KBUDA

I have had several different back pads from several different manufacturers, and I can confidently say that none of them have ever made a difference. It might just be where I've lived. It goes from fun springtime temps, to brutal, ruin your soul hot summer temps pretty quickly. A fun mesh design in my backpad has been the last thing on my mind when I'm trying not to die of heatstroke. I'm sure there are varying opinions on this, but if money was a factor for me, I wouldn't bother with any of the backpad upgrades.

You can also route your chest strap this way: https://www.dropzone.com/forums/topic/263720-chest-strap-quick-release-routing-/?do=findComment&comment=4594717

Adrenalin BASE uses quick detach buckles for all of their hardware I think. I'm sure they could point you to their supplier.

Not trying to call you out, but maybe it will relieve some anxiety about riser maintenance. https://www.dropzone.com/forums/topic/10643-looking-after-your-3-rings/?do=findComment&comment=941792

I still think this is an odd choice to be making. It's like being stuck between buying a Vespa or an S1000RR. Do you want an impact rated helmet, or a lightweight, low-profile helmet?

Were you in control of your tunnel time? You can talk with your coach at the tunnel and say something like "I want to work on flying super fast on my belly," and they can work you until you break in half. Get on a foam roller and do a bunch of upward facing dog pose, and get dat back workin. It will come together for your eventually.

These have been designed for 2 completely different reasons. The G4 is an update on the G3 for sure, but it was designed to be an impact rated helmet. The BC Dynamic appears to cater to high speed freefly disciplines where low-profile is the major consideration.

RABBLE! RABBLE! RABBLE! RABBLE!

I use a tool I heard on Skydive Radio. Start by asking "How did your jump go?" Then you let that conversation play out naturally. You're just establishing the connection. Once you've both finished talking about how good your skydives were, I usually say something like, "Would you mind if I gave you some feedback on something I noticed?" At this point they're not getting blindsided, and I feel like the people I've talked to have been very receptive. Bonus points points if they turn into a person you get to know, rather than a person you scolded one time. Reinforcing relationships on the dropzone is what builds this community. That's all if you don't really know the person. If you already have a rapport with the person, that should be pretty straightforward.

The G3 and most other skydiving helmets are not impact rated, and they are not made out of any material capable of achieving an impact rating. Impact rated helmets are made out of a substantial layer of expanded polystyrene (Styrofoam) or expanded polypropylene. These materials are capable of absorbing impact forces in a way that other materials cannot. Existing skydiving helmet designs are functionally worthless with regards to actual impacts. Out of curiosity, when you say "I've found my G3 to be quite adequate", do you mean that it helped to prevent or lessen the severity of a TBI after a foolishly low turn or something? Because that's the point of an impact rating, not to provide additional protection from someone's foot on a freefly jump.

Also, and I get that this might rub you the wrong way, but since you're selling a rig with a Katana 107, and in that same classified ad are looking for a 170-190 main, I would STRONGLY recommend you do all of your gear buying through a single rep who knows exactly how many jumps you have. A 150 is a high performance parachute regardless of wingloading. I'm making a lot of assumptions about you, but a traumatic brain injury will change your whole life forever. Every single person in the sport for more than a few years has seen it happen. Gung ho people downsizing too quickly and ending up with broken bones and TBIs. Sorry if my assumptions are wrong, or if that came off like a dick thing to say. It's just kind of rude to bounce in front of people if it's something you could have avoided doing. I know I don't like to hear people screaming because their bones aren't in the right order anymore.

Since I've been skydiving I've encountered two people that have tried to either pass off a jump story as true, or they could have just been messing with me. I'm curious how many others have caught people lying about jump experiences out in the wuffo world. One was my boss's boss's boss at my last job. I found out that he was a former skydiver, so at some point I started a conversation about it with him. About 30 seconds into it he told me about a friend of his who was under canopy, saw a person in distress (unconscious) and in freefall, friend cuts away his main canopy to chase down the unconscious person, and finally deploys his reserve once he has a firm grip on the unconscious jumper. That boss was not a joke telling person in all of my experience with him. I never called him out on it, but my assumption was that he got really drunk and watched Dropzone and incorporated the happenings of that movie into his own life story. The second was pretty recently at my current job. There were two guys in front of me at the coffee machine, and I could hear them talking about one of the guy's special forces service in the military. SF guy was talking about HALO jumps and whatnot, and I asked him if he still jumped for fun. He told me that he got it out of his system while he was in the military, and then he proceeded to talk about his escapades, the most outlandish of which was throwing his rig out of the plane and chasing it down. I get that people have done similar things, but I feel like the chances of that happening without me already knowing about him specifically are pretty slim. I just nodded and said "that's crazy" and walked away. He could have just been yanking my chain too I suppose. I welcome anyone's stories of people blowing smoke, or if anyone has ever seen anything like the two stories I've heard I'm into hearing about that too. I've got to imagine that chasing a rig out of a plane is pretty much a non-starter cause of the terminal velocity difference.

I use the VSE hook knives: http://www.chutingstar.com/vse-infinity-hook-knife You can install snaps on each mud flap and on both leg strap covers. I run with two and never have to think about it outside of touching them for EP practice.

I have large gear... ...I'll see myself out.

The last DZ I jumped at had the first part of that. We would all agree on a landing direction at the loading area, but once everyone started looking at the stupid spinning arrow all bets were off.

https://www.sskinc.com/Contact

This doesn't answer your question, but I can't figure out for the life of me why some dropzones don't have a plan for no wind landings. I've always been fed bs about "the winds could change once we're at altitude" or whatever, but at the follow-the-flag or land-with-the-arrow dropzones, more than half the time you get cross traffic. It always feels like I spend 80% of my canopy flight setting up for the current wind direction, and it changes right as I enter my landing pattern, and no matter how many times I go through it I ask the question (while flying the now incorrect pattern), should I commit to this, or make an adjustment? I would rather take a thousand 3mph downwinders than ever have to ask myself that question again. Rant over.

