skr

> I was talking to B.J. Worth this summer about you and > the old days. He says you might be moving to China. > Any truth to that rumor? Yes. I'm leaving in about 3 weeks. I thought I might post something here but I'm running out of time. It's really only half time, 3 months there and 3 months here until sometime later. It starts as helping people with English at the Chinese Academy of Science in Beijing. I don't know where it's going, it seems that over there everything is flexible and anything is possible, so don't be surprised if you see a broadcast some day from the Chinese International Mega Space Station and I'm floating around somewhere in the back ground :-) :-) I'm not selling my gear, I just finally accepted that there is no where in Colorado for me to jump, and I don't want to get to the end and have done nothing but jump, so ... Skr

I think the first person down approach is totally inadequate unless you supplement it with a bunch of other factors, like at the grassy area at Eloy: - There are only two possible directions - There are a bunch of wind indicators so you can figure out up high how it's probably going to go and start setting yourself up accordingly - If you do something really stupid and dangerous Bryan Burke will come out and help you upgrade your thinking for next time - There is a whole desert outside the grassy area where you can land if you don't like the way it's developing in the grassy area. I don't understand the collective resistance to tackling the question of how to determine landing direction. It's complicated, like exit separation, and sound bite solutions, leave 45 degrees, or wait 5 seconds and go, or follow the first person down don't solve it. Yet we did, after a zillion person years of effort, gain a basic understanding of exit separation, and I think we could do that with landing direction too. But so far, over the last few years when someone brings it up, the majority response has been either do the first person down thing or risk canopy collisions, like that's the only two alternatives. Well, I'm heading off into a different life for a few months, so I'll check in when I get back and see whether any progress has been made. Skr

>and dispersing the energy by rolling over my shoulder >(like a foward somersault but rolling from right shoulder >to left hip). This sounds like what I do. I learned the PLF motion from ex-paratroopers, but when there is much horizontal speed I do it in the manner of the judo roll where you're going forward and you sort of roll up your arm and across your shoulder and diagonally down your back to your hip and slap the mat. Except I don't stick my arm out or slap the ground. I do the standard feet and knees together and lightly up the leg while bending at the waist and twisting into it to make it happen and across the shoulder and diagonally down the back. I never hit my head because I tuck my chin and do the bending twisting make it happen motion. I think sliding in is a really bad idea, but people are doing it because nobody is teaching them how to do the PLF / judo roll motion. ( Insert standard rant about the quality of some of ( today's training here. Skr

> Cool . . . > Why hasn't this one been actually done yet? > http://manifestmaster.com/...utist/big1980_02.jpg I believe that formation was invented by Matt Farmer in 1975 at the Gulch. His "sketch" of the dirt dive was a model built out of pipe cleaners (those long white things with a wire inside). We tried it a couple times a year or two after that at Pope Valley, but is was just a big funnel. I should imagine that with today's skill and a tail gate it would be possible. Skr

I was on that load. From memory: It was organized by the Pacific Coast Skydivers. I don't remember the cost but it was like $50-$100. We took off from somewhere in LA, like Long Beach, although I don't think it was actually Long Beach. It was owned by Blatz(?) Airlines. The seats were in place. The stewardesses were on board. The idea, besides jumping an exotic airplane, was to have the inconceivably large number of 100 jumpers in freefall at the same time. Most people were afraid to have that many people in the air so we had 64 or 65. We flew to Taft. I vaguely remember someone, Bill Pyle?, spotting. We were at 15,000 ft. The fear of too many people was not necessary, just getting out of the seat, shuffling down the aisle guarding your reserve handle and diving out spread us out over several miles. The stewardesses were back by the door watching us dive out. I never saw anybody the whole freefall, but that was because I had to pee so bad I was about to go in my jumpsuit and hope it dried out on the way down, so I spent the whole jump in a head down dive and pulled pretty low so I could get down and pee. I don't remember why we were up there so long, but we made several passes over the dropzone with go arounds before we jumped. I remember Dirty Ed telling me that the guy in front of him passed out as he got to the door and fell down and Dirty Ed, in the exit frenzy state of mind, just picked him up and threw him out and dove out after him. Then he thought "Shit, what did I just do?" and started chasing after him. The guy is laying there on his back, passed out, in a slow turn. Part way down he comes to, shakes his head, does the fastest half barrel roll in the history of the world, and Dirty Ed just kind of fades off into blue. We made a second jump, taking off from Taft. This time we were more organized and several groups tried to do some RW. I was with some friends from Oceanside. "Organized" meant that we sat close togther so that when we struggled up out of our seats and shuffled down the aisle we would be following each other out. The other main thing I remember is this is where I met Bob Sinclair. I worked for Bob and Dave Burt for several years after that and consider them my main teachers, along with Bud Kiesow and Richard Economy. So, that was 40 years ago, but that's how I remember it. Skr

