skr

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skr last won the day on June 17 2019

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Gear

  • Container Other
    Racer
  • Main Canopy Size
    150
  • Main Canopy Other
    Stiletto
  • Reserve Canopy Size
    160
  • Reserve Canopy Other
    Performance Designs
  • AAD
    Cypres

Jump Profile

  • Home DZ
    Pitt Meadows / Snohomish
  • License
    D
  • License Number
    981
  • Licensing Organization
    USPA
  • Number of Jumps
    3989
  • Years in Sport
    57
  • Freefall Photographer
    No

Ratings and Rigging

  • USPA Coach
    No
  • Pro Rating
    No
  • Wingsuit Instructor
    No
  • Rigging Chest
    Senior Rigger

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  1. > From Bryan Burke at Skydive Arizona. I think these analyses and formulations of situations that he does are real milestones in the evolution of skydiving. Skr
  2. I read to the bottom of Bryan Burke's article http://www.dropzone.com/safety/General_Safety/The_Horizontal_Flight_Problem_935.html and tried to add a comment, but it doesn't show up. I was able to rate it by clicking on one of the little gold stars but couldn't add a comment. Skr
  3. skr

    The Horizontal Flight Problem

    Thanks Bryan. These analyses and formulations of situations that you do are real milestones in the evolution of skydiving. Skr
  4. > One type of dive you can do is where you do nothing in freefall ... except feel the air. I still do that fairly often, just go out by myself and feel the amazing feeling of being in Freefall. Sixty seconds is a really long time! Skr
  5. Besides all the other good answers above I find it helpful to get on Google Maps and practice seeing how the runways, surrounding ground features and so on look. I look at the dropzone from various altitudes then look away and practice visualizing it. I do that enough times that I can see the runways and know their numbers, and can see the river, highway, town, railroad track, race track, or whatever, and know which way north, south, east and west are. That helps me assimilate the avalanche of other new stuff I will encounter at a new dropzone. Skr
  6. > Writing to us the 'old' jumpers Skratch! Yes, some of the gear, airplanes, and common practices have changed, but lots of his stories revolve around human nature, motives, quirks, bravado .. How many young guys get in trouble doing something weird these days because underneath it all they were just trying to get noticed by all the pretty girls? :-) :-) I remember a story about them jumping a watermelon - a Texas sized watermelon. Right away I'm visualizing something the size of a small tank, with handles dangling off the ends (how'd they get that thing into and out of a 195?). And immediately upon exit the watermelon goes supersonic, with two jumpers fluttering in the breeze, leaving the camera and third jumper stranded in freefall at exit altitude. So they seek wisdom far into the night, and decide to try it with a mattress the next day. A mattress?? From a 195?? But I can see that story happening today. The jumpsuits and gear and airplanes may have changed but ... The "old days" really were different in some ways, and I'm glad I got to see it, but under the surface a lot is still the same. Kind of scary thinking there's lots of young guys out there now with attitudes like ours were back then, isn't it? :-) :-) Skr
  7. Aha! I thought there might be more to the story than appeared in Parachutist :-) :-) It was good to see the uncut version, but I agree with Guru312 that your stories reveal even more. So if you happen to fall into a reminiscing reverie from time to time ... You'll be writing to us, the jumpers, not to some Parachutist editor, so you can just kind of let go and ... Skr
  8. Clarice just forwarded this email from Brian Williams: Date: Sun, 5 Aug 2012 19:48:02 -0700 (PDT) From: Brian Williams Subject: Bill Newell gone I'm sad to say, but Bill passed on sometime after 6:00 P.M. today. He battled the Grim Reaper to the very end. I've known this Great Guy for 49 years and will miss him terribly. Brian Williams
  9. > They are from way back in the Casa Grande era Way back? Whaddya mean *way back*?! It seems like just day before yesterday. I ran into Bob Schaeffer in Oklahoma in 1980 when I was helping Hillsy at Skydance, but I haven't seen Mike in a long time. Those guys really knew how to run a drop zone. Thanks, Gary. It's good to know Mike is still active and flying. Skr
  10. Worst DZO? I've been jumping at Snohomish for the last four years and I have a different impression of Tyson. He reminds me of Bryan Burke down at Eloy who looks at the whole system and how the various components fit into the overall situation and tries to let people do as much as they can without endangering others. And I'm sure he would like to be doing some wingsuit jumps himself. But I think he's up against the question of how to coordinate really different flight modes, like swooping with regular canopy flight this is wingsuits with straight downers and high pulling tandems. And I think the real sticking point is the effort it would take to keep new wingsuiters out of the straight downer airspace. Multiple landing zones and airplanes add to the complication, but I think the training to keep the airspaces separated is probably the stumbling block. Didn't Mark Twain say something about people who do what's right even when it's inconvenient and unpopular? Something like aggravating some and astonishing the rest? :-) :-) Skr
