skr

> flare a little later > flare a little higher? I wrote some stuff about that and put it here http://indra.com/~bdaniels/ftw/c_wings_level.html That article is also somewhere on this dropzone.com site.

> You are not that far behind Skratch. Hey! Watch it there kid! :-) :-) I may not be as young as I once was, but I'm as old once as I always was .. Or ... Wait ... How does that go? The scary part is that I sometimes understand Pat when he cuts loose with a full-on riff of babble!

> 50 years since I started jumping (Hit pause to let the magnitude and import of that sink in ... ) ... ... Wow! :-) :-) Skr

Big gaping hole in the Universe right now One of the Lights went out Anguish - For Her - All the people She touched She was one of the Good Guys

Thanks rapter. It brings up a lot of 60s Lancaster - Arvin - Taft memories of him. I used to sometimes wonder how such a little guy could stay down with everybody in freefall. Skr

> What year did the PCA ban wingsuits? I vaguely remember this ban in the 60s, but don't recall anybody paying much attention to it. I jumped a lot at Taft in the 60s and I remember Lyle Cameron, Don Molitar, and Red Grant, and others whose names I'm spacing. I remember Lyle one day jumping a big, rectangular piece of plastic - not rigid, but like heavy shower curtain with loops in the corners. He taped his feet into the bottom two loops and held the top two in his hands, and we all went up in Art's 185 and jumped out. To me the really interesting guy was Tom Sitton. Tom was this mad genius who designed his wings on the big computers at Hughes Aircraft. They had a top and bottom surface. There was a metal frame inside with heavy canvas like stuff stretched really tight over the frame. There was a hinge on each side where the leading edge met the frame your body rested in so he could rotate them down parallel with his body so he could get in and out of the Beech. It was a pretty big wingspan - you couldn't rotate them all the way down standing on the ground because the tips would hit the ground. The hinges and leading edges met your body several inches below your armpits, and there were small handles on the top surface to rotate them into position once you were out. There was also a set of tail feathers between his legs. The whole thing weighted 40 or 50 lbs. I really wanted to jump them and tried them on and practiced quite a few times, but I was too scared to do it. Tom did a lot of other really far out stuff, too. He was an interesting guy. Skr

>(Just trying to keep everything on thread here.) Tilting at windmills again I see .. But I'm not surprised, anybody who would tackle running a dropzone has a serious tilting gene :-) :-) > How you doing, old friend? After shedding a lot of stuff in the move up here above Seattle I'm tuning in to this new phase and this new region, and starting to shed ideas and viewpoints. It's interesting how different it feels in different parts of the world, and also how my perspective is changing as I get older. The combined effect is quite a ride, but fortunately I'm past the point of having to appear like I actually know what I'm doing. Is this still on topic? I think so, let's see, "ZHills sign", what sign are you? I'm a sign of the times. There, I think we're still on topic .. Skr

Ahhh ... Nostalgia ... Poignance ... I love feeling this stuff. > Also, just to note it in the ship's log, I ain't done yet! Good! I'll get to feel some more next year! I'm still jumping a little up here in Snohomish, and once in a while up in Pitt Meadows. I mostly jump with new jumpers so I don't have to remember anything complicated :-) :-) Skr

> At the first Z-Hills 10-Way Turkey meet in 1969 > our spotting of the DC-3 was done from the ground > by the judges, and they put us ALL so far out It was those stupid telemeters. You had to have the plane coming towards you regardless of the winds. And you had to get the jumpers out pretty early because if they went over the top while in freefall the telemeters would hit the stop before they got vertical and you couldn't just swing them around because you'd never find the jumpers in time. I felt really bad about putting you guys out in the swamp so many times. I hated being a judge. I only tried it about 3 times, once at Z'hills, and the first 4 and 10 way nationals, and each time uncovered all kinds of problems in spite of our best efforts to anticipate and plan. I guess I'm incompatible with the competition vibe because I only competed once, at the first 10 man meet, and that was pretty painful, too. But I really am sorry that I put you guys out in the swamp so many times. Skr

