skr

I think it's good to practice the breakup as a
maneuver in it's own right.

If for example you're pulling at 3,000 ft and
allowing 1,500 ft of vertical for breakup you
could start at 4,500, turn 180 from your
imaginary group, track for 7 seconds, wave
and pull and it would be about right.

If you're pulling higher start higher.

If you want to leave a little margin while you're
learning this allow 2,000 ft of vertical, turn 180,
track for 7 seconds, stop, check altitude and
see how much altitude 7 seconds of tracking
really used.

It's helpful to get used to these intervals and
also how the ground looks while you're doing it.

For solos either direction away from jump run
is OK, although where you are relative to
target might make one direction better.

I find it helpful to notice where I pull and where
I open to learn how long my chute generally
takes to open. Even with rental gear it's a good
exercise.

The more familiar you get with the bottom end
the more comfortable you become.

Skr

Theme 2 was that "Follow the first person down" is
one of those memes, like "Wait till they're at 45
degrees", that gets into people's minds and sidetracks
us from real solutions.

"Follow the first person down" as both formulation
and algorithm is inadequate, incomplete and
misleading.

The goal, safe landing / safe separation, gets
obscured by the statement of the attempted mechanism,
"Follow first down" / "Leave 45 degrees".

We can do better.

----

xxxxxxxxxx

But right now I can't seem to get into words what
I'm trying to say, so I'll just put this much out
and see if it comes to me when I get back, and also
maybe respond to some of the points made above.

Skr

Theme 3 was that the difference in values between
swoopers and regular jumpers leads to very
different ideas of what a good landing is.

Like bicycles and cars they don't mix well and
trying to force them into a common mold doesn't
work.

----

Not being a swooper I'm only guessing at swooper
values but they appear to be along the lines of
length, form, assorted toe dragging and other bonus
points, maybe the esthetics of the entry.

Ideal swooping conditions would be down wind in a
meadow at 5,000 meters in the Alps where you could
go for about a mile.

The actual arrival back on earth is unimportant.


The traditional ideal landing is to come to a dead
stop, and then calmly place my feet on the ground.

If I have to take a step I lose points. If I have
to run it out it's a shitty landing. If I have to
PLF to survive I really blew it.

Mere survival is not the point.

----

Both the end goals and the flying required are
incompatible.


Due to the historical order in which they occurred
swooper goals and values are being forced on
regular jumpers instead of recognizing that they
are two separate kinds of activity.

Just look at what pictures of landings appear in
the magazines.

It's even built into the current language in such
phrases as "high performance landings".

Whether performance is high or low depends on the
values against which you are measuring it.

For speed and acceleration a car is high performance.
For an ecological paradigm bicycles are high performance.

For me a perfect standup is high performance.
For a swooper a great swoop is high performance.

So landings are not high or low performance, they are
simply swooper or traditional.

----

Now I happen to think that swooping is a very cool
development. It looks great, and it pushes our understanding
into whole new areas.

But forcing of values is not cool.

Seeing one as better than the other instead of just
different is not cool.

So that's that theme.

( Upon rereading this before posting it I realize that
( for me to be championing traditional values is at least
( a case of beer and possibly even a small keg.

Skr

OK - I tried to combine 3 themes into one post
and it was a mistake, so let me separate them
into sub threads with different subject lines
and try again.

This is stuff I've been thinking for a long time
but it's the first time I've tried to articulate
it out loud.

Seeing people's reactions is very helpful.

----

Theme 1 was largely venting frustration at one
of the local dropzones where the wind indicators
are minimal and hard to see, swoopers and regular
jumpers land in the same area, the custom of
flying a recognizable pattern has never been
established, the rule is follow the first person
down, and people land every which way.

That is a local situation which doesn't really
belong in the discussion as other than motivation,
so let me drop that part, it doesn't contribute
to further understanding.

----

Theme 2 was that "Follow the first person down" is
one of those memes, like "Wait till they're at 45
degrees", that gets into people's minds and sidetracks
us from real solutions.

"Follow the first person down" as both formulation
and algorithm is inadequate, incomplete and
misleading.

The goal, safe landing / safe separation, gets
obscured by the statement of the attempted mechanism,
"Follow first down" / "Leave 45 degrees".

We can do better.

----

Theme 3 was that the difference in values between
swoopers and regular jumpers leads to very
different ideas of what a good landing is.