Also remember, while you're figuring out what body position you want to freefall in, to put some real and systematic effort into learning the parachute jump skills. That means gear and maintenance and weather and spotting and exit separation and tracking and canopy flying and stuff like that. Maybe find a couple experienced jumpers who are good at that stuff and ask them to help you learn it. Skr

> Every time someone dies on a swoop the blood is on > our hands. How long are we going to go on denying this? > And there's plenty of blame to go around. We jumpers share > the blame with gear retailers and canopy manufacturers who > are putting profit ahead of safety. We are selling killing > machines to our innocents. I've thought about this from all > angles, and the only conclusion I can come to is we are > royally screwing up :-) :-) I would hate to be called into court as any kind of witness. Being under oath to tell the truth I'm not sure I could be as diplomatic as that. I think the evolution into our current state of parachuting skill and canopy flying is the biggest collective fuck up I've seen so far. I slowed way down in the 80s and when I got active again in 1993 I was amazed at what I saw people doing under canopy, and it wasn't a good amazed either. > I'm not, and never have been for banning anything. > I've always seen that after a steep learning curve we > jumpers figure out how to do dangerous things. Me either, but we're light years past where we should have learned. I have no idea how to break the cycle, DZOs, S&TAs, USPA, gear sellers, experienced jumpers ... the people with the power to set trends ... It's like collective Sport Death. A long time ago we used that word for people who persistently did stuff that was predictably lethal, you know, take a bunch of quaaludes and pull low a lot. But back then it was individuals, now it's skydiving as a whole getting people in way over their heads with little or no training. I don't mean just little canopies and swooping here, but canopy skill at all levels. When I do coaching toward the A license it's about 75% parachuting and 25% freefall, and I think canopy training should go well beyond that into the later licenses. More money .. I can hardly grasp the price of things now, but I've always liked that bumper sticker: "You think knowledge is expensive? Try ignorance." Skr

>However, the image and sound of that incident >is burned in my mind. I still remember my first one. We opened a couple hundred feet apart at about 1,500 ft. He had a line over. A reserve started out, started to tangle, pulled it back in, got one riser released, reserve tangling in main, lower, lower, the sound of the impact, the little ring of dust that went out. Landing beside him, the chute was partly covering him, raising up one edge to see who it was, the emptiness of his facial expression, the horrible smashed body of a vertical impact. That was 1967. I couldn't get it out of my mind for days. What finally broke the obsession process was Jerry Bird telling me that people on the ground heard him scream just before he hit. That made it so horrible that my processor broke. >Do you somehow forget? >Become numb to the reality of this sport? I don't think I've forgotten, I just don't think about it very often any more. It's not a new idea. The shock and disbelief aren't there any more. When it happens now the pain and loss and grief are just as sharp, but they don't last as long, and there is no longer any surprise or shock or resistance to the idea of it even happening. I've lost a couple hundred friends, not all of them to skydiving, but most of them, and not all of them close, but enough of them to be pretty painful. I think it does somewhat explain my short fuse when I see shitty training or corner cutting, unsafe procedure. I can understand young guys getting carried away with testosterone and ignorance and doing stupid stuff, but I just don't have much tolerance for experienced jumpers being sloppy about taking care of new ones, or endangering others. I want all my friends to be in the hangar at the end of the day too. I remember the last thing Alan said to me. We were at Taft and he had just bought some zippy little sports car and he wanted to show it off, so we jumped in and he put it through its paces down to the end of the runway and back (we were young guys doing stupid stuff :-) :-) After the airport manager finished chewing us out Alan looked at me and said: "Don't let the small minds get to you." And then we put on our gear and went up and jumped out and he died. So I guess the way I cope now is I just go through the process of feeling the loss and grief, it's a really familiar process, and renew my efforts to watch for all the little things, the undone chest straps, the dubious loads, the accumulation of circumstances. I'm pretty introverted so I tend to do it alone, but if you're a more outward person sharing the process with a few of the right people can really help too. Skr

