mathrick

I can order LVR2, but not LVR2V (the AZ1-specific GPS-enabled unit). Which is annoying because I'd like an option of buying just the camera and then getting a remote if I decide I need the functionality. But eh, that's not your fault, and I know more now than I did before, so thanks for the help. "Skydivers are highly emotional people. They get all excited about their magical black box full of mysterious life saving forces."

1 year, 6 DZs, 3 countries "Skydivers are highly emotional people. They get all excited about their magical black box full of mysterious life saving forces."

I see, thanks. The lack of clarity on what differentiates the models is infuriating, as is the fact it's apparently impossible to buy the GPS-enabled LVR2V other than as a bundle with AZ1. But it seems like it should be relatively easy to fashion a mount for it on my Viso wrist mount, have you got any experience with what? Where do you normally keep your remote? "Skydivers are highly emotional people. They get all excited about their magical black box full of mysterious life saving forces."

I find that intensive jumping in general is more relaxed and relaxing than just a few jumps with enough pause between to get a break. Getting into the progress mindset, where you work on a particular thing and just pack for the next load as fast as you can, works wonders. Especially if you can see the results and the progress you're making. Whereas I sometimes need to push myself to jump on slow days because I will otherwise give in to this "maybe I don't need it that bad" feeling. "Skydivers are highly emotional people. They get all excited about their magical black box full of mysterious life saving forces."

Except we talk and think in terms of numbers, not dials. If we brief on breakoff altitude, it's going to be 1500m or maybe 1200m, not "when the arrow points here". So if I have a digital and it shows "2 and something", I don't need to read further to know I still have time, but if it's "1.6 and something", then I won't be able to do much more. Besides, no matter how sideways I glance and how much my alti is shaking, "1.6 and something" will always read as "1.6 and something". I won't see 1.9 there, nor will I see 1.3. I've jumped a VisoII since my jump #15, and it was a huge relief to me because I process digital in a fraction of the time I need to decipher analogue. We have several people who've jumped digitals since #1, and they all turned out alright. Yes, it's prudent to go double for a couple jumps if you've learnt on analogue just to make sure you can read digital as well, but the whole theory about analogue being universally safer is suspect because skydiving is not a static activity where things never change. Every jump can and will at some point call for different altitudes than the previous one. If analogue works better for you, great. But it doesn't automatically make it better for everyone else. "Skydivers are highly emotional people. They get all excited about their magical black box full of mysterious life saving forces."

Slightly offtopic, but are the remotes compatible across models, and are they different from model to model? I'm eyeing AZ-1 for when my jump number rolls over, but the remote is absolutely gigantic. It's looks like it's almost twice the size of GoPro remote. I'd like to know if that's the case for all Sony models. "Skydivers are highly emotional people. They get all excited about their magical black box full of mysterious life saving forces."

Well, it doesn't change the pitch much, instead just slowing you down. But because the flight path is as it were before, with a steep descent and less lift generated (because it now flies slower), the total slowdown is much less before you touch down. Though I haven't flown Sabre1, and not every canopy is equally sensitive to the way you flare (that's really what the "flare power" means). A flatly trimmed canopy like Pulse can be successfully flared in one go because its descent speed is low, and it starts with a higher angle of attack, so pitching further it won't help much with lift generation. But I expect Sabre1 to be more similar to Sabre2 than Pulse. Pilot is also in the same steeper-gliding family, so you would probably run into the same problems eventually. "Skydivers are highly emotional people. They get all excited about their magical black box full of mysterious life saving forces."

