DonnellyB

There's always BASE jumping

My take on this, you have every right to swoop if that is what you want to do. Skydiving is 1. an inherently dangerous activity; and 2. attracts individualist types that will consistently refuse to be stopped in the pursuit of what makes them come alive. Isn't that why we're all here? Skydiving is certainly not safe, but we all do it anyway. We try to make it safer in all the ways that we can without taking the soul out of it. For some folks canopy piloting is the soul of it. We have no right to take that from them any more than the FAA should be able to stop all of skydiving.. or any more than DZOs should have a "right" (morally speaking) to ban jumpers over 60. I think that's the big difference between this conversation and any concerns around low pulls. Pulling low does not change the nature of skydiving. Those extra seconds are not magical and different than the rest of the freefall. At best it adds a few extra seconds to a formation trying to turn extra points. In this way banning low pulls doesn't take the soul out of what we're here to do. So I don't think it's a fair comparison to swooping for many folks. However there is something we can and should do - we should make a recommendation similar to the camera recommendation that limits at what stage in a skydiver's career they should begin training to swoop. The recommendation could limit canopy size, or degrees of turn onto final, or both. This is a reasonable thing to do I think - and an often overlooked cause of injury in younger jumpers. While I don't think we have a right to take the soul out of jumping for folks who find that soul in the discipline of canopy piloting. I think that delaying those folks who rapidly progress onto unreasonable wing loadings too young to understand what they're doing is completely fair.

I have been searching every corner of the web trying to find an answer to this question. I'm hoping that the experienced folks here can help me shine a light on it. For the MARD in the Infinity, there is a trigger that sits in a small pocket. My understanding is that in the case of a cutaway, the trigger will be extracted from that pocket, and in this moment will lock the right main riser to the center of the reserve pilot chute bridle (essentially by allowing for a change in the angle of the MARD pin). This facilitates the extraction of the reserve as well as pins the freebag to the cutaway main to help locate it later. What I'm curious about is if under any circumstance the trigger could be extracted from its housing inadvertently. And if this is possible, could this result in a reserve pilot chute in tow? I wonder if in the case of a hard collision with another jumper the force could potentially extract the trigger from the housing, without any main canopy deployment. Then if this would 'lock' the reserve pilot chute bridle to the right main riser and keep the reserve from deploying (ex. from AAD firing for unconscious jumper after collision)? Thanks for fielding the question, do also wonder about similar pin and loop designs such as the RAX system.

Yeah, this is actually what is so interesting about the 'ape index' in so many sports is that it does often show that outliers (folks with longer arms relative to their body size) tend to have strange advantages or disadvantages. It would make so much sense to me if having a larger 'wingspan' would quite literally provide an advantage in wingsuiting in a way that additional "empty" fabric might not. If I'm not mistaken there are a number of NBA players with almost mutant wingspans (think 11+ inches longer than they are tall). Maybe we could convince one of them to strap on a wingsuit !

This actually brings up a fascinating point. The human wingspan is 'fixed' to a degree - this is true - but within a range that fluctuates from person to person. You can look up concepts like 'wingspan' or 'armspan' and their effects on many different sports. I wonder if wingsuiting is the same. Does anyone know if we've quantified the effects? If we look at some of the best wingsuit pilots in the world for example, do they have abnormally long arms? Are they abnormally tall? In a few sports there is talk about the 'ape index' (ratio of wingspan/armspan to height) playing an important role in performance. I really wonder if that could be the same here.

What about grip tape? Plenty of options that should be very 'grippy' even if wet. I'm actually kind of surprised to learn we don't all seem to dislike those hollow cylinders. I always thought they were more of a cost saving measure - maybe for ease of maintenance and replacement than a useful item. That they 'worked' but not much more. I can't think of anyone I've ever known with a modern rig that used one purposely.

Great questions, it was a 230 student rig from sunpath. I'm coming back from a long break and so I've purposely upsized off my rig for a bit. There was no tuck tab and I was given no briefing on the specifics of the gear. The pilot chute handle was one of those hollow cylinder monstrosities. The pilot chute itself seemed a bit large to me and was not collapsible.

A bit of background - I've never jumped "new" gear before. I've always been on used containers until this last saturday when I jumped a shiny new rental rig while traveling. The rig had actually only ever had one reserve pack last month. On a jump went to pull and actually had my hand slip off the handle from how well stuck the pilot chute was in the BOC. I went back for one more try and pulled like I meant it and the darn thing came out. But on the ground I brought it up to the S&TA. This was a rental so I wanted to make sure no brand new jumpers got a nasty surprise out of it (The hard pull + an unexpected extra long snivel had me under canopy lower than I'd like). They seemed to think it was essentially "normal"? I have never had to pull anywhere near this hard to deploy before. On my next jump on the same rig I ended up even slightly messing up my body position on deployment from bracing to pull the pilot chute out. What do you think? I want to ask the hive mind of experience here. Does this sound 'safeish' and 'normal'?

Thanks for the answers! It sounds like this is actually pretty straightforward. I do wonder why I wasn't able to find this information anywhere else? Might be operator error on my part!

I've been searching hard for an answer to this question and I'm just not able to find it. It seems to me based on all the various cutaway videos I've watched (very scientific, I know) that diving line twists almost never happen on reserve canopies. Can anyone give me the technical explanation for why this is the case? Is it something to do with the aspect ratio or trim of reserve canopies? Should this knowledge inform anything about I fly reserve canopies (ex. if trim is different)? Thanks in advance!