Like bicycles and cars they don't mix well and
trying to force them into a common mold doesn't
work.

Skr

> You ought to come play with us at Lost Prairie

:-)

With the usual synchronicity of events we are
planning to go to Lost Prairie this year.

See you there.

Skr

Landing Directions                                    Tue 2004-5-11

------------------                                    -------------


Landing into the wind has been the normal way to land ever since

people started flying 100 years ago, and birds have been doing it

that way for much longer. It gives you the least ground speed and

softest landings.


Recently the idea of following the first person down has emerged.


I think that's a bad idea and here's why:



Consider how a normal landing goes:


- You monitor the wind trends during the day.

- Jump out and open up.

- Look at the wind socks, wind tees, tetrahedrons,

and see how the winds are at this moment.

- Start flying from there to the beginning of a pattern

for these winds.

- Modify this general plan to account for traffic,

fly the pattern, and land.


With zero or light and variable winds there is either a default

direction, or you know that people could be landing in several

directions and watch out for it.



Now consider how it works when you're trying to follow the

first person down:


- You jump out and open up.

- You start looking around trying to figure out who's

going to be first down.

- You don't know who it is or what they're going to do,

so you can't start positioning yourself.

- Instead of watching for traffic you're looking down

trying to figure out who's going to be first and what

they're planning to do.

- You spot a couple possibilities and their shadows.

- You start setting your own pattern up based on what

you think they're doing.

- You glance away for a moment to check for traffic.

- One of them does a 180 hook and lands.

- You look down and think you know which direction they

were going.

- Others are fooled by the same thing.

- None of it makes sense according to the wind sock.

- Some people follow the rule and land down wind.

- Others follow common sense and land into the wind.



One of the arguments I hear for this is that that's how Eloy

does it.


But no, that is not how Eloy does it.


The general rule at Eloy is to land into the wind.


There is only one small grassy section where the landing

direction must be one way or the other based on the first

person down.


And there are lots of wind socks and wind tees and tetrahedrons

so you can figure out which way it will be.



"Follow the first person down" is one of those things that's

easy to say but doesn't make sense when you look at it more

closely.


It's not like you're hanging around at opening altitude until

the first person lands so you then know what to do. You need

to start positioning yourself up high, you can't wait till the

last minute.


It doesn't translate at all to a dropzone where the winds are

tricky and the landings could be in any direction.



I also hear the argument that you should not put up good wind

indicators because if people can see what's going on they will

chase the wind sock in light and variable winds.


But that really only happens where people have not been taught

to read the winds and fly their canopies according to conditions

and traffic.


That points to better training rather than suppressing important

wind information.



So, except for special cases like the one small area at Eloy,

I think it's better to put lots of wind indicators up and

teach people how to read the conditions and fly their canopies.


Skr

edit to add

 tags to restore formatting
						

Good idea.

Besides looking around for close neighbors
I tell people to look at the ground and rear
riser to a good direction too before collapsing
slider and releasing brakes.

Skr

Bryan Burke wrote some nice articles on this
which I put up here:

http://indra.net/~bdaniels/ftw/index.html

They're about 8 or 10 inches up from the bottom
of the page.

Skr

> Kathy and Bill have split up.

Aaaaeeeee!!

Another cornerstone of stability in my world
has crumbled ...

If I ever hear that Bill has stopped jumping
I'm going to get really scared.

Why I knew the young lad when he had only
5,000 jumps.

The world is getting weird out.

Skr

I didn't vote because I've done all of the above.

Only you are going to know.

There is some chance that you will hurt something
else trying to protect your injured ankle. That's
happened to other people.

But there is some chance you will hurt something
else trying to cope with freefall deficiency syndrome
too .. being a freefall junkie is no joke :-) :-)

Maybe picking a perfect wind day (in Colorado ??)
and wrapping your ankle really well and PLFing to
your good side will seem to make sense.

It's probably more sensible to wait but we are talking
skydiving here.

Skr

>I was one of the lurkers at Elsinore back in the old daze

This is a small world .. I see that we've been jumping the
same amount of time, have the same number of jumps and
jump the same kind of canopy.

Us old farts have unusually good taste, don't we? :-) :-)

Skr

>BB waves at skr

Who waves back :-)

>How did that video work out for you?

We've had winter and a long string of weathery
weekends, but we'll show it this summer.