90 jumps wonder on a Sabre2 170 @ 1.1 here. It did nasty things to me at first, now I've got coaching and we're much better friends. Is your canopy a Sabre or Sabre2? What did you fly before? First off, if you have more horizontal speed than you know what to do with, do not try to run it out. You will do a scorpion and break your face and/or neck. Sliding with one leg forward (not both, as then you have a higher risk of a hard slam onto your butt and a broken coccyx) is the right thing to do for excessive speed. Are you doing a two-step (or rather, multiphase) flare? You want to stab the first part, ie. bring the toggles down to the point where your flight is level, then stop there. You should feel it level off, and it needs to be quick. The reason for that is that if you stab it out, you change the pitch of the canopy without reducing the airspeed too much. Airspeed is what you use to control your canopy and generate the lift that keeps your descent rate low, so you want to have as much of it as possible until the last possible moment. The second phase is braking, which is where you shed off the speed, and that happens more gradually with deeper input. On a Sabre2, you really want to go as deep as you can without stalling it (it's a problem I'm working on myself, because I tend not to use the last 10-15cm). If you can't stall it with a single wrap of the lines on your wrists, you might have your brakes too long. Talk with a rigger. You also want to have the right body position. Chest strap maximally loose (get it extended if you can't at least slip your shoulders out of the harness without undoing it), slider down. That lets the canopy spread out more, giving you a flatter, aerodynamically better wing. Get used to undoing your chest strap and adjusting yourself to sit better in the harness once you have a good wing overhead and have brought the slider down (and scanned for the traffic!). On landing, lean out of your harness into the chest strap, legs under your centre of mass, with one foot leading for the run. That way you can either run it out or slide it out, depending on how it goes. Pull your toggles down along your body to below your butt. Lastly, no wind landings are simply tough, and Sabre2 @ 1.25 is not a kind canopy for someone with 75 jumps. At 1.1 I got mine loaded at the very top of the recommended level for new jumpers in Denmark, and I'm happy I didn't try to push it. The fact is it was simply too much of a canopy for me at first, and I didn't land it, it landed me. If you can't land it well, upsize or switch to a more docile canopy, like Pulse. P.S. Consider adding some paragraph breaks, they make long blocks of text much easier to read :) "Skydivers are highly emotional people. They get all excited about their magical black box full of mysterious life saving forces."

This is the exact reason I got me a Rev2, also from Bonehead. I haven't had a chance to try an Aero, so it's not a direct comparison, but Rev2 is splendid for bespectacled people. Since I have a very strong prescription I never take my glasses off, and the comfort of putting it on and taking it off is unbeatable. It works better than a conventional fullface or an open face, as there aren't any goggles to mess with. It's just put it on, then flip it closed before exiting. "Skydivers are highly emotional people. They get all excited about their magical black box full of mysterious life saving forces."

What are the relative deficiencies of Wings as compared to Vector in your opinion? I'm curious, because I see Vectors being unchangingly popular, despite their hellishly long wait times (40 weeks, seriously?) for very much not discount prices, yet I don't see anything about a Vector that shines so brightly compared to other options with way shorter turnaround times, and some areas where a Vector seems to be clearly beaten (like how well it fits, where everyone just can't shut up about how amazing Curv is). So it seems to me like a lot of it is that it's *the* Vector built by *the* Bill Booth's company, and everyone knows you just can't go wrong with Vector, which is certainly true, but doesn't necessarily mean you can't go best with something else. "Skydivers are highly emotional people. They get all excited about their magical black box full of mysterious life saving forces."

You might also want to get the retainer bungee for thigh straps. It makes sure they stay in place, as otherwise it's possible to have them creep in freefly. "Skydivers are highly emotional people. They get all excited about their magical black box full of mysterious life saving forces."

Damn, this thread is moving faster than I can keep up with it, let alone reply. I will do my best to address the points raised, though it will sadly have to be more selective and less immediate than I'd like. Please read carefully what I wrote. A Cypres does not cost $1000. A new Cypres does. Which is why it's fair to compare it to a new rig, which can easily hit $10K if you want to go all out on it. I also addressed the issue of resell value and cost of ownership per annum, as well as financing and leasing. I'm putting together a rig at ~$2K including the AAD. It's not freefly friendly, but the canopy prices being what they are, I can't really do much better with this kind of budget assigned, and I don't really care because I want to spend a year doing FS. So it's not like I don't know about used rigs, and you simply cannot make the argument you made and ignore everything I wrote to address that specific issue. As for the AAD accidents, I'm going to lump it together with a reply to mcordell. "Skydivers are highly emotional people. They get all excited about their magical black box full of mysterious life saving forces."

