daffes

I showed mine for some friends who have 3d printing experience and they told me that the printing quality was questionable. Although, I have been happily using it for 300+ jumps, and it has worked very reliably. It takes a few times to get used to mounting it quickly, but just like packing you get good at it and can do it fast.

Do you have a quick estimation of how many jumps it usually takes to need a replacement, on average?

Just for reference, Google Image search is quite powerful to give you context about a random picture, for example, check this link https://goo.gl/6EBA6y Then you can see every page that has posted it. Anyway, still post it here, since it's an awesome shot :)

No one has to skydive, but since you did a tandem and came back, you have something inside you that really wanna do it. Try to remind yourself why you came back and why do you want to do it during the climb up. One thing that really helps overcoming fear is knowledge, understand the statistics of the sport, eat the manuals, drill your emergency procedures over and over. You can go to a wind tunnel to diminish the novelty factor, you'll know you can handle the freefalling part easily and then you can focus on the canopy part. Ask if you can pay a jump ticket to sit on the copilot sit and watch the skydivers going out, open youtube and watch AFF jumps over and over until that feels normal, visualize! The count to 3 is something really magical, even more if there's "risk" to mess up things if you bail out in the middle of it, it has always worked for me. Good luck!

This tunnel is truly awesome, smooth, powerful, consistent wind speed through all the tall glass area. You can get in and out the chamber while people are flying quickly without causing any disturbance to the flyers. It's the first time I had flown on a modern tunnel after many hours in a 12 footer (SF Bay), game changer for me.

Thanks for sharing this video here, it was very educational both on FAA laws and how politics happen on the city counsel.

It's all based on how good you want to be. Most people want to be as good as their friends or as good as the best group on their DZ are, since that becomes a reference of the most fun you can have. If you have started jumping before the tunnel flying to become a trend, then you probably had an opportunity to stay on the top tier skill without it. Now a days, it's close to impossible to ramp up to an advanced freefly level or even competition level 4 way belly without the aid of a tunnel. For some industry workers who can jump 5 days a week, they can get a little closer, for the weekend jumpers it's a no-no, it will take years, and when you get there, the level will be again much higher. Besides that, I can go to the tunnel at night, and keep connected to flying during the week, it's a lot of fun. As money is a limited resource, splitting it smartly between tunnel and sky is the challenge. Locally here, my advice is to do about half an hour of tunnel over your first 100 jumps to get solid on your belly. Then 1-2 hours until you reach 200. At this point, you should have enough sky awareness to push the freefly further. Then progression starts to get quite different for each individual, how many jumps they have compared to how many tunnel hours, if they have done time in bursts during camps or spreaded over months and if they have high skilled people teaching them to freefly on the weekends. For people who hit the tunnel early on their jumping career, I see that people with around 5 hours of tunnel can perform things more than being a base and being docked and carved around, and it's also when they start playing with head down exits. Around 8-10 hours is the time that people start lifting off the net and being able taking head down docks etc on the sky.

Even though you can reach your terminal speed with a smaller turn, doesn't a bigger turn give you more time to think and do several small corrections during the turn without compromising the top speed?

Does your $30 bucks "burner phone" support the Chicago app? I also have the same problem as the OP, when I put my smart phone on the jumpsuit chest pocket it presses against the D ring and makes it harder to grab it. I haven't tried after I moved to pillow handle. A smaller burner phone is a great idea.

Thanks for running this detailed analysis raymod2, adding the purple line makes a lot of sense. It's a little harder to analyze like that because horizontal speed will be affected by winds, but I guess we just have to deal with it. Very interesting, so I have been trying to fix something that is not a problem but a good thing? :), that's why coaching is so valuable!

I think it's way more common to have injuries on the tunnel than on Skydiving. At least for me, statistically, I have accumulated way more minor/medium injuries and collisions flying dynamic on the tunnel than on Skydiving. Although, I also agree it would be pretty hard to have a death inside the tunnel. Both are a lot of a fun, but for the tunnel to get closer to be as fun as skydiving it requires a much higher level of flying. If I were asked to only do one for the rest of my life, I would choose to keep skydiving in less than a second.

