JohanW

You know what they say about hookknives - you need two.

You drop the first one, then you use the second one.

So the second one had better be useful. If it's just reserve line-overs you're worried about, a small one might do. If you're into serious CReW, you seem to need at least a foot of metal to really fuck up the canopy your buddy just wrapped around you.

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[snip] Trust your own judgement [snip]

At 100 jumps? I know I felt invincible then ..

Wait, I was talking about legwings ..

What canopy is an XC? Never heard of that, PD Don't know it, Google doesn't ..

See attachment.

The red line is the hypothetical 1+.1/100 jumps.

The first line @1.3 was a Silhouette 170, the second one @1.4 a Stiletto 150, the third one @1.6 a Stiletto 135 and then I discovered wingsuiting and got a Triathlon 135 and later a 120 @1.8. Remember folks, it's always the pilot. A Tri at that load does not have a world class surf but it has one hell of a dive. The experiment @2.0 with the Katana 107 was very shortlived. I was in over my head. The Ka 120 was a lovely canopy, but not for wingsuiting, not for me.

Yes, my first owned canopy was rather aggressive. Do I regret that? Not really. Maybe I was lucky, but I was flying a lot, reasonably current and a 170 with me under it, even at my 216# exit weight, was no reason for concern with my instructors (or myself, but what did I know). Still, do as I say, not as I did. I did not make that line red for no reason.

Yes, I still jump student canopies every once in a while. Preferably static-lined. Few things are more fun than bumping endcells with your jumpmaster, after you've lent him your altimeter, and before just losing to him at a hit-n-chuck competition.

Quite the legwing for a beginner suit. Not necessarily bad, but to me a little surprising. Maybe that's why I'm not a wingsuit designer ..

Can we go off on this tangent now and stop harassing the OP? If he hasn't got the message by now he never will ..

I've always checked my rig and haven't had problems .. yet.

One thing to be aware of is the French measure in meters, not feet. And I've heard stories of lunching with wine, then going back to jumping. You may want to pass on the wine until you're done jumping for the day. Then, hit it! They can throw a mean barbecue as well.

Really really? No.

But a FJC is not the time or the place to explain that stuff. Students die, too, but in different numbers and ways than experienced jumpers.

What you need to know later, you learn later. Sometimes the hard way.

And he or she did AFF freeflying .. we have another prodigy!

(must be a he. what was I thinking?)

It's not the same, but there's BASE, and there's groundlaunching, and parapente and all the other semi-related sports. I'd find a way to get my fix. Freefall and canopy flight might no longer happen (much) in the same jump/flight. Sites for swooping and serious wingsuiting might be very few and far between. Formation bigways would probably die.

It's not as far-fetched as it might seem BTW. Not so much making jumping outright illegal, but restricting access to airspace might kill skydiving in a lot of places.

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.. though because I live in the UK I do most of my jumping in Spain ..

there, fixed it for ya

Up to 166 search results now. But most of them point to only a handful of threads.

I know dragon2 on here has had her eyes lasered. Judging from the search results plenty of other people have, also. And what's wrong with having the surgery and simply waiting until it feels good enough again? Need to plan competitions? Trainings? In winter?

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I had to use a generic term as I'm asking the same questions of mountain/rock climbers, paragliders, hang gliders. I guess some people will think they aren't extreme sports when compared to skydiving.
Are you kidding? I've never considered skydiving dangerous, or extreme. Those other sports, however, might get you killed! Not to mention soccer. No knees after 30!

***"any sport where one has to accept a possibility of severe injury or death as an inherent part of the activity"

Like driving to work, you mean?

About your questionnaire: "Most people see me as loving and affectionate", "People would describe me as a giving person, willing to share my time with others" - Why don't you ask them?
"Some people wander aimlessly through life but I am not one of them" - Which part of this question would you like me to disagree with most? There was another one of those, but I stopped copy/pasting.

Though I'd hate to feel unique, I've never considered skydiving dangerous or extreme. Or bungee jumping. Or riding a motorcycle. It's a calculated risk, much like a game of poker. And the biggest risk is not dying - it's nearly, but not, dying.