Skr

>>Riddler
>>I had fun today jumping with my friends.
>
> livendive
>Fuck the hokey-pokey, THAT'S what it's all about.

But actually there is no need to restrict ourselves to fun.

There is a vast range of experiences to be had at the
dropzone.

Skr

>That's classified

Ha! I wondered whether anybody was going to
give it away :-) :-)

Skr

Hmmm .. I went in once (bounce and live) - July 4th, 1980.

There was a moment of extreme dread and "Oh, shit!" when
I realized it was happening (I was about 500 ft at the time).

Then there was a period of really attuned focus while I tried
stuff and then grabbed my risers and swung out flat, kind of
a right rear PLF all at once.

Then I hit. And bounced. And lost consciousness on the
bounce.

I thought I was going in but a little while later my eyes opened
and I was looking up at blue sky and a circle of faces looking
down at me.

Hitting the ground didn't hurt, but it hurt like hell for a long
time after that. Actually I still have a fair amount of pain in
my pelvis, which doesn't stop me, but it slows me down
and limits what I can do.

I recommend that you avoid it if you can.

Skr

> I'm a senior at North Carolina State University, and I have recently become addicted to skydiving

Same thing happened to me when I was there!

I started jumping between my junior and senior
year. Somehow school never looked the same
after that :-) :-)

I'm a couple thousand miles from there now but
I'll join your club in spirit.

Skr

>Tell the students what to do, not what not to do.

:-)

We should print that inside the goggles or visor
of all our teachers, it's a really, really important
point.

It takes effort to re word things in that way but
it makes a big difference.

Skr

>You and DeJan are the most inspiring people I've ever met!

OK - All you guys out there .. Listen Up!

If you go down this path it attracts pretty girls!

Now what else do you need to know ??

Get moving !! :-) :-)

--

Well Kalyne, it was obvious to me that you were already
in tune with this kind of stuff.

When your ankle gets better lets talk canopy stuff and
then make some more jumps.

Skr

>and stunt jumpers being fiilmed by the best in the business at that time...(Others , please help here with names and places...)

Carl Boenish did a lot of the filming.

Jay Gifford, Mike Milts, Garth Taggart, Jerry Rouillard
did the jumping and probably some of the filming.

I can't remember who else at the moment.

Skr

You know, this is a very interesting post.

I also put some effort into teaching myself
to keep track of altitude. For me it is basically
a sense of is it starting to get too long since
the last time I checked.

It took a conscious effort because freefall is
so seductive, I could just jump out and stay
there all day.

If I had a spare 20 million I'd go visit the space
station in a second. Hmmm, maybe I'll go buy
a powerball ticket tomorrow :-) :-)


I basically treat altitude (or lowness) like a cop
in the rear view mirror. I don't fixate on it but
I never quite forget he's back there either and
I periodically check just to see exactly where
he is.

When I get down lower, like when he's pulled
in right behind me, I check more often and get
a little more focused on not spacing out and
doing something foolish.

Skr

>Is it me? Am I missing something?

No, I think it's that a lot of people don't realize
that this can happen, so you either stumble on
it accidentally, it happens spontaneously, or you
just don't get to experience it.

To do it on purpose you have to have a DZO and
a web of experienced jumpers who want it and know
how to make it happen.

Even then it can be elusive because you can't
just go directly at it or stand around proclaiming
that it's happening.

You have to kind of open the door for it and then
let it. And you have to let it have you too because
the very act of trying to control it makes it go away.


I didn't realize the first one I was in, it just happened.
All I knew was that I was having the best time I had
ever had in my whole life. That was Oceanside in the
early 60s.

Another spontaneous best time was the Gulch in 1975.

The first time I really got that you could do this on
purpose was the summer of 1976 in Norway, Sweden
and Denmark.

That was when I realized a really fundamental insight:

It's not about maneuvers and hot dives and records
and stuff, it's all about how people feel while they are
doing it, and all that other stuff is just tools to produce
feelings.

The fundamental reason we skydive is to feel feelings.

Actually I started to put some of this stuff on a web site
once. If you go to

http://indra.net/~bdaniels/ftw/index.html

up near the top, the Oreo Cookie and freedom and
frameworks stuff and the next section down, the jumpstart
and profile stuff has more on this.

I oughta get my butt in gear and finish those sections.