  11. > our mom was to say the least, one of a kind. Most of the people she jumped with were unique and colorful characters, but yes, she stood out even in that crowd, and not just because we were nearly all guys and she was a really pretty girl :-) :-) I wasn't there for her malfunction, but now that you mention it I remember it happening. I remember her being on the Fairchild jumps at Oceanside. I was jumping at Oceanside, Elsinore, Taft, Arvin, Lancaster and California City, and ran into her at several places, but I imagine that I noticed her much more than she noticed me. People are fading fast. It's good that you have so many memories of her. Skr
  12. I don't know. Danger wasn't why I started jumping. I wanted to go out in space and be weightless, but I was inconveniently born a couple centuries before that became commonly available. And I wanted to fly, like a bird. And when I was a kid I played WW-II pilot getting shot down over Germany so I would have to bail out, and I would fall and fall and fall. And for a couple summers I spent all day jumping off the 24 ft diving platform, accumulating several days worth of freefall one second at a time :-) :-) And when I finally did start I was really, really scared until I got stable (11th jump), and that wasn't fun. And the times after that when I would get in some situation and be really shit scared weren't fun either. On the other hand .. That danger introduced me to intense focus, and forethought, and paying attention, and I found that I really liked that. And I remember, in the late 70's, when life was starting to transition, wondering why I had to jump in order to focus like that. Well, of course you don't. People have known that for thousands of years. That led to a big thrash of reading spiritual and meditation books. And as I became more self aware, or maybe honest, over the years I found that I was drawn to situations of concentration and paying attention. I remember, working at the Academy of Science in Beijing a few years ago, the first time I decided to try taking a taxi and get further than walking distance from my apartment. It was like the pre-jump jitters of my first jump, reviewing how to say where I wanted to go, pinchecking everything I was taking with me, going to the bathroom again .. And when I got to the subway and started down the steps into the vast unknown of god-knows-what my heart was racing like on any jumprun. So I guess I'd change my answer from not sure to about the same as it is now. I don't like being afraid but I like what I've learned from it. Skr
  13. Well all the words floating around in my mind seem kind of trite and inadequate. He used to jump at Oceanside, near Camp Pendleton, in the early 60's, and when I'd run into him here and there over the years he always seemed like the same guy - a little more weather beaten, but the same, quiet guy. And he was always in such good shape I guess I thought he'd just kind of go on forever. Damn .. Well, thanks for posting this. Skr
  14. Hi Al, > The old crowd seems to be shrinking at an alarming rate now. I don't know if you've seen Bill Newell's latest post (5-5-12) on Air Trash but it snapped me back to reality. I didn't know about that. Thanks for telling me. I should apologize for pulling in your face before it's too late. It's just that I was used to pulling at two rather than breaking at two. I actually saw you, but by the time it registered my right hand was going for the ripcord and it pulled before I could shift gears. And then when you said I should be able to handle myself at 1,500 ft I knew you were right but I was too embarrassed to say so. It's funny the stuff you remember. Skr
  15. I got so involved in drawing that ascii diagram that I forgot about this part: > Why is this not true in your example: > When J1 passes through, it will take him horizontally farther away from J2 and when J2 pass through it will take him horizontally closer to J1, back to the original horizontal separation at exit. > > J1 will see J2 first moving horizontally away from him and then horizontally closer to him. Except that I woke up a couple mornings later thinking "No, he's right. That apparent extra separation disappears right there in the forward throw layer." So then I started trying to think where I got off the track, thinking I would come back here and say something, but I can't seem to concentrate on this right now. This is especially annoying because I used to think what you just said, and even posted about it. rec.skydiving Sept 1999: > One way I retrain my intuition is to practice standing in the door > with my primary focus being my relation to the ground and my motion > across it. With high uppers I can see that I am not moving very much > and the previous group is being swept away by the upper wind. When > I step out I too will be swept away by that same wind and will end > up pretty close on top of them. > > With no uppers, I am covering distance across the ground and basically > leaving the previous group where they got out (except for forward throw) > and moving away from them. Bryan Burke has a number of pithy sayings, one of which is "Minds are like parachutes. "Sometimes they just don't work. So this effort foundered on poorly formulated physics, but I'll be back sometime later and start a new thread. I know that 98% of the attention these days needs to be developing customs that allow different kinds of canopy flying to coexist, but I'd just like to have a nice, clean exposition that takes new jumpers from their initial intuition of looking out the door and leaving room, to why that doesn't work with uppers, to when groundspeed is a good technique and when conditions are in unsolved territory. Skr