> Are you defending me? Maybe I was now that you ask, but at the time I was reacting more to a multiple reality situation being artificially framed as an either/or choice. Even if Bozo knows what he means by "either in or out" it doesn't mean that everybody or even anybody means the same thing with those words. You can consider yourself "in", or be like me and not even have a stance on the subject. I don't even see skydiving as a sport. I have a friend who started in the late 50s, made about 600 jumps and then didn't jump for 37 years, and then a couple years ago started up again. I made a jump with her last Saturday. Was she "in or out" just because she took a few weekends off? Is there a boundary somewhere between a few weekends and 37 years where you suddenly change states from "in" to "out"? I don't know. It was curious thing for Bozo to say but I don't know what he meant or what prompted him to say it. >I don't know if you remember me I imagine I would if we met. I'm going to some kind of SOS thing at Elsinore in a few months so if you walk up and say "Hi, I'm Sandy" we can find out. Skr

> You are either in the sport or you are not ? I think that's leaving out all the in-between states, all the ways a person relates to jumping, physical, emotional, mental ... and how, at any given moment, all those ways are a certain degree true or not. I even have multiple and contradictory feelings at the same time about all those threads of relationship. Skr

Now that's a good post. I didn't realize that that's been bothering me until you brought it into focus. Trees and forest. Skr

I have mixed feelings about zero-g in jump planes. For one thing it's always unexpected, at least I've never had a pilot warn us. For another it only lasts a moment and the pull out is not always smooth and gentle. Still, I mostly liked it. A few months ago I went to http://www.nogravity.com/ where you get 25 seconds worth at a time. I buy a powerball ticket a couple times a year just in case the universe is trying to funnel $20,000,000 my way so I can go over to Russia and and go up to the International Space Station. Skr

>I'm still debating whether this is worth the long-term risks I don't think you can answer the question of whether to jump or not with a statistical approach. Statistics work for insurance companies because they deal with lots of cases, but you're only one case and you don't end up in a mixed state of 90% alive and 10% dead, you either live or die. And there is also the risk of living a long, boring life, getting old, having done nothing, never experiencing the friendships and jump stories and insights and feelings. I think that if you like to jump then jump. Maybe someday you'll feel full, like after a good meal, and just naturally move on, but in any case you can't decide the whole rest of your life today. Skydiving is kind of like a narrow mountain trail. If you stay on the path where a lot of stuff has been figured out, you'll probably be OK. But you don't have to stray very far off the path to be in some deep and lethal shit. I wonder about this myself from time to time. Skr

I don't know where you are in Wyoming but I think Skydive Ogden over in Utah is the nicest dropzone in the mountain region. I don't know whether they do static line jumps but you are only in that student phase for a short time and then it's all the same so maybe going to Ogden and doing AFF would make sense. Skr

Yes, he made a difference, and it was a good one. Even as a skinny young kid with only a few jumps he was full of energy and ideas and vision. I know some people don't like him, but it's hard to do anything of significance without ruffling someone's feathers. I stopped by there a few years ago on my way back from Quincy (Chicago really is on the way to Colorado if you hold the map just right) to see him and what he was doing with his dropzone. He took several unscheduled hours out of a busy morning to show me around and tell me what he was doing. Skr

