skr

> Who was your most memorable instructor? Bob Sinclair. I worked for and got to hang out with him and Dave Burt in the 60's and learned a huge amount. Also Bud Kiesow, D-55, for lore, attitude and perspective. And Richard Economy, D-115, for that and for showing me the idea of flying no contact. We used to call it hovering. Skr

> Has it occurred to you that it takes time (and evolution) to come up with a clear set of rules? > This is just another step in the ongoing development of this community. I agree with this. I was on the WELL (Whole Earth something something) in the 80's and there were tremendous thrashes about etiquette and procedure and responsibility. And rec.skydiving was a great place to talk and learn for many years. I used to think it was important to have a place where anybody could say anything and not be censored. I still like the idea but the practical result was that in the late 90s a lot of people showed up who had no respect or consideration for anybody and every thread was instantly hijacked and filled with brain foam and bullshit. It became useless as a place to talk about anything. Then I came over here and it was great - a place for chit chat and places for trying carry on a conversation and stay within visual range of some topic and some moderation to keep it on track. There was still some topic drift and one liners and clashes but the topical forums worked pretty well. There does seem to be a need for something like talkback where people can hang out and talk about nothing in particular. I didn't go over there much, it wasn't very interesting to me and I couldn't even keep up with a small number of topical forums with periodic scans of the other ones. I'm just stepping back in after a 3 month phase of otherness so I missed the specifics that lead to this, but I gather that some people were pissing in the well that we're all trying to drink out of? I really agree with Sangiro's effort to create community and I hope he's not getting discouraged by whatever's going on. I think it's been a really worthwhile effort. A jump only lasts 3 or 4 minutes but the community goes on all week. Skr

Well, I've been in kind of an out phase with respect to skydiving and dropzone.com the last few months, but a local jumper, Courtney Frasch, and then listening to people talk on Safety Day, sort of prodded me to take another stab at dealing with upper winds. I did it in two parts. http://indra.net/~bdaniels/hidden/sg_skr_dealing_1_uppers.txt is mostly words and thoughts and conclusions. For the hard core who want to see ascii diagrams and mathematical handwaving I put that stuff in part 2 at http://indra.net/~bdaniels/hidden/sg_skr_dealing_2_tables.txt It all makes sense to me, but of course my writing always does make sense to me until other people start reading it. Maybe someday I will send some version of this to USPA and see if any of it makes it into the SIM. I know it's not as pressing as canopy control but I really think after all these years of discussion there should be something more than just "leave more time". Skr

Maybe find a Cessna dropzone if you're not already at one. Turbines are expensive and mostly spotted by the pilot and GPS so at most you get to look out the door and check the spot or practice a little at looking straight down. Skr

Yes, I got an email yesterday. We go back almost 40 years. A lot of scenes, memories and thoughts. I know from my own life how it is to be in such deep despair that that seems like the only way to make it stop hurting, but it really sucks to know that Joe was there. Tell them you love them while they are still around, it's too late when they've gone in. Skr

> So does that make skydiving statisticaly less dangerous then driving? Three statisticians went duck hunting. A probable duck flew over. The first statistician fired but his aim was behind the duck. The second statistician aimed with more lead and fired ahead of the duck. The third statistician put his gun down and said: "We got him."

http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20040228/fob2.asp

In another context I ran across this: http://www.ixtreme.com/pictures/fullsize/photo59.jpg I guess this could apply to a lot of conversations and situations but I just found the image funny. Skr

2:30 pm sunday feb 1 i just got an email and gave him a call the room was full of jumpers, probably having a party :-) :-), so we only talked a couple minutes he sounded like the same Jerry Bird to me pretty soon they are taking him up to tampa i guess i shouldn't let 24 years go by between visits ... skr