In things like a Cypres, R&D is the cost, as is sourcing parts and labour which will consistently pass quality checks, plus the quality checks themselves, sunk cost of remade or discarded units, etc. Then you have the service & inspection (even if they charge you for it), collecting field data, reacting to anything unusual or unintended that was reported or detected, analysing the data for anomalies, writing new firmware to correct what you found out, testing the hell out of it again, .... I have no idea how much of a profit a unit turns, but looking at the price of the electronics is misleading in high-reliability, small-volume applications like this. You can just as well assume the electronics are free and it won't change the unit cost of manufacture appreciably. Given that almost all actual costs are upfront or running maintenance, and the high cost of switching for users of existing units with years of service life ahead of them, I doubt the market is anywhere big enough to make any kind of price war a viable strategy. By the time anyone will trust your cheapo AAD (just marketing a new one is hard, marketing a new one 40% cheaper than everything else and telling people to trust it their life is going to be super-hard) enough for you to see sales in volume, you'll be bankrupt. That's not to say that Airtec or even MarS aren't seeing a nice unit profit. But we simply don't have the market depth to make up in volume what you lose in unit profit if you want to keep a company with expensive R&D afloat. "Skydivers are highly emotional people. They get all excited about their magical black box full of mysterious life saving forces."

And you are entitled to your opinion of my attitude. My response isn't intended as an attack against you. I don't think requiring people to spend over $1000 on an AAD to allow them to jump is a very adult attitude so I suppose we will have to agree to disagree. Skydiving is expensive, that is just one part of it. You're dropping $6000+ on a rig already (since we're talking new prices), plus $400 on the helmet, $500 suit, tunnel time, camera, jump tickets, ..., so clearly you weren't expecting a cheap hobby. Also my local rigger offers rentals for a monthly fee if you cannot afford the full upfront price, plus financing arrangements, and I expect he's not the only one in the world. The price is simply not an argument against an AAD requirement, $1000 is nothing compared to being dead. AADs are also extremely predictable in their resell value, so you're never really paying the full price unless you use them for their full service life, which comes down to $80/yr (Cypres) or less if it's a Vigil. $80 is less than you're going to spend on beer. I don't believe AADs are infallible. I do know however that AADs have shown themselves to be extremely good at reducing a particular class of risk inherent in skydiving to basically negligible levels. This is just a rehash of the old seatbelt argument, and it's equally or more fallacious. I'm not familiar with any incident where improper AAD activation has caused a fatality or injury (not talking about FXC here, only the modern electronic breed). I'm familiar with AADs (extremely rarely) not working when they should, but even in the Argus incident which eventually grounded them all, there is no indication the possible loop entrapment with top cutter arrangement actually was a factor in the fatality. A faulty cutter could prevent an otherwise good reserve release, but as far as we know, there was no deployment attempted in that case. And if you pull after your AAD has fired, you're not going to live for long anyway... So in essence, you'd rather die in a way that has demonstrably and repeatedly happened before the introduction of AADs, than in a way that has never happened and remains in the realm of science fiction. That is trading in for literally infinitely worse odds, good luck with that. The "government" (actually it's only the parachuting association for us, though it does encompass 100% of operating DZs here) also has other interests than babysitting you: a fatality is an expensive affair (as I've previously explained), and making you wear an AAD is a great way of reducing one of the most obvious ways in which a fatality can happen when you decide to jump out of a plane. Glad to know you don't have fatalities there since AADs are mandated, at least not low pull fatalities right? How many more fatalities did the US have last year that you didn't due to this "problem" that you guys have realized and mitigated? http://www.uspa.org/tabid/81/Default.aspx?Cat=NP (And the number is this low because most US skydivers do in fact have an AAD) "Skydivers are highly emotional people. They get all excited about their magical black box full of mysterious life saving forces."

