Flocking - it's here to stay!

[decompresion 2]

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Super girl really should be denied access to these forums . She makes entirely too much sense in her diplomatic approaches to our male ego and pride of authorship stubborness that takes up most of the postings ( like mine)
DSE "was" my favorite diplomat ,..but it is very difficult for me to imagine any diplomat retaining their composure after watching their own side's people bomb their car..... So I vote Andrea as our chief wingsuit forum diplomat and logic sanity check flyer.

damn straight !!!

caw caw
Checkyourgear

[stoney3434 0]

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I hear what you are saying Kallend and their are things that can improve on Ed's bubble idea ,...But FIRST,....you have to admit that if each flyer on that 68 way photo had eiither their head or their body ( not the arm wings or legwings -but the head or middle body section inside Fast Ed's bubbles template ( whichever is chosen and I prefer the body ) ,..then that 68 way sure would have been an ever sweeter , more beautiful, more symetrical and most important a "more accurate representation" of

We do need to make a distinction between the formation during the record and other formations in general.
The 68-way was flown TO FIT THE GRID.
All efforts were made to get the formation inside the grid, including exactly the kind of stuff Kallend is talking about with flying off of people further away rather than our immediate neighbors. Our only goal was to get a nice grid picture. We flew off of people way further in front of the formation in order to correct for any flaws in the lines that would affect the grid fit. Had the requirements been different, the flying might have been a little different, too. Instead, we found ourselves adapting our flying style to accommodate the grid, rather than the grid being an accurate representation of our flying.
No surprise that some of those bubbles don't always fit.

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it seems the best fit grid criteria is producing the recod goal at every event held and using the grid's best fit judging,... That makes for beautiful big formations but not really special formations worthy of being called " a record". I agree with what Zack DSE, and many others have said here nad away from this forum that a record should be something very difficult and very special,...NOT easily repeated. Using the grid I project that every event held will produce another "record".

I, too, have mixed feelings about the current "best fit" criteria that are combined with subjectively choosing the formation that looks best. So we have a grid that could fit a bunch of junk in it (Jarno's counter-examples come to mind), but we claim that we will not submit a bunch of junk as a record jump, because people will always want to submit something that looks record-worthy. But we really have no guarantee for that and no proper way of enforcing it.
I recall a certain 70+ way (what was the number again?) being built the day before the mighty 68 way. I may be wrong, since I was not involved in any of the judging and I don't have any pictures at hand to prove this, but my impression was that the bigger way from the last jump the day before also kinda fit the grid, just not as nicely. Hence it didn't deserve to be called the record, when compared to the badass-looking 68-way that followed. 
So what makes the 68-way MORE grid-worthy than previous formations? How do we properly quantify its grid-worthiness without being too subjective? Yes, the 68-way provided a much better fit, it flew together longer in that solid configuration, it sure as hell felt great (that jump has provided most of us with sweet visuals of excellent sight lines, and memories that will probably last a lifetime). But if we hadn't done that jump, if Purple had flown a shittier base, if we'd gotten hosed by weather for the remainder of the event, or whatever other scenario, then would the other formations from the day before have been equally okay to claim as the new record? Or would we have stuck with the 30-something way from the earlier 2-plane formation just for the sake of being strict about it? 
When we move on to bigger and bigger numbers, will it be as easy to make the distinction? Will we be tempted to accept formations of lesser value then, just because the rules are loose enough to allow it? Will we risk becoming more complacent as the task becomes harder to accomplish?

It often seems that a decent formation is achieved, but it still looks a little bit all over the place, so it is then improved upon, until not only does it meet the baseline criteria for being a record, but it also LOOKS worthy of being called a record. We break a record, but we're not quite sure yet if it's the best we've got, so we try it a bunch more times, and then we realize that what we had before was actually pretty damn good and call that our best. When we finally realize we got a record it all feels a bit anticlimactic. Yea, we sorta knew we had something good all along... we were just working out a few kinks, but wait, we actually had it right there... never mind... It's not the clear YES/NO answer that makes you go "YEAH!!!" immediately. Why the doubt? There's that fuzziness that comes with the wide range of improvement that is still possible.

Maybe we are still missing some extra guidelines in that judging rule set.

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All very well said as usual Andrea,..... You really need to join the State Department with your DIplomacy and your way of validating all sides of a discussion...

Glad you are well JarnoMc.... I thought your transportation of choice "was" a pony?! I saw you riding one in the ZHills Sky one day.

Life is what happens while we are making other plans.

[DSE 3]

The below text is a letter sent to USPA Competition Committee members. There was/is some confusion with a region wanting to attempt a record, and opinion was asked for by a USPA BOD member and Executive Committee member. None of them are wingsuiters, so they have reached out for help in understanding the grid mess. Up until the week before the record attempt, the USPA BOD had interfaced with only one wingsuiter, with said wingsuiter claiming to represent all wingsuiters in the USA. The letter doesn't suggest any better solutions, it merely addresses the problems some of us have with the grid. It's not my place to present the FlyLikeBrick software to the USPA, although I do believe it is a superior solution by comparison.

This letter was sent to the USPA on October 27, 2009, nearly two weeks before the bigway event.