That price is fairly expensive, you don't have a location in your profile so I can't tell if you're flying in one of the bigger shiny tunnels. Skydive Arizona coached hour is about $950. At iFly SF Bay you can get one hour of coach with a top instructor for $650 (for the tunnel) + $220 for the coach = $870. Here, if you buy 20 hours in a group of up to 4 people you can pay $575 the hour for the tunnel. 1 hour in 3 days is definitely doable, even more belly flying which is not as physically demanding on that stage. 15 min is usually enough to fix bad body position of students who have failed an AFF level, but tunnel is fun and a great learning tool, so doing one hour is a great idea for your skydiving career.

Thanks for the info Dan, the shape of the top view from 19-09-04 looks pretty neat. Interesting to see a similar pattern of vertical speeds from your data, looks like you're being able to at least maintain the vertical speed in that interval. I added dive angle to my plots as you suggested, it's in fact more effective than just vertical speed for debrief. I can see when the dive angle gets shallower before even the speed starts decreasing. It almost matches the vertical speed curve offset by a second. This gives me a few ideas to play with this weekend, hopefully one of them will work :).

Haha thanks Hodges, love the .png distinguishing constant/increasing turn rate. I think it exaggerates a little bit on the second 90' angular speed though :). Sharing both the csv file and a screenshot of what I consider to be my cleanest swoop so far (which doesn't mean much on my level) to exemplify what I'm looking at. 1) I'm looking from the top view to see if it resembles your .png "Good" guideline 2) I want to see where the top vertical speed happens, I want it to happen towards the end of the turn, so that the canopy only starts recovering after I finish the turn. 3) If you check the green curve (vertical speed) on the screenshot (this.png), around t=-128 I go to breaks, and in t=-117 I reach my top speed. It's bothering me that around t=-122 my vertical speed decreases instead of keeping increasing. This is happening between straight double fronts and the moment I start offsetting them. I'm guessing I'm holding them straight too long or I'm timing the break swing wrong, but would like to see other people data. 4) Horizontal speed when elevation < 10ft. In this case, My top Horizontal speed matches my fake gates. p.s. this data was recorded under a Crossfire2 129sqft WL @ 1.55

I've started playing with a Flysight for boosting the learning curve on high performance landings. Having a benchmark for the "ideal" or a "close to ideal" curve to achieve can definitely help. Any swoopers out there willing to share their data from proud swoops? Mostly interested in 270 degree turns. Thanks in advance.

Axis has a pretty cool generator http://axisflightschool.com/DG2015_2.php?Competition=MFS2 IBA as well http://tunnelflight.com/drawgenerator/

Enta, let me give you another perspective on this, it's a little long, so bare with me: First, no one has to downsize, just as no one has to skydive, it's all a game of probabilities and where the line between justified excitement and reckless behavior is drawn. It's usually a good idea to trust people who have been on the sport longer about where to draw this line, since your knowledge is likely not sufficient to do it. Let's say that the average joe skydiver has a probability of bouncing as Pavg, while the probability of the safest skydiver to bounce is Pmin and the probability of the less safe skydiver that is allowed to jump by an S&TA is Pmax. What determines where you lie between this bounce probability spectrum are many factors, which you have listed a few, i.e: 1) How much canopy time you have 2) How many landings you have performed 3) How many landings you have performed in non-ideal situations 4) How many jumps have you spent dedicated to canopy piloting 5) How many canopy courses have you taken 6) What other activities in your life correlate to canopy flying that requires reacting in highly stressful and fast situations. 7) How many times did you get your landing debriefed and filmed 8) "natural" talent, yes it exists, but it's really hard to evaluate precisely, and I wouldn't count on that to make my decisions. I'd rather use proxy achievements that correlates to natural talent, for example, crossing out that downsizing requirements. This list could go on and on... All those factors might bring you closer to the Pmin (safest). Then, you can decide to stay there, and be a safer skydiver than the average joe. Or, you can choose to downsize, and put yourself back at the Pavg. What you can't do is to go beyond Pmax, which then, you must be grounded for the good of the community. Brian Germain, in his book The Parachute and It's Pilot, tried to give people a methodology to determine recommended and maximum wing load based on number of jumps and a few other things. But even him recognize that after 500 jumps, there are too many variables to correlate canopy sizes and jump numbers. I think it's a good idea to stay in his recommendation. Let's say, in the end, that you are in fact a superstar. For this, we can have a simple analogy with Age and Driving. I'm sure there are many kids in the world that could be driving when they are 14. But we can't let them decide this, because too many of them would think they are ready before they actually are, and all the society would suffer with more deaths. Making them waiting two years, or making you wait a few more jumps, might be a little unfair, but in all means it's not a big deal for your skydiving career. Hope you make the right decision for you, and on a side note, there are many things you can do to make your gear more freefly friendly, like using a belly band.

