Leaderboard

100% it’s part of Trumps plan to pin the whole Capitol invasion on Rudy. ’My speech was perfect. Everybody says so. But Rudi (unknown to me!) said it should be Trial by Combat!! I fired him as soon as it was apparent. Very sad. Tremendously. Nothing do with me. No responsibility. Perfect.’

Hi Folks, Jerry Baumchen

A friend of mine posted this on FB the other day. He said he absolutely didn't come up with it, and that it's free for sharing: Wendy P.

I always liked this one... The Gear Scaries. Sometimes my gear scares me It's a long way up To be hanging from strings and rags So I think really hard And figure it all out again And everything goes fine For a while And then I go do something Scary again Like watch someone open Do I really believe that? I better Because it's my turn now I just keep going through the process Because I started when I was too Young to know any better And now I can't stop. Skratch Garrison ,

Back when I was a wuffo there was a book circulating my home DZ. "United we fall", I always wanted to get a copy but never did but now have it. Wish I would have purchased it back then, like most of the jumpers I knew was on a tight budget. Anyway, I'm wondering if this is still recommended reading? I find this thing to be full of great tips and advise and would be ideal for beginner RWs. That's my two cents. Oh, and it's great history for the younguns out there. Cosmic

WENDY!!!

What DougH said. They were in a situation where something had to be done. Ya know, in some cases it might even have been the right decision, but with facilities without as much capability to isolate it was devastating. Hopefully there won’t be a need to drag that knowledge out too soon again. It’s kind of like the decision tree when you have a horseshoe or a pilot chute in tow. What’s the right decision for some of them is the wrong one for others — and you’re in the middle of a skydive. Wendy P.

It was a shit sandwich either way. States were flying by the seat of their pants, especially given the limited guidance from the Fed. We were just starting to figure all of this out. They were faced with capacity constraints at the hospitals, and I don't think at that time it was known just how stratified the risk curve was based on age and comorbidities. From a triage sense I could understand sending nursing home patients back to nursing homes if you thought that you were going to run out of hospital capacity causing more able-bodied "treatable" individuals to die because there were no icu beds available. I think it was a failure to plan, and a failure of imagination. It is probably too simple to call it gross negligence, it was probably more of a case of trying to do the least amount of overall harm to the society. I am glad I didn't have to make those calls myself.

It also shouldn't be necessary to have Nazi ideology define the edge of your political thinking.

Now that's funny right there.

Feel free to use away! Just call me either "billvon" or "The Duck."

Hi olof, Re: 'I'm not sure I'm getting through.' Did you really think that you would? Jerry Baumchen

look like it's available to read here.

I have a copy of The Art of Freefall Relative Work, but not of United We Fall... Pat Works is always a good read. The content is not about "modern" skydiving, but gives you so much of the history of RW and the Tao of Skydiving. I find his texts very enriching.

Ah, United We Fall, by the late, great Pat Works. I still have my well-worn copy. Back in the day, even before my time, he used to put out a newsletter called the RWunderground, and I believe UWF is an anthology from that. How recently and where did you find it? He also had another great book, The Art of Freefall Relative Work. I lost my copy of that many years ago when I gave it to an up-and-coming student and never got it back. Hopefully they did the same. I, for one, would absolutely still recommend these timeless works for anyone interested in skydiving and it's history. Perhaps someone could convince Jan to re-issue them.

That makes sense! They went out and got neo-Nazi tattoos, gained 200 pounds and bought all those flags just to LOOK like typical Trump supporters. That's the only explanation possible. As a side note, imagine going back to 1990 and telling people that, 30 years in the future, Arnold Schwarzenegger would be using Conan's sword to condemn Donald Trump for launching an insurrection, led by overweight neo-Nazis and white supremacists, to take over the Capital building and install him as a dictator. People would say "that's too absurd even for whatever movie you are talking about."

Don't press the pedal, tap on it. You need to push it down far enough for the clutch to engage, but not long enough to run more than one or two revolutions of the machine. Tapping does that. That's what I was taught anyway. "There are NO situations which do not call for a French Maid outfit." Lucky McSwervy "~ya don't GET old by being weak & stupid!" - Airtwardo

You should contract for altitude and only pay pro-rata for what you get. Better yet, establish a minimum opening altitude and contract and pay only for what you get over that. (After all, if you wanted a zero-second delay, you can get that for $7 out of a C-182. Then afterwards for free you can jump into the river for a couple seconds of dead air. ) -=-=-=-=- Pull.

Please explain why the balloon would be in descent. First of all a ballon is virtually always in a slight descent unless you have just heated it. When your weight leaves the balloon it suddenly has a lot more buoyancy. It will suddenly rise up causing the balloon's evelope to distort significantly. This can be catastrophic if multiple jumpers left at the same time and the balloon had just been heated. Most balloon pilots will put the balloon into a rapid (even terminal) descent prior to letting jumpers exit. Once the jumpers exit, then the balloon stabilizes and either continues a slight descent or ascends slightly. The key is to avoid a rapid ascent that can cause problems.

I wouldn't worry about the spotting part, you're going to be going real slow, and directly downwind, so it's a lot less challenging than spotting from a plane. Take some binoculars with you for spotting and leave them in the balloon, everything is going to be going real slow until you jump, so just be sure you haven't overlooked any power lines, fences, swamps, etc. and have an alternate if possible. Good luck, that sounds like a lot of fun.