mcstain

Has anybody else jumped one of these? Keen to hear about your experiences with it.

Give the Small Format Camera "Incident" list a read if you haven't already: http://www.dropzone.com/cgi-bin/forum/gforum.cgi?post=3894693

Do you honestly think you're the first person with less than 200 jumps to think that they have "the right stuff" to jump a camera safely? Simply turning the camera on and off is a distraction. The argument for the 200 jump minimum is that for the first 200 jumps, you shouldn't have anything non-essential distracting you before, during or after your jump. On jump run, you should be checking your handles, not fiddling with your GoPro to make sure the red light is on. Same goes following deployment, you should be checking your airspace, not trying to turn your camera off. On the way to the plane, you should be checking your gear and rehearsing the dive, not thinking about whether your camera has enough battery or storage space left on it. In Australia, the minimum requirement to jump camera is a C license, which can be obtained after 100 jumps. It's not my place to decide whether this is appropriate or not, but I do have an opinion on people who are so sure they can do something safely and therefore should be exempt from rules or regulations: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect

Anyone know what the mounting options are for this model?

Anyone picked one of these up yet? Keen to hear how the different models compare.

Imagine if a 90 year old went base jumping then. They would probably just explode into a red mist on opening.

Argh, that really sucks, I'm sorry to hear that. I tried to allude to the possibility of this happening in my post. It can take a long time to find a psychiatrist/psychologist/doctor that you see eye to eye with. Ultimately it can be a process of trial and error where you tell your life story over and over again at initial consultations until you find someone that you click with. That said, it really doesn't sound like your current therapists are helping at all. I had to laugh when you mentioned that they thought you were a difficult patient because all you did was lie on the couch. What do they expect from someone experiencing depression!??? Enthusiasm is not one of the symptoms of depression. Hang in there, and try to find another doctor to help out with your situation. It won't be easy, but finding the right person will help you to get the treatment that you need. In the meantime, try to look after yourself as best you can, and shoot me a PM if you want to chat.

Not quite. The studies that the video is referring to are massive scientific studies designed to examine the biological basis of depression -- they are not referring to the methods used to diagnose depression. The diagnostic tools (e.g., standardised questionnaires like the K10 http://www.beyondblue.org.au/the-facts/depression/signs-and-symptoms/anxiety-and-depression-checklist-k10, DSM-V criteria) we have for depression do a pretty good job, without the need to scan brains or analyse DNA, which would be far more expensive and time consuming and not specific enough to apply to the individual biological makeup of everybody. In terms of stimulating brain growth, this can be achieved in a number of ways without even needing medication. Learning a new skill or even taking part in regular exercise has been shown to stimulate neurogenesis at some level. This could be why exercise can have an antidepressant effect in some people. I'm not up to date on all of the research behind CBD yet, but to my knowledge it is not legal everywhere in the world, and it's not a preferred first stage medication to treat depression. In time, with more research it may become as widely prescribed as SSRIs (which increase the amount of serotonin available in the brain), but medicine and science tend to be incremental. Things rarely advance in leaps and bounds, especially with something as controversial as treating patients with cannabis derivatives. Best thing to do is to find a health care professional such as a doctor, psychologist, or psychiatrist who you can discuss this kind of thing with. They will be far more up to date on the research in terms of CBD, but you may need to shop around to find someone a little more open minded. A lot of doctors prescribe on the basis of the status quo -- so if a medication like an SSRIs works for 70% of people, they will continue to prescribe SSRIs for all of their patients until a better option comes along. Other physicians may be more willing to enter into a non-conventional treatment plan, and this is something you can negotiate together.

Thanks for the reply. I've said all I'm going to on this topic, but thought I'd leave the annual fatality reports here for anyone interested. The USPA provides a detailed report annually on the circumstances surrounding each fatality: http://parachutistonline.com/category/tags/fatality-summary. Definitely good to read over each year's report to get a feel for what circumstances lead to fatalities, and to think about how you might handle being in the same situation. You might also be able to get a feel for the numbers involved in possible suicide/intentional no pull incidents here. Has that AFF student been banned from the DZ? I wouldn't want to be anywhere near them in the air if that's how they behave while still in training.

