Leaderboard

It sure was fun and a bit scary to be around students in the static line days! I'm surprised more DZO's didn't have heart attacks. As a young jumper at the time, watching static line students was great entertainment and sure made skydiving seem cool & dangerous. (Doing radio or dispatching them did get a little more stressful of course.) Most students of course did fine, but there were always a few problem students. All sorts of tales and horror stories to be told, as they scattered themselves across the landscape when having trouble hearing or processing the radio instructions (or even turned the radio off because they didn't like the instructor's "attitude"), moved their hands in accordance with the steering instructions....but didn't actually grab the toggles first, lied on their forms and jumped with undisclosed medical conditions ("Don't worry about that eye," said the student to the paramedic checking his pupils for proper neurological functioning after a crash landing, "I can't see out of that eye anyway."), spiralled down into the ground with one toggle still stowed (and getting lucky and surviving with minor injuries), occasionally just went unconscious, chopped for minimal reason ('the parachute was the wrong colour', 'the slider didn't go back up again', whatever), got edgy and chopped because another student had chopped on the previous load, delayed chopping for way too long, started to chop then decided not to and left the cutaway handle partially pulled and dangling, thumped down under round reserves, lost gear in fields of crop after taking gear off before walking out of the field, backlooped into their risers on exit to cause malfunctions and near main-reserve entanglements, suddenly decided to put in a full toggle turn too close to the ground, didn't flare, flared too early but then let it up, and so on. Not that tandems are perfect, but having someone experienced along for the ride really helped make things safer for the STOOOPID ones out there.