I still like my Stiletto so well that I haven't felt moved to try any of these newer canopies. The way it flies and glides, even the openings, although it took me about 150 jumps to learn how to pack it :-) :-) Skr

I didn't get bored, but I did walk away from being an active jumper once for a few years because the only dropzone within 500 miles was so painful to jump at. I ended up going to China as an English teacher. It resembled jumping quite a bit. I had to pay really close attention to what was going on all the time. And new and bewildering situations came up several times a day. And the adrenaline was pretty good, too. The first time I walked down into the bowels of the subway in Beijing my heart was beating as fast as on any jumprun. Jumping is such a powerful experience that it's hard to think there can be anything else as strong or as meaningful. But there is probably a lot of stuff, both inside and outside of jumping, that can have that kind of power and meaning if we can only open the doors of our minds a little and let it in. Maybe you could do a little scouting and report back. Lots of people come across this question, and maybe we could pool some answers. Skr

Oh .. A flood of memories .. June, 1964 .. I - A student struggling with the unbridgeable gap between what I was seeing in the sky on the weekends and the increasingly unappealing reality of graduate school in a math department. He - A guy also sitting at a desk when I walked in, but a rig sitting beside him instead of a blackboard with homework. A very hyper-modern looking rig. Sage green. I'd never seen a sage green rig before. Dennis Quinn, the other experienced jumper in Raleigh, and I had driven down to Ft Bragg to get my C license signed off. I don't remember what we talked about, but I was really struck, both by him and by being around a real, official parachuting scene. It's a good thing he didn't offer to sign me up. In the rush of the moment I probably would have done it, and then ended up in Antarctica or something :-) :-) And in the years after that I always perked up with interest when I encountered news or a story about him. Funny how someone can make such a lasting impression. And now we're here .. Blue Skies - In memory of ...

It's like pieces of the puzzle are disappearing. Pretty soon the past isn't going to exist anymore. Thanks MJO / Sparky. If you weren't posting these I probably wouldn't be hearing about them for a long time. Skr

A friend of mine once told me that she thought I'd never been domesticated. In hindsight I'm not sure she meant it as a compliment :-) :-) I also see that that when I read your words long ago I took the word "vertical" as referring to spine vertical body position, because I never had the idea that relative work was two dimensional. The words don't quite make sense with that interpretation, but I resolved that by seeing them as a poetic exhortation for people to get out there and innovate and imaginate and break free. And I entirely agreed with that. To be sure, the hookups were flat, at least the ones worth logging were. But the ride up was 3 dimensional, the exit- dive-swoop was 3 dimensional, the breakup was 3 dimensional, the relative work with the planet was 3 dimensional, the canopy flight was 3 dimensional, and, in the Oreo Cookie metaphor where the top layer is the exit and the bottom layer is the break, the filling, the long tall fall, was often filled with 3 dimensional activity. I remember in the mid 60s at Elsinore asking Clarice to fall straight down while I flew around above her, sticking my hand in and out of her burble, trying to figure out the size and shape of it. And I remember us trying to stand on each other's back, like a surf board. And 10 years later I remember pictures of Exitus doing an Enterprise dive where you build a saucer section out of 10 or so people, and have someone stand on it, and a 3-way wedge fly in and be the warp necelles. We did stuff like that at Pope Valley, too. And considering all the chile dogs and beer and other stuff that people ate, some of those ships were probably venting plasma on the way down too :-) :-) And Pope Valley in the 70s was where I really got focused on building dives out of moves instead of hookups. One of my favorites was hopping pairs. Just like people were flying wedges and stairsteps and stuff around we tried flying hopping pairs around relative to each other. A hopping pair is two people side by side continuously going over and under each other. So it's like flying pieces around, except the pieces all have an internal state of motion going on, too. Another was the waterfall where you have 3 or 4 people stacked up at 45 degrees, each person maybe 3 or 4 ft over and down from the one above, and then you have a person start at the top and burble hop down the waterfall, and take up a position on the bottom, and then the top person goes, and so on. There was a whole bunch of stuff like that. You know, relative work started out as freedom and expression and exploration, and over the years kind of devolved into competition and compulsory moves and records. I didn't see it coming, and I was distressed by it, and sort of went my own way, diverging from the mainstream, so I was happy to see freeflying burst forth, but before long the same symptoms started appearing, and I knew when I saw the words "compulsory move" in the same sentence as "freefly" that the game was over. But you've heard all this before. Still, someone might reasonably ask whether anybody has done anything new in the last 100,000 years. And I think we can say "Yes. We did. We flew."

