lyosha

Not sure if I didn't hit the "submit reply" button or my post got deleted, but I'll try again for posterity. As I become a more and more experienced skydiver a decade into jumping, I am less and less sympathetic to gear with significant failure modes from perceptibly normal operation or minor faults. In the case of the Racer dual RSL, it will try to kill you if you follow instructions in the SIM. This is for sure the worst offender I can think of in that category. That simply should not exist in skydiving. The "borrowed gear - borrowed death" age should have been long over by the time I became a skydiver. I've actually met someone who a Racer almost killed. He bought a rig second hand and downsized into it. He was very heads up, but never in a million years did he think that following something in the SIM would almost kill him. But lo and behold, it did. Even if you're the most heads up skydiver and know to disconnect one side of the RSL in a high speed mal - someone will buy your gear, and selling something with that RSL to someone else is just reckless.

It's connected on both sides in a Racer container. The setup has almost killed a few people. There's some fun youtube videos out there of the complications that can happen.

For context, I'm asking because these guys use kevlar for plane attachment straps (kind of like the "risers" of the system) https://brsaerospace.com/ And when I asked them "why kevlar?" they mentioned it was more abrasion resistant... which I found odd.

Just curious what about kevlar made it a poor choice and why the world went to dacron/spectra/vectran/hma.

Ask your canopy coach. If you're thinking crossbraced, you should definitely be working with one. I can see a few things potentially wrong with your plan. 1. You are jumping from a super docile canopy (spectre) to super aggressive (xb) with no intermediate planforms. Usually people will jump an aggressive elliptical non cross braced such as a katana or crossfire or x-fire for a long time before cross braced. 2. 1.6 seems too low wing loading for cross braced. Go work with a canopy coach, don't ask the Internet for advice.

Do they still run havoks or do they now instruct people in ATCs?

Interesting. I never made it to an Enzo/acro level, but hard for me to imagine flying the punchy, sharp-edged thermals of southern california without active piloting. But I'm not a top-level PG pilot, so what do I know? I go hands up in skydiving. Try kiting the wing and see how easy/hard it is. At least the wings I jump which are all the typical semi-eliptical ones most skydivers jump, they're twitchy and the inputs are unbalanced. It was very straight forward how to fly my paraglider half-collapsed. Literally zero effort. I cannot imagine doing that with my sky wing. I'm convinced it would fly like dog shit and would be extremely difficult to control. So I stack the odds in favor of not getting a collapse - I try not to fly in conditions where I'll encounter mechanical turbulence or strong thermals, I fly hands up to maximize airspeed, and check wing surges, but that's about it. I don't feel confident in what would happen if I tried to actively react to minor deflations. And we all know to keep the wing flying straight and level as much as possible and flare (or try...) before you hit the ground in the case of a major event. Kite your skydiving wing in some turbulence - see if it handles alright. In my experience most don't because the manufacturers don't care and don't measure. Their research $$$ is going into maximizing swoop distance, minimizing forward riser pressure, not into making a safer, more predictable and more refined (control-wise) wing. In skydiving wings, "swoop" sells, "safer" does not.

This is a complicated question that you won't find an answer to in a skydiving forum because the paraglider equivalent of an A license obtained in the mountains had spent more time in "turbulence" than almost all skydivers. The reality is as skydivers we jump in ideal conditions with virtually no turbulence. And as such do not understand it, do not measure our wing response to it, and have no basis for knowledge on how to react. To get a real answer you need to understand the technique. Google "active flying". There is a black magic to maintaining the half pound of brake pressure and why it helps manage your wing. But that is for a paraglider. Compared to paragliders, skydiving wings are poorly designed and twitchy. Active piloting takes hours of flying in turbulence to get the muscle memory to not over control the wing and do more harm than good on a paraglider. Having kited a sky wing before I was left pretty dejected at the prospects. I think stick to plan A: don't fly in turbulence.

It's a good sentiment but I can also see why piggy backing off of a nationally recognized program for health verification is convenient and severing those ties carries legal and reputational risk. For sure TIs have died mid jump due to health reasons. While infrequent how many are actually on the sidelines waiting for medical? As a pilot my sense is most class 3 medical problems are due to chemotherapy or mental illness. The FAA is a pain in the ass for sure. But looking around the world I don't see a better system for high tail risk environment. Curious to know how you intend to get skydivers to care about USPA and it's mission.

Well that's a frightening scenario. I'd be more worried about a jumper not doing gear checks (most don't) and the issue happening on the ground...

+1 vote for canopy coaching. At your experience level you really should be on a 150. If you want to consider a faster progression make sure you are getting tons of coaching and mentorship so you know what you are doing. Everyone here has a friend or several that got hurt by downsizing too quickly that looked great until they didn't. If you are worried about the state of your canopy, get another used 135.

So first off, the first and absolutely best piece of advise with regards to anything related to any embassy ever is to avoid any interaction if at all possible. Every embassy for every country I have ever dealt with was bad, arbitrary, illogical, self serving, for every country. A couple of times for a couple of first world countries I was flat out told they don't care what the laws of the country they represent actually are. If at all possible, find a travel agent that has experience with the embassy and contract the interaction out to them. Travel agents will know what to put on the forms to not create any suspicion. The embassy knows who the travel agents are and ask fewer questions. The travel agents typically know someone in the embassy in case things get dicey in the process (ask me for some horror stories over beer...) But if you still decide to forge ahead on your own, dealing with visas in my experience less is more. Pretend you are a generic tourist. Purpose: tourism. Going on a backpacking trip. Going to try to spend as much time with the locals as possible. Create yourself an itinerary. Hotels can be cancelled for free. Typically what they'll care about with tourism is that you have an exit ticket booked, a place to stay booked for the first couple of nights, and have enough ties to your current country that you won't want to overstay your visit.

There's another angle to this too. The VFR cloud clearance exists to separate VFR and IFR traffic, not just to ensure visibility. There might be planes in those clouds talking to a different air traffic controller who may not know that the plane flying 10000 feet above them is dropping skydivers.

I would hope by the time people are trying to swoop ponds they are not seeking altimeter advice from an Internet forum

How many people go swimming in their skydiving gear? You might be one of the exceptions. I sure hope an AFF student isn’t thinking about how waterproof their first gear is…