Contact www.an28.de. They have an An-28 they rent out, and being new, them might have it available still.

Wait, 8-12 jumpers. It might be too big for you.

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1) man is too heavy to fly: reduce a man in three dimensions to the size of your favourite heavy bird of prey, add the prey to the weight of the bird and compare the weight of mini-man and bird. How big is the difference really?

I'm not sure you can look at it this way. Scaling down, volume and therefore weight are scaled down in three dimensions. Wing area in only two. Scaling down, your wingload decreases. This makes a lot of things, like landing, a lot easier.

Also, if you want to redesign wings, the most efficient ones seem to be long and thin, like gliders', or birds'. Forces may scale, but force moments do not.

Sorry to rain on the parade, a paradigm shift may come from a direction where I didn't see it coming at all, but there may be a reason the largest flying bird is a lot smaller than a human (comparing body size here, not wingspan).

Give the moon an atmosphere though, and with 1/6 g you may get somewhere. (This is not my idea.)

If I'm neither gay nor homophobic, can I come to both?

Actually, some of my best friends are gay and I like to confuse narrowminded people by not taking myself too seriously. What's your problem, not getting any?

I don't like where I see the two threads heading. It's inevitable I suppose. But I don't have to like it.

Any chance of qualifying in Europe, or you taking Jarno's or Scott (LouDiamond)'s word for my skills? I'd like to be there, but at the moment I have no plans to be around your continent before then.

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Do you have any actual evidence that people with a professional, engineering level of knowledge of aeronautics, on average make worse students than anyone else?

No.

And I never said they do.

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premature

You got that right.

Hope you don't die.

You described the professional as a professor. To the best of my knowledge, a professor teaches. So I misread you.

I did not intend to badmouth theoretical knowledge either; if you read that into it you may have misread me, or I may have misformulated. As I tried again to explain earlier, I intended to convey the fact you are moving is more important than your starting position if you want to get somewhere. I provided anecdotal evidence from my own experience why I thought this might be a useful point to make. Another teacher's post in this thread specifically said she experienced this same challenge personally. (Thanks Pat. You are not alone. And therefore neither am I.)

To continue the badmouthing of theoretical knowledge , there is more to skydiving and parachuting than theory. On the other hand, I think a pilot brings along more possibly useful things than theoretical knowledge alone, even if I didn't explicitly say that in the soundbite you love to hate to quote. But it's easy to get ahead of yourself because of perceived knowledge, ability or experience. Pilots are not the only kind of people at risk of this, DZO kids might fall victim to the same fallacy, tunnel rats might think they're the cat's meow. (I said might!) It would be counterproductive not to acknowledge their prior abilities, but it hardly makes them well-rounded skydivers. Any skydiver needs a lot more than theoretical knowledge.

John, I highly respect your credentials, even though in your online persona you occasionally get on a high horse and exhibit a somewhat limited and possibly slanted view of others, their opinions and the values of those opinions. What I was trying to do was tell him that I think it is important to keep in mind there is more to learning to skydive and parachute than theory from a different, though neighbouring, universe, while not dismissing carry-over from his previous experiences.

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***The best student is a student, not someone who has a head start in theoretical knowledge, but someone able to be taught.

So what would you say to a potential skydiver who happened to be, say, a physics or engineering professor? "Go away, you'll never learn"?Non sequitur. Your teaching others does not disqualify you as a student. But you will be at the other side of the lectern, and the mindset should be different on different sides of it. So you might disqualify yourself from being the best student you could possibly be. By, say, positioning yourself as a highly qualified theorist (is that a word?) from a different field who should be treated specially because of that. You may rate special treatment; someone else whose credentials I highly respect has alluded to that, but not because of academic high standing, and not with regard to all aspects of a first jump course because of prior theoretical, mental and physical skills and knowledge. But you will have to acquire certain new skills and certain new knowledge, and you will need to have the mindset to learn those things. You will have to be a student again. For a teacher, this may require mental flexibility. This mental flexibility is not a given in any person, be they a professor, a pilot or a construction worker.