> When did it change and why? When was a couple decades ago. Why is a mystery to me too (sort of). RW, relative work, used to mean people flying in freefall relative to one another. There was nothing in there about formations, hookups, body positions, points or anything else. Viewed from a couple miles away everybody is falling like a brick, but when you're up close doing it it feels like you're really flying around. That's what it still means to me. Formation skydiving is a really restricted form where people are doing hookups as fast or as big as they can for people on the ground called judges. In freeflying the emphasis switched to body position. Sit flying makes sense to me because we are built to see from an upright position and the visual aspect is a big part of it for me. Head down, other than to try it a few times, makes no sense to me, you can't see where you're going, and you're going there really fast! :-) :-) What I really think is more complicated than that, with a lot of hedging and allowing for other viewpoints and motives and situations and history, but to me, the words "relative work" still mean flying around relative to other people. Skr

> Hey Skratch! You started jumping in the 50's.... Yeah, in a way. From at least the 6th grade, and possibly earlier, I spent a lot of time in my imagination going up and jumping out and tumbling through the air in freefall, and also, in real life, jumping off of things like barns with homemade parachutes. And I spent even more time out in space being weightless. And there was a swimming pool that had an 8, 16 and 24 ft diving platform, and I would spend all day jumping off of the 24 ft. So I probably had several days worth of freefall, collected one second at a time, before I got to jump out of an actual airplane - a little Piper Cub in 1962. You're about a year ahead of me. > did you guys use the USAF equipment then? It was olive drab B4s with 28 ft flat circulars and 24 ft twill reserves. The mains had sleeves so we didn't get the killer opening shocks of the generation before. The guys who taught me, Jack Pryor for my first jump, and Bob Sinclair later, both started on straight, unmodified for sport, seat packs - no reserve, no training - they just went up and jumped out - Jack in 1953 and Bob in the 40s right after World War II. I remember a mid 60s conversation one night in the parking lot behind the Rumbleseat where a round of one-upsmanship started. Someone remembered when something came out, the next person remembered when PCs came out, I pitched in with 7-TUs, there was quiet for a moment, and then Don Moses said, with no particular emphasis, "Oh, I remember when nylon chutes came out." We were kind of quiet after that, just standing there grokking the universe and trying to take it all in. > And, if you remember, what was the date of your 1st 5-way? My logbooks are a little buried, but I was in the third 8-way which I believe was 1966, and some time before that some of the Arvin guys came down to Oceanside and Clarice and I made a 5 way star with Alan Walters, Bill Newell and Bob Buquor out of the Fairchild. I have a sliver of doubt but those are the three names that come to me, although Jim Dann comes to mind too. I may have been in a 5-way contact before that. We spent a lot of jumps trying to make contact, but the idea of specifically and persistently going for stars came from Bob. We (Clarice and I) had gone to all the Southern California dropzones, but mostly we went to Oceanside, until it flooded, and then we moved to Elsinore (1966?). By then stars, as opposed to just making contact, had entered consensus reality and I fell into organizing star attempts. We got as far as 7, and then (late 1966? early 1967?) Luis Melendez told me we should come up to Taft, where the Arvin guys had ended up after Arvin closed. That's when I started jumping with them every weekend. We made a lot of Beech load star jumps, but I had also been an avid no contact person ever since Richard Economy had shown me the idea one day at Lancaster (1964?) and so I did a lot of that, and other than star shaped hookups, too, mostly smaller 3-5 way jumps. Bill Newell has a much more complete version of the Arvin group thread than I do. Then in middle-late 1967 came the Garth Taggart - Bob Allen Rumbleseat bet and in late 1967 the first 10-man star meet. I don't remember the date but for me that was jumps 1019 & 1020. When competition entered the scene the atmosphere changed from learning and exploring to anger and tension and stab your buddy in the back to get on some team, and I dropped out, although I was still entangled for another 4 or 5 years because I had not yet learned to be my own person and I still wanted to be part of the "scene", even though I was pretty uncomfortable in the scene. I remember being at that Z'hills meet that had over 100 10-way teams, feeling amazed at how quickly relative work had taken over from style and accuracy, but also feeling really out of synch and out of phase with main stream reality. (So what else is new? :-) :-) Well, that was an interesting pour, but I think I'll stop here because I've forgotten what the original question was. Skr