----

As for experiencing it yourself, you know it's possible
because other people have experienced it, so maybe
if you go looking for it you will find it too.

You will know it when you see it.

Skr

>is there any thing that we should not do?

That's a good question, here's a couple things
that come to mind:

In freefall if you're feeling rambunctious and
wanting to try a bunch of maneuvers, don't go
for too long at a time without stopping to check
your altitude.

If you're wanting to track stay out of other people's
airspace. Track perpendicular to jump run rather
than up or down it. And keep going in the same
direction, don't go back and forth, which means
also that if your track is good and you're getting
too far away then stop just fall straight down.


Under canopy watch for other people. That means
don't go spiraling down through the crowd or
making turns or even flying straight without
keeping your scan for other people going.

Also after you open and do your controllability
check start thinking ahead to how to set yourself
up for the landing pattern. Don't go zooming
cluelessly around and then make some stupid
last minute maneuver close to the ground.


Ask your teachers this question, it's a good one.

Down at the bottom of

http://indra.net/~bdaniels/ftw/index.html

is an article called "Wings Level" that can help
you think about your canopy flying.

Put some real effort into learning how to fly your
canopy. That's where most people are hurting
themselves these days.

Skr

I was thinking about a sentiment I've heard here
and in other discussions in today's skydiving world,
variously expressed as:

"We are selling a service for $22."



No, what you're selling is a human experience,
freefall, friendship, feelings, family ...

The $22 plane ride is logistics, a means to an end.

What people want most is family, feeling included,
and self esteem, feeling empowered.

You create that the way a gardner creates flowers,
prepare the garden, plant the seeds, water the vibes,
make it possible, then stand back and watch as the
flowers do the growing.

There are techniques, prune here, nudge there,
but the flowering is inherent in the flowers.

It's what they naturally do in any conducive environment.

The DZO and her Boogie Mechanics are gardners.

The planes and manifest and business are the shovels
and rakes and watering can.


So, if you don't push the analogy too far, that's what
you're selling.

That's how it's worked at all the really successful
skydiving scenes that I've seen.

Skr

During the latest thrash here in Colorado I posted this
on the local mailing list. Why are we skydiving in the
first place?


> King Air, Twin Otter, what more do you want?

A skydiving scene, a jump story, a feeling of special times.

People who have been there know what I'm talking about, and
for people who haven't it's like freefall, no way to explain
it in words.

It's vibes and feelings and friendship and personal journey.

To look only at the mechanical infrastructure is to miss the
whole reason why we jump.

I've experienced it at Cessna dropzones. I've had the really
good fortune to be right in the thick of it several times,

Oceanside, Elsinore, Z'hills, The Gulch, Pope Valley,
Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Australia, New Zealand

come to mind from the 60s and 70s.


The experience was so good that I studied the process, the
ingredients and how they come together in order to enhance
the chances of helping another one happen.

I think Steve Woodford knew about this and tried to do it
at Brush, but it's not easy, it's delicate. It's like a
complex chemical reaction using emotions instead of chemicals.

It's delicate and easy to trample or derail.


Jeff and I didn't just argue, we talked about a lot of stuff
too, and I told him several times that he should hire me
to help with this. Several times we took a tentative step
down that path, but the gap between us was just too great
to bridge.

I started to try at Brush when it opened but I found Brush
depressing, something about the vibes of the town and that
horrible cattle meat grinder place just down the road maybe.

Plus, for me, the dogs and blasting music are such an unpleasant
environment that I gave up and went to Calhan for a couple
years. Calhan started well but in the second year the weather
and disintegrating dropzone ended it.


After last year at Mile-Hi I started feeling a lot of hope
that maybe this year it would happen. It's been trying to
happen in Colorado for years but it needs fertile ground.
It's a delicate, emotional chemistry reaction, much easier
to destroy than create.

Maybe it's still possible, I don't know, it's out of my
hands, but it would be really wonderful for both new and
old to experience one.

There's really nothing like it.

Skr

I think Bryan stated it in terms of body position
because at this time in history people are really
hung up on what body position you happen to
be skydiving in.

The real point is fall rate, and what he meant was
slow fallers (boards and RW usually) first, then
fast fallers (sit and head down usually), then high
pullers.

So if you are falling that fast you should probably
go just before the head downers.

Some of Bryan's original posts on this are down
at the bottom of http://indra.net/~bdaniels/ftw/index.html

Skr