skr

> modeled after the "buddy system" method used by the Air Force Which Bob invented. I wasn't there but as I understand it Bob and Bud Kiesow took about 150 Air Force Pilots out harness to harness as it was called. I have a vague memory that Jim Hall, who did the first live zero-zero (zero altitude - zero airspeed) ejection, and some one else, possibly Verne Williams, were also involved. Also probably Dave Burt. When I met these guys Dave wasn't jumping anymore because he'd gotten hurt really badly doing some kind of jump in Mexico some years before. Dave jumped into Grand Canyon in 1948. He was a graduate student in geology doing research for his thesis, so he cargo dropped some supplies onto a sand bar and then jumped in himself and spent several weeks going down the river doing geology. These guys have more jump stories per square jump than anybody I have ever met. Also I believe it was George Speakman holding on to Johnny Carson, and Bob doing the filming because he wanted to be sure he got the footage he had in mind and there was only going to be one jump. Skr

>I've been chatting with him and he's great! Yes, he is. In the category of it's-a-small-world I was coming back from Australia once in 1976, and it turned out that not only was he on the same flight but we were sitting next to each other. He was one of the people I used to read about in Skydiver Magazine when I was first starting. Skr

> Other than, I expect more out of our community > than we are apparently able to give. Eeeeeee .. The anguish of that statement! I know that feeling really, really well. I'm with billvon on this one: > We absolutely do have the ability. We won't use it. We never have I was talking to a friend of mine a few years ago about hook turns in traffic, and spiraling, and mindless downsizing, and lack of basic canopy training, and ... He's a well known, well respected guy who picks up the bodies at a major DZ and has tried to change and educate for years. He said he had finally concluded that (in terms of effort required) that it's easier to keep putting people in body bags than it is to change people's minds and behaviour.

> I generally like to trust my eye's ability to gauge location > 2 miles away over the ability of a super-redundant system > using atomic clocks for precision. It's not the GPS that is spotting, it's the pilot. Skr

> when you guys were jumping with rocks No, no, the stone parachutes were before this. In the early 60s we were jumping wooden parachutes. And I'm here to tell you that sometimes getting those things into the box was a real bear! My first jumpsuit was a pair of Sear's Carpenter Coveralls, complete with loops for hammer and saw and other stuff you needed. Although the hammer was mostly needed in case you had a nail-over, which was a particularly nasty malfunction. Gotta keep those historical facts straight. Skr

> I'm going to visit even if they don't let me jump. They do tandems and AFF and post AFF and on up to leading edge people in every kind of activity with zillions of jumps, so I don't know why you couldn't jump. There may be some restriction during boogies, I'm not sure. With low jump numbers they will want to supervise you enough for them to feel sure you are not going to hurt yourself. But really, all you want to do jumpwise is go through the whole process at a new place for the experience. When I go to a new dropzone I look at the aerial map and go outside and watch people and jump runs and traffic patterns and just kind of tune in. Then I go up and jump out and don't do anything, just look around, like: "OK, there's the two grassy areas, and that's the hangar with the manifest, and the wind socks are there, there, and there, even though I can't see them from way up here, and when we took off the wind was going like this, so the landing patterns are like that, and ... " If you go to http://maps.google.com/ and put in 'eloy arizona' and go to the "hybrid" view you will see the airport northwest of town. Then you can zoom in pretty close and look around. ---- Then you can come back here and tell us some jump stories. Skr

> opportunity to get myself over to the Eloy Good idea. Going to another dropzone, especially a well done one like Eloy, really enriches your viewpoint and understanding. Plus they have a wind tunnel. If they have you do something differently than you learned at Bill's, ask them why. There is more than one right way to do a lot of things, and both places probably have good reasons for the way they chose. Skr

I follow your general pattern, rear risers, dodge close neighbors, pick a heading based on winds and spot, slider etc, and toggles last. I would go for toggles sooner if there were some circumstance, but on a normal jump I feel better getting everything squared away first and then going for toggles. Skr

> Steve Fielding passed away last night Aacckkk! Another one? I feel old, Clarice and I made his first 3-way when he was just a skinny young kid at Elsinore. It seems like just last week. He was so excited. Feeling thoughtful ...