John, I understand your safety reasoning about avoid corrupting the alti software. I do use Paralog and it's a great piece of Software. I've been in your forums before and was the person to suggest the definitive fix for the compatibility with Mac OS Yosemite. http://www.alti-2.com/showthread.php?1429-Mac-OSX-v10-10-(Yosemite)-lt-gt-Altimaster-USB-Driver-Compatibility-Issue&p=3978#post3978 As a Software Engineer, I have to agree with the OP that Alti2 should allow exporting the data in the simplest format, i.e., a csv file that can be imported to a spreadsheet software like Excel. Given that the protocol and drivers already exists and that they are not part of Paralog, I doubt this would really be an expensive work to do or maintain. And I also think most people that bother to do that will still buy Paralog for its extra functionalities anyway.

Thanks for sharing this story. I had been discussing this with a friend and we were wondering how to get into the right mindset of passing a jump whenever we don't feel 100% and we came up with a weird idea, to draw a random number before each jump, with a small probability like 1 - 50, and if it happens to be your number, you should not get in the load. I believe this would help to say no when a "I think I'll be fine" goes through the mind. In a side note, Brian's way of packing the pilot chute can't be done if it's not cocked, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=axCeYlY_6io, and is one of the main reasons that I stick with it.

Do you think this at (https://youtu.be/LJr70PKbgOE?t=38s) at 0:40 is a barrel roll? Is the pilot doing much more than pulling down hard on the left rear riser and balancing on the harness? I try this maneuver up high on a much more forgiving canopy and it feels awesome, I thought I was doing barrel rolls :), but now you got me a little worried.

Relevant: http://www.deepseed.com/d-spot/blog/liam/inside-no-pull-cypres-save-0 If the cypress is disabled after opening, RSL is more than a must.

Plan your hanging climbing out properly and protect your handles, check those pics in order.

Jerry, can you elaborate more on this? I don't understand that if the magnets have the same releasing force as the suggested locking stows with rubber bands, why does the fact of being a magnet changes anything? As I see, the force on the magnets is at least more constant, and I'd like to believe that it was measured by the manufacturer (5 pounds?) Every time you do a rubber band stow, there are many more random factors can make it tighter or looser. EDIT: After writing this I thought better about the mechanics and the fact that the rubber bands go through the grommets on the locking stows which is hard to emulate with the magnets. Anyway, seems like this problem was figured out according to this video https://vimeo.com/120294419

just wrap it on (url)www.dropzone.com(/url) tags Replace ( by [ and ) by ] and it will come as www.dropzone.com

I'd like to mention that it's exactly because I have a huge respect for the things that are written in the SIM that I raised this thread, as I was worried that I was putting myself in danger for following one of the advices. I admit that I assumed decision altitude and hard decks to be the same concept. Reading the CATA pointers again there are indeed a few entries that solve part of my concerns.