excaza

Talk to your instructors and ask them to watch your pattern.

Since others have hit on the reasons for retainer bands, I'll ask another question: how's your packing? When I first started my packjobs, they were HUGE (not that I've improved much yet ) and I was fighting a lot of fabric to get the bag closed. While I was helping a friend with his packing at last weekend's boogie, a sympathetic PD rep showed us a couple tricks for getting everything under control once it was in the bag, and the best tip I got was to try and bring the grommet to the retainer band for the closing loops, not the other way around. Stretching the band that far stresses it quite a bit, and will cause it to break much sooner than usual.

How else would they get to all those deserted islands?

Skydive New England is about an hour and a half from Boston (north) and is my home away from home. Unfortunately you're going to miss the boogie this weekend , but it's an awesome place to jump (not that I'm biased or anything ). There is a bunkhouse with rooms available, and I believe it's something like $25 a night. Jumptown in Orange, MA is also about an hour and a half away from Boston (west). I've jumped there a few times and it's got a nice open LZ and a great group of people. Not sure what lodging is available since I've never stayed the night. There's a few other DZs within roughly the same distance, including Skydive Pepperell in Mass and CPI in Connecticut, as well as some near Cape Cod, but I'm not personally familiar with any of them.

Quite an axe to grind.

You're being awfully indecisive for someone who voluntarily decided to learn how to jump out of an airplane.

As a new jumper, the problem I have with going by the beep is that altitude is really only part of the process. This was hit on hard by my instructors during AFF (that the 1000, 500, 250 ft. marks are just rough points), but it has the potential to get lost if one is flying by the beep. I started using a ditter when I got my A and I think it's a great tool as long as you keep up with the basics. For me, it's basically "don't get caught by the beep." A few jumps fresh on my A I decided, for whatever reason, to go with the beep instead of my eyes on the canopy pattern and almost put myself long into the trees. It was really, really dumb and I turned off everything under 1000 feet after that. I can't speak for high performance canopy work, but I'm sure it's a completely different beast.

Seems like an awesome way to ditch someone in the pond

It doesn't take that much time if you're doing 4-5 a day

Not disagreeing that he should communicate which direction he intends to track, but is that exit order really correct? The tracking divers I've seen go out either first or last and track way out perpendicular before turning anywhere remotely close to jump run.

Except that's not at all what I said. A student should be comfortable with getting out facing the relative wind and being stable out the door because it's what they did for most of their AFF jumps. Hence why I asked "shouldn't they be comfortable with the body position?" I'm not saying one should get in the door, get their feet in the right spot, arch and then do the exit cadence as the airplane is hurtling towards the ground. I would appreciate if you didn't insinuate that I did. edit: grammar

Take some canopy courses.

The serious answer is yes and no. Most rigs are sized so that they can safely fit at least two or three canopy sizes, essentially tight/optimal/soft. If you go too much smaller than the soft, you're at an increased risk of the closing loop being too loose to properly hold the pin in place.

It counted for AFF?

Watch skydiving videos

I already answered that.

Rotator cuff rehab exercises would probably be a good first place to look. The stretching and strengthening are pretty comprehensive for the shoulder as a whole and will help for most shoulder issues.

At the risk of continuing the whack-a-mole questioning... They also had a secondary control surface to keep it stable. The secondary booster adds complexity and weight (and therefore cost). These are considerations that the Apollo program obviously didn't mind, but CS feels that they didn't want to add. The whole thing is already a rocket assisted skyhook. The whole purpose of it is to clear the crew capsule from the booster in the event of an emergency. It's designed to take the capsule from 0/0 (zero airspeed, zero altitude) to an altitude and speed high enough for the parachutes to deploy and safely recover the capsule. It's the same basic concept behind jet ejector seats. In this situation, the parachutes weren't the problem.

No, but they're good questions when there's actually an interest in discussion.

If you're not going to take this seriously, I'm not going to either.

They didn't, it's very clearly at an angle. If you add more distance then you change the moments of inertia of the system and make it more unstable. The added structure also makes the system heavier, which is bad for space.

If you're worried about the rocket burning up the parachutes, you don't really want to have the rocket pull the chutes out of the container shielding them from the exhaust. And no, a slider won't help anything open faster.

I think I'd go with stopping the tumbling and getting to the right altitude by fixing the uneven burn rate. You know, the problem they point out in the article.

How about some mesh fabric attached to the line groups that 'slides' down the lines and slows the opening?