Also remember that has USB can be used to take over the unit's memory and there's nothing you can do about it. Anything with a USB port can have its memory accessed and/or changed, and it's impossible to prevent it because of how USB is implemented. Yes, anything, including your phone or your AAD, if it has a USB port. Secondly, remember about limiting what it does. Any feature whatsoever added makes the whole more complex and less reliable. You know, like the smart TVs which can actually crash and require a reboot when changing channels? You really don't want your AAD to lock up and require a reboot while in the air. AADs should be reliable more than anything, so they should do as little as possible. Thirdly, I already have a unit which logs my jumps. I wear it on my wrists, it's called a Viso. Sadly without USB dowloads, though an Altitrack offers that. Other electronic altimeters and freefall computers also offer it. Data collecting in a black box fashion is useful for a variety of reasons, but it doesn't mean your AAD should now turn into a family entertainment unit. "Skydivers are highly emotional people. They get all excited about their magical black box full of mysterious life saving forces."

First of all, you will most certainly not "live with" the consequences of not having an AAD when you need it. Secondly, it won't be you who deals with the consequences, it will be others who will be cleaning up your remains, dealing with clueless press (although for once the headline of "skydiver dies after parachute fails to open" will be at least remotely accurate), analysing what went wrong, organising the funeral and grieving. Even if mandatory AADs were mandatory[*] solely for the dropzones wishing to reduce the number of people impacting at the premises, that'd already be a sufficient reason to make them so. Thirdly, the attitude that AADs are about your "decisions", and not many possible circumstances outside of your control, is indicative of an attitude towards safety I don't personally consider very adult. It's not dumbing anything down, it's acknowledging the inherent risks and managing them like a responsible person so that time can be spent on other, fun things, like flying a perfectly good canopy into the ground and upholding Booth's law. [*] They are mandatory here. We have no discussions about it, because as with many other things, unlike the US we have solved that problem and moved on. "Skydivers are highly emotional people. They get all excited about their magical black box full of mysterious life saving forces."

OK, here's a proper detailed reply: Firmly so. It's still not being "gear-dependent", unless you also want to classify people who won't jump without a properly packed reserve as such. It's acknowledging the fact that the reality sometimes does its best to fuck things up, despite our best intentions, and doing something about it to improve our chances. Parachutes sometimes fail, that's why we have reserves. Jumpers sometimes fail, that's why we have AADs. It's risk management, and of a very unintrusive kind: having a reserve or AAD doesn't change how you jump at all, until the time you actually need it. No, of course not. You're skydiving between those two points, you already made the decision to jump out of a perfectly good plane. Just to make it clear, I don't think that skydiving is risk-free, nor am I under any illusion that it can ever be made so in any foreseeable future. Every time I get on a load, I explicitly acknowledge the possibility that I might die; if I didn't want to accept that risk, there's a simple solution: do not get on a plane with the intent to jump out of it. What I'm advocating is mitigating risks that can be effectively mitigated to prevent accidents that can be prevented. However, I'm saying that once we enter the AAD fire area, thinking about "pilot choice" is the entirely wrong mindset. An AAD should ideally never fire unless actually needed, and we agree on that. But I'm describing it in terms of "don't act until necessary, then do everything to act", and you're describing it in terms of "pilot in command choice". Even though it will result in a very substantial overlap of design decisions, the mindset you start with can and will influence some crucial details in significant ways. It's true of all software (and other complex) projects, and an AAD is a complex software project. No, of course not, if it's actually above the point of no return. Once again, AAD is a "you done fucked up" device, its job is to wait until the last possible moment, then do all it can to save you. But as you correctly noted, the problem is detecting when it's the last possible moment, and the answer might be different depending on the data you have available. It's simply that "freedoms" and "choices" are not something you should be considering in AADs, because AADs are about requirements and necessities. To take your reserve snivel example, your AAD has data which allows it to fire early, before current, less smart AADs would, because it can tell that the "last possible moment" is approaching before other AADs do. So in effect, you have created a device that will fire when others on the market won't, so you have just made it more invasive and took a "decision" away from the pilot when other AADs wouldn't. Is that wrong? No, because that's precisely what was needed to save that pilot's life in a situation that'd otherwise be fatal. But if it truly has detected that the pilot is screwing up, and can tell it's now or never, then yes, it should act in a way that maximises the chances of survival. That's what it's for. Yes, exactly. If adding more nylon to the situation is the best you can do, then by Luna, you should add more nylon to the situation. If you ask me, the point of no return has been passed a good while before, though of course a good starting point is not using ram-air systems designed for terminal deployment. Which makes me wonder, maybe you can make a BASE AAD with that... ;) No, that'd be pointless. For one thing, people who positively cannot take the necessary decision-making and risks of skydiving have a simple solution: do not jump out of perfectly good planes (or jump tandem if you want the thrill but not the skills). And for the other, doing so would compromise both the safety and the enjoyment for people who can handle it. I never thought it was either of those things, no worries. But as I'm both opinionated and vocal about it, it's important to me to be able to communicate those opinions in a way that will be understood clearly, which is not always trivial. Also because I come from a place which is about as radically different from the US as possible, both as it concerns skydiving and otherwise, and a lot of the time I cannot help but wonder at the ridiculous allowances you make to make possible things which basically everyone else has decided are a bad idea and no longer attract any discussion because they are solved problems. We do not have heated discussions on the merits of having AADs vs. not; we simply made them mandatory and no sane person takes it upon themselves to oppose that, because it's painfully obvious that the world has improved since we did so. It's actually funny to stumble upon a very, very dated local skydiving mag from 1992 explaining the plans to implement mandatory AAD ownership and addressing common objections, and depressing to realise that it's still a current issue in the US. "Skydivers are highly emotional people. They get all excited about their magical black box full of mysterious life saving forces."