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First, perhaps a little background may help.
At present, wingsuit flying is not an official IPC parachuting discipline. However, more and more parachutists are jumping with wingsuits. There has been a presentation to the IPC at their meeting in Paris, 2008. This presentation focused on formation skydiving with wingsuits in sequential manner. There have been several international competitions based on this format, none of them in the US, yet it's becoming a standard in EU and other areas.

Furthermore, there have been several "largest slot-perfect wingsuit formation" events. The qualification of these formations were based on non-official rules. As a result debriefing and judging of wing-suit formations has been the subject of great debate over the past three years. With wing-suits not taking grips in formations as parachutists in other skydiving disciplines do, there is a lot of room for this debate.


USPA has adopted the so-called "grid system." There are too many subjective and unclear aspects to this system which may actually harm the credibility of wing-suit records as perceived by the worldwide skydiving community. Further, the "grid system" applies skydivers to the rule as opposed to applying the rule to skydivers. And, the grid has fundamentally changed how wingsuiters fly. I believe based on my experience, that this alone may lead to an incident.


Here are some issues with the grid system as it stands;
--The grid system is scalable/resizable. See the Texas formation as a demonstration.
--The system also allows for subjective viewing, and creative movement. See attached photos for a demonstration.
--A grid system allows for a poor formation to be qualified as a record. See attached drawing formation A and B for demonstration. Formation A is horrible, but the formation B image shows that it would indeed, qualify as a record.
--Camera distance plays a HUGE role in how the grid functions, so it's not entirely objective here, either. See the South African record with/without the grid applied.
--The grid REQUIRES image editing software such as photoshop. This means that the aspherical aspects of the formation may be called into play, and lens distortions either removed or generated to allow a photo to fit the grid. (In other words, it's very easy to cheat)
--The grid system does not take cumulative error into account, and a cumulative error can be a beautiful, symmetrical formation, so long as all distances are equal. Think "elastic broomstick."
--Regardless of the organizer, whether for debriefing or judging, consistent and demonstrable results should be achieved. There should never be a question whether a formation is complete/successful or not, yet if you send the grid and accompanying photo to multiple judges, you'll get multiple results.

Additionally, as this email thread alone demonstrates, the rules were/are not close to complete, and yet you've applied a standard without means of being sure the standard works.

All of the above is fair and objective in my opinion. Subjectively speaking, the wingsuit community as a group was not allowed to comment nor even made aware that the USPA was considering the grid as a means of judging formations. I believe it's still too early to make any sort of assessment on the viability of the grid. The grid is an infant that needs guidance and improvement. That said, a couple of wingsuiters have attempted to improve the grid system, and when they asked the USPA for a photo, they were referred to Jeff Nebelkopf and Taya Weiss for copies of those images. The attached "flipped bird" grid was sent as a response to queries for wingsuit record photos. Very objective and professional indeed.
There is somewhat of a feeling in the wingsuit community that a few people have quietly undertaken an action to the USPA that affects everyone, although "everyone" was intentionally excluded from an input process.
My feeling is that we should stop now, step back, and reevaluate the grid using feedback from multiple knowledgeable individuals in the wingsuit community. There is a strong anti-grid sentiment known as "gridlock" out there, and you can find discussions in multiple fora, not the least of which is dropzone.com.
I'd implore you that if the Board have the ability to slow acceptance for this grid, and give it a one-year trial period, then this should be done. We need a year for critical eyes with positive input to make commentary. Haste and secrecy appear to have played a strong role in how this problem has come to light.
How is it that the USPA Board would not pass a wingsuit intructor's program that would likely save lives, but rushed to accept a measurement and half-finished rule system for wingsuit competition? The instructor's program has at least 50 known wingsuiters signed on as supporters and authors of the program, yet the grid has only 1-2 people involved in its inception and implementation. I fail to understand the Board's motivations here.

regards,
~d

The "email thread" referenced in the above letter isn't published here, as it contains several personal discussions between members of the BOD, persons not on the BOD, and some frustrations with the grid system. It is not appropriate to publish those mails without everyone's permissions.

The one response received supporting the acceptance of the grid was "it was the only alternative presented to us, we need a means of measuring wingsuit flight."

Yeah, well....you might present a starving man a plate of horseshit as his only "alternative." He probably still ain't gonna eat it.

All this said, I'd like to reiterate that although I don't believe in the grid, it's a wingsuit-related effort, and I support wingsuiting 110%, which is why I was in Elsinore to fly in the bigway. "Please put me in my box, Coach. I'm ready to play...."

[kallend 1,621]

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While quite clear 'the grid' has major flaws,

I disagree. I think it has minor flaws. If the requirement was to be completely inside the larger box it would eliminate most of the wierd possibilities (that you have illustrated) that still technically fit. The option of non-square boxes would allow more creative formations.

A grid (not necessarily as currently defined) is the only proposal I've seen that ensures the long range order of the formation. Its drawback is that it allows some short range discrepancies.

The most perfect patterns we know about on Earth are found in the atomic arrangements in crystals. Yet even in a "perfect" crystal we have some atoms out of place with respect to their neighbors while maintaining long range order.

...

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

[Taz 0]

For anyone who is interested in wingsuit records, there is now information and an FAQ online.

This includes 10 steps to setting a USPA wingsuit record, for anyone who is thinking of doing a state record in 2010.

It's the Year of the Dragon.