Hello, I appreciate you being conservative and your insight into swooping/my video. And I agree, it should be safe, thats the goal right? Im sure we have both seen more bad things than we wish to remember. Normally, I don’t feel compelled to explain myself, however, I am bored, and I feel that you are on the fence between coolness and safety. I’d like to help you be more informed so that I can hopefully help you understand more of the coolness side and be more informed. Let me be the first to say that I am very concerned about safety. I stress about alot of things in skydiving. I guess just trying to stay alive after seeing enough shit over 26 years of jumping. You would be surprised if you knew me how many things I won’t do anymore. The building you see in the video.. I started swooping that 15 years ago. I started at 50 ft from the building and now I’m at around 2-3 ft. This has been a big undertaking for so many years. I know exactly where the burbles are at any given wind speed and direction on that building. Funny thing is, the building next to the pool (much smaller) puts off a hell of alot worse burble than the big hangar. Go figure… I’ll try to put this in layman terms. High speed is good, low speed is bad. I know that if any person sees a spider, or, for that matter decides to jump up and down on the table or starts doing jumping jacks at the last second…well, no problem. I know its hard for you to understand, but think about your car at 60 mph, turns really fast right? How well can you avoid an object at 2 mph? Not very well. Now, in all fairness, I guess it is possible that I could die of a heart attack in the middle of a hook, but Joe Blow could also die while driving his car and end up killing you in a head-on crash. In any case I have hooked over that building approximately 7,000 times. Thats not total jumps, thats hooks over THAT building. I have thought about every possible scenario. What if I hit the building? According to my calculations my body would clear the spectators. We can’t plan for everything, we can just do our best. Those aren’t generators, however they do look like them. Point is, I look out for my own and for safety. If we are hurting people then its not a good thing. As far as the USPA guy…that title means nothing as far how good of a swooper you are. Its like saying US Senators can swoop. Maybe some of them can, but…not likely. I have no idea who that was, however I can guarantee you he wasn’t someone who should have been doing what he was doing. The real test is people like myself, and top swoopers who are better than myself, you don’t see them hurting people. I hope I helped, in any case swoopers are not trying to create bad blood. Please let me know if I can answer any more questions. Cheers, Charlie Mullins