> Just wondering how easy it is to become complacent and was > looking for a catchy phrase I could reflect upon so I can avoid > ever getting that way. This is a great question. I'm not sure you can keep from getting complacent. Also the boundary between being really current and relaxed vs sliding slowly into complacence is hard to notice when you're sliding because it can happen bit by unnoticeable bit over a long period. And then there is being too tired to take the normal care, or getting stupid from dehydration. I remember one year at Quincy I caught myself going through the motions of checking my gear. My hands were raising flaps in the usual order and my eyes were pointed in the right direction, but nothing was registering. I wasn't there. I was going through an auto-pilot set of motions. I had gotten complacent about exhaustion and dehydration. I think the real answer to your question lies in the direction of meditation and sports psychology and all the ways people have figured out about how to pay attention. One thing I do is have a kind of rigid or strict sequence of steps that I (almost) always do the same way for each phase of the jump. When I pack I don't really like to talk to people or stop part way through and come back to it. When I do my gear check I do it the same way each time and put my stuff on the same way each time. And so on for other parts of the jump. It's not that I can't step outside of these patterns, or change them if a better version comes to mind. It's more like making intentional use of habits. But even with all this I go along until I either notice I've gotten lax, or I see something happen to someone, or I scare myself, and I wake up out of my dream for a while. Good question. Skr

sometime in the last few weeks the font size on the front page got much smaller other pages like forums are still the same

> there's a "D" stamped on one side Oh, yeah, I forgot about the "D". > But how far can you swoop Well, I try not to make these new guys feel inadequate but there's a picture of me swooping about three screens down in http://indra.net/~bdaniels/ftw/index.html It's called "1998 - Turf Surfing?? Did You Say Turf Surfing??" and it's here http://indra.net/~bdaniels/ftw/turf_surf.html Actually it's been a long time so I'm not entirely sure that's me, but it is in my imagination, and that's close enough for a jump story :-) :-) Skr

"dash two" floats up out of my dusty memory bin. On the handle where the cable goes through there used to be a "-1" or a "-2". The "-2"s were longer and there was some combination of housing and "-1" where you could pull the rig by stretching the housing. Talk about arcane lore! :-) :-) Skr

Maybe there are just lots of different kinds of people who are experienced jumpers. Some are like lasers, they are going where they are going and fend off side issues. Others are generalists who see some bigger picture from several different sides. Some are using skydiving as a means of self worth, and others are just shy and don't talk much to anybody. But I see adults who can't seem to remember how it was to be a kid, or be too young to have the experience to know how stuff works all the time. I have wondered about that myself, but it's not unique to skydiving. So maybe for you it's just a matter of feeling around for the ones who are approachable and letting the rest be whatever they are. Skr

Hey Sandy [MissBuffDiver] I'm trying to think which Sandy you are. Are you kind of tall with reddish hair and jumped at Elsinore and kind of dated Bob Sinclair for a while? I guess I'm not as clear on last names as I should be. Skr

>Can an S&TA allow a non rated individual to act as Instructor I believe that used to be true for people doing the post AFF to A license phase. I haven't looked at the SIM in a while. I'm pretty sure you can't do that for the AFF phase though. Skr

>I don't know you remember me or not. Yes, I remember you. I didn't recognize the name Hammitt, but when I looked at your profile and saw Dean I knew who you were. >If was certainly one of the most innovative times in my skydiving career. Yeah, me too. Those 70s years starting at the Gulch and then moving to Pope Valley were a real high point in my life. It's pretty neat how we're all running into each other again here. Skr

I'm not sure whose idea it was. The Crossbow piggyback also had the possibility of an RSL. I never used it, and don't remember how it was set up, but the reserve ripcord housing was attached to the reserve container with four snaps, so maybe the static line somehow went from a riser to the housing. And maybe Perry was working for Security at the time so it was all his idea anyway. I don't know. Also I remember Tiny Broadwick talking about doing multiple cutaways, and had the impression that the cutaway canopy static lined the next one, kind of like some of today's base rigs do. I don't remember her specifically saying that, it wasn't part of the jump story, but at the time I thought that was what she was saying. Skr

I got an email from Pat Swovelin last week. I met Bill at Elsinore in 1964. It's funny, I thought of him as "Dirty Ed" but I always called him "Bill" out of habit. He's in so many of my 60s Elsinore memories that I don't even want to think about it, although I have been. He made a difference. His life had meaning. And a *lot* of jump stories :-) :-) I remember the Orange Sunshine in Terry's going away to jail cake. Skratch