To me freedom is not a body position. It's an attitude. Skr

>where will the sport go next? I have thought for a while that organizing to produce various emotional experiences was a more fruitful direction than the technicalities of some new body position or maneuver. That came to me in 1976 when I spent a summer in Norway, Sweden, Denmark and realized that maneuvers in themselves are meaningless. It's the way people feel about things that counts, and maneuvers are just tools to produce feelings. When I got back to Pope Valley I tried to make that more concrete and predictable and called it Skydance. I wrote a couple things about that. The Skydance Approach at http://indra.net/~bdaniels/ftw/fr_ref5_skydance.html and Freedom is Not a Body Position at http://indra.net/~bdaniels/ftw/fr_ref4_freedom.html This may be too nebulous and new agey, or maybe I didn't explain it very well, but other than Pope Valley the main stream world has pretty much focused on body position and maneuvers as the medium of expression. Skr

>wouldn't exit order and timing be pretty basic >knowledge requirements for someone with any >sort of instructional ratings? It should be common knowledge for everybody, but it seems to be harder to get that established than anybody would have believed when we first started talking about this about four million ascii tons of discussion ago :-) :-) I think one reason it's confusing is that our intuition about how things work when you jump off of something developed for limited situations like jumping off of a chair. If it's right under me I will land on it, but if it's over there at a 45 degree angle I'll miss it. That intuition doesn't work when you have upper winds and forward throw and 60 seconds worth of freefall drift and hundreds of feet of canopy motion from the group in front of you. It gives you wrong answers and what we have to do is make the effort to expand our intuition to this new, more complicated situation. I wrote something about that once. Go to http://indra.net/~bdaniels/ftw/index.html and go down to the bottom in the learning section and look at "Learning how to do Separation" at http://indra.net/~bdaniels/ftw/sg_skr_coach_weekend.html#septop I found John Kallend's freefall simulator pretty helpful in expanding my intuitive feel for how it works. And I agree with billvon's way of formulating it, he's been part of this discussion for 10 or 12 years. Skr

> Would a delta position cure an uncontrollable spin? Deltaing out of a spin was once a standard technique. Maybe it's emphasized less now because AFF instructors are reluctant to have their students deltaing away from them. A spin usually comes from some asymmetry of body position plus stiffness. The legs are often the culprit and toe taps are a standard thing to try. The swan dive / delta is a very stable position and going into it takes you out of whatever position you were in that was causing the spin. Relaxing would work too but just jumping out is a tense thing to do and if something is going wrong people usually get even more tense. So all these things are something you can try if a spin starts, but a cure is more like doing something other than whatever is causing the spin in the first place. You may figure out an actual cause or you may just move on from it as you start to feel more at home in the air with more jumps. Remember that at some point you have to pull even if you are in a spin. Skr

My first piggyback had places in the main liftwebs for separable D-rings so I put on a front reserve and did some cutaways. In one way it was just making another jump, but my heart was beating pretty fast, the ground looked so close and so far away at the same time. After that I tried tying the skirt of a round canopy together to make a streamer. It doesn't slow you down much, the camera guy stayed right with me. I cutaway, fell forward flat and stable for a ways, and pulled the reserve. The pilot chute went up and then fell into the main container and just sat there. The camera guy was laying there watching the show, but I didn't know what was going on, I thought I was having a total on the reserve. I sat up and was wiggling around trying to bang on the reserve with my elbows. I was just on the verge of pulling the front reserve when the rear one left and opened. I didn't pursue this much further because I couldn't figure out how to tie the chute into some slower malfunction like a mae west. Skr

> If you're going to take the risk of an intentional cutaway Hi Bill, I've noticed in other posts that you seem to discourage intentional cutaways and I was wondering why. Is it the fear of all the makeshift ways people might do it, or ... ? I have thought many times that it would be good if somebody (like maybe you :-) :-) would design a cutaway rig and that we then develop the custom that somewhere in their first few hundred jumps almost everybody makes a cutaway or two. Besides the chills and thrills for the young and restless, it would de-mystify cutting away from a malfunction. My first piggyback (Crossbow - mid 60's) had built in to the main lift webs places for separable D-rings and I did a number of cutaways and learned a lot, as well as acquiring some good jump stories. It seems like a well designed system and some procedures and everybody having a chance to do a couple in calmer circumstances would be a good idea. Skr