Oh .. Hey Pat .. I was going to email you about this thread, but I see you found it. I'm just too dang sporadic here. I was really moved by Eco's explanation of where hovering came from. It closed some circuit that's been open in my mind for 40 odd years (*very* odd years if I may say so :-) :-) That was such a fork in the road event for me, and I didn't know where the original inspiration for hovering came from, so over the years it took on kind of mythical mystical proportions in my mind. And suddenly, there it was! It came from camera flying! And I had this feeling like a kid running to tell his friend over in the next block, "Hey Pat! Hey Pat! Remember all those times we talked about ... Well guess what!" I was still mulling the impact on me and trying to formulate some kind of thanks to Eco. I think I'd like to thank Sangiro for making this place where we can all get together again and ... Skr

> First time a blind person was taught to jump Well, if I logged it I didn't see it in my logbooks just now, but Sunny Yates went blind after he had maybe 300? jumps. Some time later he made a few more jumps. The first was at Oceanside down by San Diego. Ron Wright (D-312?) was his "jumpmaster". Somebody else went up in the same plane with them but I can't picture who it was. I made a couple jumps with Sunny a little later at Elsinore out of a Howard. This was 1965-1966. He used a Crossbow piggyback with a PC, and he packed for himself. He was light so it was hard for me to stay up with him, and also since he couldn't see he kind of drifted around in freefall. Going blind took the spark out of him and he gradually faded away, becoming almost transparent, until one day I heard that he had died. It was hard ... we had shared some amazing times and he had been right in the thick of some pretty colorful jump stories. Skr

A few years before this, early 1964 at Lancaster, Eco was the one who gave me the idea that flying no contact was a worthwhile activity in its own right. It was always wonderful and surreal to see other people out there in freefall, but there was also an urge to try to make contact if anybody was close by. One day Clarice and I went to Lancaster. It was a little windy and there was only a C-170, which didn't climb all that well, so I got out just over 5,000 ft and Eco and Clarice went up to 7,200 and flew facing each other with their finger tips only a couple inches apart. It was called hovering. Then Clarice and I did it and I was hooked. Like new converts everywhen I went on a crusade, determined to turn the whole world on :-) :-) I didn't think to ask at the time but I've wondered since then what made him think of it. Did he just think of it one day, or was it a standard activity down in Texas in the late 50s early 60s or what? Skr

> Damn, Pat, it's good to hear your words once again. Yes, it is. I haven't been around much the last few months but I've seen several Pat-posts as I'm dipping back in. I can even still understand what he's saying! I probably shouldn't tell my doctor that though, he might order more tests :-) :-) Skr

> something, something and the caravan passes on I remember it as "Dogs bark, but the caravan moves on". In my sophomore year I took an experimental course where they were trying to see how much advanced stuff a group of unprepared kids could understand. We were over our heads the whole time. When the final exam came around they knew there was some grumbling in the ranks and that was quoted as a Turkish proverb on the top of the page. Hey, Hoop! It's good to hear from you! It's only been 2.7 decades :-) :-) Skr

http://axiomsun.com/home/video/flying_through_the_swiss_alps_in_a_fighter_jet.html I still have a couple details to work out but ... Skr

> spaces... the original had em and it helped I know, I had the same problem, so I asked about it down in one of those forums at the bottom, probably suggestions and feedback, and Sangiro activated the "pre" tag. > I can > Edit this... > but not > my post. There is a time limit (6 hrs?) for editing posts, probably to encourage people to think a bit instead of just firing from the hip, and also maybe to keep people from coming back much later and rewriting history. You could post the whole thing again and enclose it in "pre" tags. This whole place is an experimental work in progress, and I think it looked better with spaces too. I haven't been coming here much lately, I gave up trying to jump here locally and my inspiration faded. I'll probably get active again when we move up to Seattle/Vancouver. Meanwhile, to keep from developing an altered state deficit I started teaching English in China. I finally have an answer for when people ask me what I do - I'm a part time English teacher :-) :-) Skr