I saw the title of this thread and thought it was going to be Pat waxing philosophical, but it turned out to be more reminiscical. You couldn't do that kind of stuff on today's gear though, you'd have to run several hundred feet on every jump just to get open :-) :-) Skr

Good answer. I don't think I've seen it put any better. Even jumper to jumper it's hard to put into words. Skr

Congratulations Dude!! :-) :-) I sometimes see articles and threads asking how skydiving changed your life and I think: "Jeez, how would I know? I was so young when I started that I didn't have a life yet." I probably would have ended up as a math professor inflicting theorems on hapless students, and probably would have shot myself half way through from sheer frustration and meaninglessness. So maybe I'm still alive and running around loose because I found something worth doing. Hope all is well with you guys. We're up here between Seattle and Vancouver now. Still jumping a little bit, but only when it's not too cold or windy. Skr

Yeah, Tony was a good guy. I still remember the surprise and shock when I heard that he had gone in. Skr

> I heard a lot this past weekend about "grounding" and since I'm so new here I have no idea what that means!! :-) :-) You just caused several scenes to flash through my mind. With his red hair and freckles and sunburn he really was "red", and when people would pull low he would get even redder, and somehow more Marine-like, and he'd go chew them out, and then put their name up on the little chalk board beside the manifest board. He was a good guy though, and always helped me when I was trying to do stuff. Skr

Hey, Dennis, Thanks for the PM. So many people so often that it's hard to find words. But you and me and mjosparky and others were there, and we know what the world is losing each time one of these guys drops. Skr

He also invented tracking. He said he got the idea one day while watching some ski jumpers and thought he could do it better. I never knew him in the sense of hanging out together, but I saw him at several meets and Golden Knights demos. I always remembered him as a gruff Army Sergeant about 7 ft tall, so I was stunned when I met him and got to talk to him at one of the old farts reunions. He was just a little guy! I guess his personality was about 7 ft tall :-) :-) Skr

I think Matt Farmer invented that. In 1975 I was driving over to the Gulch from Los Angeles every weekend, and he had constructed some skydiver stick-men out of pipe cleaners, and assembled them into a sphere. A year or two later at Pope Valley I watched a group trying to dirt dive it (pretty funny), and then go up and try to do it (not even close). Maybe it's possible now with all the freeflying skills that have developed. Skr

One thing that helps with fear is to make a lot of jumps fairly close together. As you gain experience the fear becomes more accurate, so that instead of being just generally scared shitless you start to learn what is actually dangerous and what is just unusual for a mammal that didn't evolve for jumping off of stuff more than a few feet high. Also you get some first hand evidence that your parachute works and the fear gradually reduces down to just the appropriate level. It also helps to practice thinking about what you know how to do and what you have done right and what you plan to do on this next jump instead of letting your mind wander off into the dark and scary places. I know from experience that if I let my mind hang out in the dark and scary places on the ride up I will be a basket case by the time I'm on jump run. Also, the first jump of the day feels one way, but if you can make a second and third you are already tuned in and can make some real progress instead of just making the first jump of the day over and over. > any pointers on BREATHING?? There is a lot known these days on all these sports psychology techniques and it's worth a google, but when I feel the scaries coming on I just breath slow and even - not especially deep, and not shallow, just slow and very even. If they are really persistent I will think about stuff that I know how to do and maybe other times when I've been really in tune and did well. Practice these techniques on the ground so they will be easier to do when you need them. Skr