If you search for Neumann gloves on Alibaba there are a few listings. They all have embroidery in the pictures, but that can probably be negotiated.

I think that most people who do it haven't really pushed themselves to the limit, and so don't realize how close to it they are. Aggressive and unbalanced toggle maneuvers can land you in line twists quicker than most people realize. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQE9IBS5zeg

I'm going to bring this up not strictly to discourage anyone, but just to point it out for newer jumpers who might not understand what they're doing to other people. This summer alone I had maybe 6 incidents (out of 100 ish jumps) where I was getting ready or had already turned onto my downwind leg, only to have someone finishing an aggressive 360 degree or larger turn uncomfortably close to where I planned on being. This usually meant that the other jumper was coming out of a very steep dive at around 1,000ft. A second point to this is that most of those people were very new jumpers. Again, I'm not going to be the crotchety old bastard and say that aggressive turns are bad, but just in case there are some new jumpers out there who aren't aware: just because you aren't in danger of colliding with someone doesn't mean that you aren't flying like a jerk and making people wonder if it's safe to continue flying their normal pattern. In addition to that, if you are a low-time jumper, you are probably lightly loading your canopy. This means that if you spiral very aggressively during your flight, depending on where we both started, I might have to pass you twice on my flight. Worse yet, if you end up spiraling down in front of me, and beat me into the landing pattern, I will likely have to fly my whole pattern in brakes to avoid interfering with you. I recognize that this is my problem. I'm sure some people will give me grief about this, but I wanted to bring this up because I get it. Flying parachutes is dope, and it's easy to get excited about it. However, the time to go hard is on high pulls or hop and pops, and not when there are 15 or 22 other jumpers in the air all trying to get back to the ground safely (unless you have your own lane and the experience to make good decisions). It just doesn't make any sense to have a person with 60 skydives toggle whip their way into the middle of a landing pattern, and people with many more jumps than that seem to know better. This isn't 100% relevant, but that guy seriously comes out of nowhere. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-vwW2MBocok Edit: I am a fool who cannot hyperlink things.

Over the past few months, I've noticed an increasing level of bickering on the incident forums over circumstances mostly unrelated to the fatality. I get that since this was an election year, people wanted to express their frustrations with the USPA. However, in many cases these incident forums will be the most complete aggregate of 1st and 2nd hand information, as well as a place with links to official reports (when they exist) and fundraising pages. These people will have obituaries in their hometown newspapers, and their families will know what happened, but that Incident forum will be the way that their story gets told to the skydiving world years after they die. We have the Base Fatality List as a memorial to those whose luck ran out, and as a resource to help us learn from our past. I'm not saying that we need to treat the Incident forum with the same degree of respect as the BFL. What I am saying is that if I ever go in, and there is any sort of an afterlife, and I catch any of you grumpy old nutjob skydivers talking on my incident page about how the USPA could have regulated me back down to the planet better, I will do my best to haunt you. I don't care about the USPA. I pay my dues as a yearly fee to skydive. I care about the people around me, and I care about knowing who to trust and who to be wary of. I trust my pilot, I trust my DZOs to make the right call if circumstances aren't clearly in the jumpers' favor, and above all I trust myself to walk away from situations that I cannot make myself comfortable with. If I ever go in, and you feel the need to be a curmudgeon, go outside and tell it to the squirrels or something, cause I don't care. If there's something to be learned from it, please post it. Even if I made a mistake and it makes me look like an idiot, give me the respect of believing I'm able to show others how they can be less of an idiot. But, if you're just getting on your soap box and ranting like a lunatic like I'm doing now, then this is the forum for it. Don't piss on my grave stone.

If you're not intending to do any freefall with it, I'd recommend any of the new slatted BASE canopies as the most appropriate tool for the job. I've only jumped an OSP, but that thing was a big fat fart in the sky and after only a few jumps I was putting it exactly where I wanted it.

Eh, in my experience I've been able to adjust the shock cord length to a point where the leg straps won't ride down my thighs in freefall, but I can still move them down under canopy. Under canopy, the shock cord is under a fair bit of tension, but my body weight and friction keeps the leg straps from sliding back into position between the cheeks. In my opinion that's kind of the whole reason for using shock cord rather than something inelastic.

I loved it though. "Hey guys, I can't figure out how to kill line." And then everyone just got all up in arms about bungees. Just suck less at packing, or replace your kill line and call it a day.

I don't know if the same rules apply here, but it's a common understanding with BASE rigs that pin orientation itself is not what matters. What is important is the relationship between the pin retainer tab and the pin. If the retainer tab is attached on the side of the eye opposite the point of the pin, the force of the bridle can actually press the point of the pin into the container and prevent the pin from extracting. Here's a few pictures showing the proper relationship between pin and retainer tab. Ignore the smiley face/frowny face part, and focus on what an applied force would do to the pin in each orientation. In the bottom picture, a force applied perpendicular to the jumper's back could potentially drive the tip of the pin into the container. You can test it yourself by orienting your pin the incorrect way and picking your rig up by the bridle. It's not guaranteed to hang up, but I can easily pick up my BASE rig by the bridle with the wrong tab orientation, and it has fairly loose closing loops. http://www.watchthybridle.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Pin-and-Pin-Tab.pdf