>What does "pre" stand for? It also stands for the lengths Sangiro goes to to make this a good and useful place. I asked for the same help JohnRich just did some time back and the next day there was an email from Sangiro saying that he had added the "pre" tag. Like all good hackers he seems to have forgotten to add it to the documentation though :-) :-) Skr

>how much did you weigh when you were jumping those round 185-195 lbs. >death rigs? Today's gear is really different, but I don't think it's all that much safer. That's just one of those things that's easy and popular to say. Safety is much more about people and training and attitude. But it's also important not to let facts get in the way of all those good jump stories. We have a cultural heritage to maintain here. Skr

The Bent Prop has always been the weakest link for me, a vegy / rice / tofu kind of person. Also, this year Aerodyne stuck a bunch of wind blades along the edge of the main landing area so it was hard to watch the swoopers. And they made a lot of noise so you couldn't hear people in freefall. Also (maybe I should do a poll) they put music in one of the Otters. Not only are there 20+ different opinions about what music, but in the turbine environment they play it so loud that it's painful. I'm a quiet concentrator on the way up and would rather have no music at all. Other than that I think Eloy is an outstanding place to jump. It always has been, but this year was even better with the seminars and all the other stuff you did. *Thanks* B^2! :-) The planes are great, the manifest is accurate, Bryan Burke is watching every load so when weird stuff happens he's right on top of it ... The organizers are good, the locals, the transients from all over ... It's not the only great scene in the world, but it's always a good choice ... Unless it's cold. I frost bit my nose this year and am now looking into full face helmets :-) :-) Skr

I believe Bob Bonitz still works there, probably somewhere in robotics. There is also a guy, Erann Gat, whose posts I read in comp.lang.lisp. I don't know him and he's not a jumper but his home page is at http://www.flownet.com/gat/ I worked there for 3 years in the 60's. It was great. Go for it! Skr[

>about the Para-commander's "flare". I made about 900 jumps on rounds, and another 900 on PC's, which I guess are also rounds. In both cases I used the rear risers. I'm not sure that "flare" is the right word. For cheapos and lopos I think the rear riser effect came from pulling the mods down and getting more material up in the high pressure area. Picture air pressure as a normal vector and see that the top part of the canopy is holding you up and around the skirt it's mostly holding the canopy open. Maybe this is kind of true for PC's too, but I think I did PC's that way because I had been doing cheapos and lopos that way. I mostly stood up. Landings under rounds have been greatly exaggerated for the jump story effect. Skr

>Thats all I got to say about that That must be some kind of record for the most story packed into the shortest sentence :-) :-) Good work. skr (18 at Christmas in Eloy)

>> you flare a couple feet higher >I experienced the opposite. I had to flare lower >than I do here in CO You're right, that wasn't very clear. When you go down to sea level you flare too high for a couple jumps, but you tune in to the lower flare height pretty quickly. It seems easier to adjust going in that direction than for people coming up here. Skr

I was born a skydiver, it just took me 20 years to run into a situation where I could actually do it. I've never looked back. Skr

These days I live in Boulder which is 12 miles from Mile Hi. For several months in 1975 I lived in Los Angeles and jumped at the Gulch in Arizona, which was 500 miles each way. Freefall junkie is no joke :-) :-) Skr

>but my instructor told me that I don't need it It sounds to me like you need to find an instructor who will listen to you, and help you from where you actually are instead of where he thinks you should be. In the long run I think it's useful to develop the skills to jump with no gadgets of any kind, just put on a parachute and jump out, but in the short run you have a temporary hard spot to get through. Get an altimiter and get through the hard spot, and later on put some effort into learning how the ground looks at various altitudes and how to not space out altitude and so on. These days I have a Cypres and two altimeters (one on my chest strap for other people), but I've made the effort to develop the skills to jump without them. There may be some sports psychology stuff you could do but that's hard to say without talking to you. Skr