Can you show your working for that? Because I'd argue that your claim is false (statistically). It's really hard to compare skydiving with other activities like driving because of their relative frequency. The risk of dying on any one skydive is approximately 1/133,333, but of course this is influenced by your skill level and the risks of the particular jump you might be taking part in (wingsuit, relative work, freeflying). For driving, one way to compare the risk is by comparing the approximate distance travelled per fatality, and then working out the risk you expose yourself to on a yearly basis by driving and comparing that to the risk of making a given number of skydives in a year. For example, I want to compare the risk of skydiving to driving. In Australia, there are 5.8 fatalities for every billion kilometres travelled by motor vehicle (including drivers, passengers, cyclists and motorcyclists). The average person drives 10,000km in a year, which represents an overall risk of death from driving in Australia of 1/17,241. In comparison, the risk of death from performing eight skydives in a year is approximately 1/16,666. So while the odds of dying from skydiving per jump are lower compared a year of driving, once you jump more than 8 times in a year, skydiving represents the greater risk. To put this another way, one jump is approximately equal in risk to 6 weeks worth of average driving (~1150km). I'm not sure where your dropzone is, but I'm guessing it isn't 1000km away. Therefore, driving to the dropzone is not statistically more dangerous than the jump itself. Of course, there are so many variables involved in both of these activities that a comparison is essentially nonsensical. But I still think it's disingenuous to make the claim that the drive to the dropzone is more dangerous than skydiving overall. Again, I feel like statistics can be manipulated in many different ways to support vastly different arguments. The fact remains that there are choices you can make both on the ground and in the air that will reduce your chances of being injured or killed while skydiving, and that's what we should be focusing our attention on.

Wrong, wrong, wrong. You've made a fundamental mistake here to claim that skydiving is safer than these activities based purely on the number of deaths per year. The difference is the relative frequency with which people are exposed to these risks. How many people get out of bed in the US each year? Billions. How many died from doing so in a year? Only 450. There are far fewer skydives completed each year than the number of people that get out of bed in one day in the US. For this reason alone, it would be reasonable to expect the rate of death from getting out of bed to be higher than skydiving, simply because it is done more often by more people. Getting out of bed is extremely safe, but for a tiny percentage of people it results in their death. Let's assume that 300 million people get out of bed every day in the US. If 450 people die doing this each year, than the average risk of death from performing this activity is 0.00000041%. This is much lower than the 0.0075% chance you have of dying from skydiving based on the yearly statistics. Let's also look at the champagne statistic quickly, because the numbers of deaths caused per year are the same for champagne corks and skydiving. 304 million bottles of champagne were sold in 2013 (this is just the sales figures for genuine champagne, not including any other sparkling wine with a cork that pops out). Compare this to the 3.2 million skydives that took place for the same number of deaths, and you'll see that opening a bottle of champagne is much safer than skydiving. To really compare relative risk of activities, you need to consider the frequency with which they are performed. If not, you could use faulty logic to claim that naked skydives are 100% safe because no-one died skydiving naked last year. I agree with others like JeffCA who have stressed the importance of making good decisions to reduce your exposure to risk while skydiving, but trying to argue that you're safer being a skydiver than getting out of bed in the morning is ridiculous.

Right, thanks for clarifying. I've seen people make the argument that the risk doesn't add up over a lifetime of jumping before though.

Holy fuck there are some clueless know-it-all statisticians in this thread. To those of you saying the risk is not cumulative -- wake up and think about it for a second. Imagine you have a coin: flip heads and you live, flip tails and you die. 50% chance of death on any one flip, right? Now, how likely is it that you will make it to fifty flips? Pretty fucking unlikely. Yes, the chance that it will come up tails on any one flip is 50%, but if you keep flipping that coin over and over, eventually your number is going to be up. REPEATED EXPOSURE TO RISK IS CUMULATIVE. Apply the same situation to skydiving, except that this time, it is much less likely that you are ever going to flip tails. Let's imagine that the coin is weighted so that it will only ever land on tails once out of every 133,333 coin tosses. This is the equivalent of saying that on any one jump you have a 1/133,333 chance of death. Now keep flipping that coin. Again, as in the example above, the chance of death on any one dive is 1/133,333. But over a lifetime of jumping, you increase your exposure to the risk that the coin will come up tails. On any one jump the risk is low. But do it over and over again and you increase the chance that your number comes up. It's that simple. See here for a worked example: http://math.stackexchange.com/questions/29950/does-repeated-activity-increase-the-probability-of-a-specific-event-happening If you replace the numbers in the answer with the correct statistic for risk of death on one skydive, you can calculate your relative risk of death over a lifetime of jumping by specifying the number of jumps you expect to do.

Yeah this is a good point. I guess hard deck was the wrong term to use here. I was more referring to the idea of an altitude at which I commit to landing with more nylon over my head versus attempting to cutaway. As others have brought up though, this biplane could potentially turn into a downplane so I guess it's a situation that you need to constantly keep monitoring until you're on the ground. Will definitely be bringing this up with instructors next time I'm at the DZ.

Oh man, that's ugly. I don't know what the best thing to do would be, but my first instinct would be to cutaway and hope that I could get out of the line twists after the main (hopefully) departs. That's presuming I'm above my hard deck. Below that I really don't know what I'd do. Thanks for posting this, I'll be chatting with my instructors to get their advice next time I'm at the DZ.