaluation and that choice.

Back to the night CRW pyro jump. The one in the linked video took place in Qatar. Similar jumps have been done by the same organizers in Florida. I know everyone involved in that jump. They all are cognizant of and accepting of the risks. There is no doubt that there are unsurvivable combinations of events that are possible. Nothing bad has happened on these, yet, but we all (hopefully) recognize that doesn't mean zero risk. There are experienced CRWDogs who choose not to perform these jumps. There are less experienced CRWDogs who want to, but have not been selected. We can't reduce the risk to zero and (even if we don't admit it ) there is always an element of luck in skydiving. Our objective in all of our risky activities is to make the best of what luck brings us, but to hedge our bets with knowledge, planning and awareness.

Kevin Keenan
_____________________________________
Dude, you are so awesome...
Can I be on your ash jump ?

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