You got some things right, some others need clarification. I unfortunately don't have the time to write a proper reply, so I'm just throwing this in as a placeholder until the time I do. I'll try to do it over the weekend, but there's jumps waiting to be done, so there might be a delay :) "Skydivers are highly emotional people. They get all excited about their magical black box full of mysterious life saving forces."

There isn't any growing dependence on the gear, just like there isn't any "growing dependence on modern surgery". We just have people who would've been dead in the old days who aren't, because the modern gear/surgery made it possible to survive things that'd kill you previously. Have you noticed how "no pull" basically doesn't exist as a category of accidents anymore, at least not in places which have the audacity to assault your freedom (oh noes!) and require you to wear an AAD? That's exactly why. Now we have moved to dying mostly under perfectly functional canopies, precisely because our "growing dependence" made it hard not to have a canopy overhead before you impact. In the same vein, I'm not only against the "freedom of choice" not to wear an AAD (dying unnecessarily and unintendedly is not a freedom), I'm also sceptical about the "AAD should give the pilot the ability to take command" line of thinking. Sure, it shouldn't step in unnecessarily and make things worse if it can help it, but if you go with "I'm the pilot, I'm making decisions here" when talking about an AAD, that is already a wrong starting point. AAD is a "you done fucked up now" device, if an AAD ever has to fire, you either fucked up massively and showed the lack of judgement for whatever reason, or something fucked you up and made it impossible for you to take action. You're by definition no longer capable of being in command. Now, you're absolutely right that it shouldn't fire unnecessarily, and if you can make an AAD capable of taking meaningful action during military static line deployments from 160m AGL, then obviously you're doing something right :). But how you approach a problem initially can influence the solution hugely, and that's where I'm starting to get worried. Not to mention that a lot of the command pilots might want to take aren't even right, for instance reserve manufacturers do NOT want you to get stable prior to deployment, and in fact many reserves do NOT open best in belly to earth position. PS. I'm a programmer by trade, so I'm more familiar than most with the fundamental limitations of being smart. The more a device can base its decisions on, and the more sophisticated the possible decisions, the less you can reason about what it will actually do. It's not even limited to machines; the reason people lock up and make no decision when they should is precisely because we're intelligent and that sometimes goes wrong. You don't usually get people forgetting to breathe the way they can forget they have a reserve handle when they can't locate the main handle, because breathing is an automatic activity independent of your smartness. So you want to be careful to limit smartness only to situations where it removes fundamental limitations of a less smart approach. "Skydivers are highly emotional people. They get all excited about their magical black box full of mysterious life saving forces."