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***Come back after your AFF and tell us a) how much fun it was and b) how being a pilot helped you and your instructors. And c) where it did not help. We learn from that, too!

I didn't find ANYTHING about being a pilot to be unhelpful in my student training.Pars pro toto. Without discounting your experience, I would like to go beyond n=1 experiments. If his experience should be different, we might learn from it, don't you think? The subject is muddied a bit because prior piloting knowledge might have one effect and average pilot character might have another. Your position as a pilot and a professor and a skydiver makes you a more difficult case than your character already does on its own. Meanwhile, I have to try to keep my sanity, my humour and the remnant of my dignity while opposing the view of a professor on the subject of teaching, where absolutes are few and far between and your experience is (a lot) greater than mine, while being limited to the written word with the occasional smiley.

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Do you agree with his statement: "The best student is a student, not someone who has a head start in theoretical knowledge, but someone able to be taught."

That statement was not intended to be taken as an absolute. I hoped it would convey that if you need to learn new things it does not matter where you're coming from if you're not moving towards where you need to go. I dare you to disagree with that.

You are free to take another soundbite from my post and run it into the ground, I can't stop you and I wouldn't want to. But shaking another blunt axe at parts of a post without any of the subtleties and nuances of the original left in it is quite the conversation-stopper with me. That's not a dialogue, it's not even a rant, it's a flame. Please prove me wrong. You have untold riches of experience as a teacher; please give me the opportunity to learn from you. Or not. But let me swim to drown or reach the shore then. Don't push me under.

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.. most likely longer ..

60 seconds at most. Focus more on the journey and less on the destination. Apply as appropriate to either sport.

No, being prior military probably makes you stand at attention and shout Sir Yes Sir when they're shouting at you. A good instructor can work wonders with a student like that. That is an advantage.

BTW, isn't Spooky an attack Herc? Or an elint Herc, don't remember exactly. What's an A1C?

I'd say go easy on the books. Enthusiasm is great, but it might help you (and your instructors!) more if you have the right mindset - be a student again.

You might go through the course marginally faster with three books' worth of preparation, but the instructor will want to make sure he's covered every subject anyway, and you may take more time because you're getting ahead of yourself, the course and possibly other students who did not read up beforehand.

The best student is a student, not someone who has a head start in theoretical knowledge, but someone able to be taught.

You're still young(ish), about the same age when I was when I learned to skydive, and then I could surrender to being a student, and it was a fantastic experience. I had a lot more difficulty when, 8 years later and firmly not used to being in the student position anymore, I wanted to learn to ride a bike. (Having driven a car for years is a mixed blessing when learning to ride a bike - see the post above on the skydiver thinking he has to land the plane for comparison.)

Keep an open mind, and learn. You will have to sit the course anyway, regardless how many books you've read. Especially don't let it get to your head, because you will be a student again - there will be new things to learn, and to learn to do, that will be vital to long term survival. Yours and others'.

All that said, of course being a pilot helps in some ways. Come back after your AFF and tell us a) how much fun it was and b) how being a pilot helped you and your instructors. And c) where it did not help. We learn from that, too!

Good luck, have fun and get out of the plane!

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.. get a girlfriend a boyfriend or a life. With the exception of Jarno ..

Concur.

Jarno, please don't get a life, or we'd miss out on a whole lot of fun here.

Wishing you lots of good things otherwise of course. Hope to see you on Saturday.

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I think we'll need a 2nd AN72 if Loic shows up as an organiser..

Well, there are two of 'em .. this year's was a different one from last year's (ER-AFZ vs. ER-AWF).

And frankly, those Germans never cease to amaze me .. give them a few years, and they just might have 2 AN-72s, an AN-28 and an AN-2. What's next, a -124? The -225 doesn't have a tailgate, does it?

That's week 31!

Meaning I have to choose between Cochstedt and Moorsele with PCMN. Which will probably go in favour of Cochstedt ..