Just wandering by and thought I heard a jump story in progress. Sure enough ... I've always enjoyed the way you told that story. Also, for all you old farts out there who used to type in a monospace font and use spaces to make things indent right, I wanted to mention the secret html tag "pre" that Sangiro added to counter the way html deletes leading and multiple spaces. It's just like the other tags, url, b, u etc where you have left bracket tag right bracket bunch_of_content left bracket /tag right bracket. Here's an example enclosed in "pre" tags: first line second line indented 4 spaces third line indented 8 spaces fourth line OK, now I'll post it and see if this still works :-) :-) Skr

I think it makes more sense for everybody to watch where they are going. I look down in a wide angle cone to keep from getting over anyone, with peripheral glances sideways in case I'm converging with someone. Skr

Aha! You're still alive! We must have a beer next time we're on the same planet. Skr

> It'll probably take me some time to convince myself. Oh, that's OK, it took me years of thinking about this and listening to people arguing in various directions before I got it. This has been a huge debate since at least the early 1990s. I think the root difficulty is that our intuitions about how things work developed for life down here on the ground where things are close together and not moving very fast. If I'm standing on a two foot rock with someone and we hop off 5 seconds apart I know what's going to happen. If the rock is 2 1/2 miles high and moving at 90 knots and we're spending 60 seconds getting blown around by upper winds then my (unexpanded) intuition about how things work is going to give me the wrong answer. So the right thing to do is make the effort to expand your intuition about how things work, and that starts by asking the question you asked. That animation at omniskore is a good start. John Kallend's program is really helpful. Lots of people here have tried to understand and explain this complicated situation. I put some of Bryan Burke's work and some of Billvon's early efforts here http://indra.net/~bdaniels/ftw/index.html down towards the bottom of the page. My last effort - Dealing with Uppers - is here http://indra.net/~bdaniels/ftw/sg_skr_dealing_1_uppers.html And one more point, besides the freefall drift and forward throw mentioned by a couple people above, there is one more factor. If the fast fallers go first, they are on the leading edge of the wind cone, which means that they have to face the target and fly up jumprun most of the way back or they will land out. Flying up jump run puts you right in the kill zone when the slow fallers start arriving 30 or 40 seconds later. So I think asking questions and wondering why things are done the way they are is a good idea. Skr

Wasn't that Bill Davis and ... can't think of the other guy at Elsinore?

> Gee, no one mentioned "shelf" Oh, yeah, I had forgotten about that. I was taught the grab the skirt and shake it approach, but a couple years later I had moved to Southern California (is it normal to apply to graduate schools base on where the best dropzones are? :-) :-) and I learned the down and out and into the spin idea from Bob Sinclair. I had the impression that he had come up with that, but I don't actually know whose idea it was. Anyway, I went up and tried it a couple times, and without thinking about it I drew my knees up to make a shelf to hold the blob of canopy while I was getting a good grip on it. You needed to throw it as a blob and it tended to squirt out like a watermelon seed if you didn't get a good grip before raising it up over your head for the throw. The shelf seemed like a good refinement and I started teaching it that way. Boy, that seems like a different lifetime!

> Is it normal to not sleep the night before AFF? Probably most people don't sleep much before their early jumps, I certainly didn't. But then how many people here are normal? You have fallen into a subworld filled with interesting and colorful characters. Welcome :-) :-) Skr

Well shit ... Flashing back .. mid 60s .. Oceanside .. This really intense guy .. about 9 feet tall .. built like Little Abner .. Fresh off the Army team .. Burned out attitude .. Flashing forwards .. a couple years ago .. old farts reunion .. Same guy .. still about 9 feet tall .. but now mellow and reassuring .. Hey mjosparky, maybe you could space these out a little more, seems like every time I come over here someone else has died.

I have always been glad that I did some intentional cutaways. It removed the mysterious unknown aspect of cutting away. I think it should be a D license requirement and be established custom that well designed cutaway rigs plus a little training be easy to get. But then, I think a lot of things :-) :-) ---- On the other hand I remember another thread somewhere where this question came up and Bill Booth said he thought it was a bad idea. I didn't understand his explanation, but he has a lot of experience and he is a thinker, so it cast a little shadow of uncertainty into my thinking about this. Skr