Westerly

Where is a good place to go in September on the west coast?

Ed Scott never claimed this happened because Lodi wasn't a USPA GM DZ. I have attached the video for you to review. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NVUTZ3APTMs This wasn't an "Unlucky Tragedy". This was negligence by a number of people involved. They keep mentioning the TI not having required USPA certifications. I'm not a TI, but it is my understanding is that no one legally needs anything from the USPA to be a TI. They need a rating from the manufacturer and that is the only rating that matters. If they have a USPA TI rating but no manufacturer rating, legally they cannot do a TI jump. Is that accurate? So the more important question is did he have a TI rating from UTP (or whatever rig they use)?

I had a surgery awhile back that required the use of a spinal block. When I woke up my legs were completely numb. I thought, hey in theory I can walk because I was walking around two hours ago so I know I am capable of it. Yea, no. Without nervous system control, your legs are useless. I spent most of the two hours it took before the spinal block wore off just trying to stand. I just couldn't do it even though I knew I was physically capable of it in theory. Even something as simple as moving my toes was a hugely difficult task. I put in all my effort to attempt it, and still I couldn't even move a toe, not even a tad. That surgery was an interesting opportunity to see what it would feel like to be paralyzed from the waist down and it sucked hugely. It was annoying enough for two hours. I couldn't imagine a lifetime of that. I wouldn't wish that on anyone. That's got to be a really hard life to live with that type of condition.

It's worth noting that most people who do a tandem jump enjoyed it, but many of them would not make it through AFF. It's not just about whether you enjoy it. You could just suck at flying and unable to understand the material. I've seen students who liked skydiving, but they were really dull when it came to understanding important aspects of skydiving like equipment and EPs. The instructor would show and explain them how to do something and they just wouldent get it. I've seen students have to repeat AFF levels several times because they just could not remain stable in freefall on their own.

With the number of people who have lost canopies, I am surprised still no one makes a cellular tracker specifically for skydiving. Anyway, there are several options on the market that allow you to track any object anywhere as so long as it is within the footprint of the device's cell network. I was thinking of getting one. Ideas for brand and attachment options? It seems like this is a reasonable choice: https://pinggps.com/ Has anyone actually used one of these guys to retrieve a canopy?

I completed an FFC not too long ago with one of the Squirrel coaches. I was taught on deployment to give a hard arch, symmetrically collapse arm wings and bring my feet up at 90 degrees. I was told not to collapse the leg wing, but bring the legs up a bit, similar to a relaxed belly freefall position. Anyway, I was reading the user manual for some Phoenix Fly suits today and noticed that it said to never bring your legs up during deployment, and instead collapse the leg wing and keep your legs straight. In other words, the exact opposite of what I was taught. It does make sense that bringing your legs up at a 90 could increase your risk of the D bag hitting your foot or leg wing, which would not be cool. So what is the proper deployment technique then for a smaller modern suit? Something like a Swift, Hatch, or something of the sorts. I watched this video and it seems to show flying the suit in full flight with little or no change in the legs. https://vimeo.com/239867145

Jumprun speed would be an issue. Getting out at 200 MPH would be brutal. Might make those four way exits rough.

That would be a nice jump plane. Super high tail. Doors on both sides. Get up to altitude in 4 minutes. Who's thinking what I am thinking? https://resource.alaskaair.net/-/media/Images/pages/travel-info/our-aircraft/aircraft680-q400.ashx?v=1

I guess the answer would be whenever they become complacent? Other people's mistakes can harm you on the plane, in the sky, under canopy and on the ground. Maybe one should worry about what other people do since their actions can harm you.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oApAdwuqtn8

Money's worth of what exactly? What do you automatically get at a GM DZ that you dont get at a non-member DZ?

***But how would I know it's you? How do you know the person actually earned their ratings and was not just given them? These 140 people were running around with "USPA Instructor" cards in their pockets. https://www.sacbee.com/news/local/article99446487.html . I wasent there so I cant comment on the whole Lodi thing. But this is what one of the instructors named in your posted news report had to say about it: https://www.facebook.com/yuri.garmashov/posts/10209874396515575

Err, what? You just gave an example where a guy with a gun quite literally escalated a non-violent situation into a life threatening one.No I dident. The suspect rammed someone with a car, was about to ram another person and then the bystander pulled a gun, preventing the suspect from running over a second person. The gun did not come out until after the suspect already assaulted someone and was attempting to run down a second person. With his gun concealed, the bystander approached the suspect while he was stealing the car. The suspect attempted to flee, running someone over in the process, and then the bystander pulled his gun right as the suspect was about to run into a second person in an attempt to flee the scene to avoid getting caught.

It doesn't use GPS if the device has a barometer; it only falls back to GPS if there's no barometer detected. There's a bug in the app that if you don't quit it properly, the measured sample rate would multiply. To quit any Wear app, swipe to the right; pressing the home button only puts it in the background (Smart Altimeter continues to run in the background and drains battery to keep the smoothing/differentiating algorithms continuously fed with current samples). The lag in smoothed altitude is 12 samples, or 12/166s - less than 0.1s. The lag from real time to the unprocessed sample is unknown. Yes, the speed lags more than altitude because of the combo smoothing/differentiating algorithm I use; without it, the derivative of a noisy variable will be super noisy.I am not sure swiping to the right actually closes the program. I dont think it does because when I swipe to the right and then select the app, it opens in less than two seconds and the refresh rate multiplication bug sill exists. However, if I go into settings and force quit the app, going back into the app takes about 6 seconds and the bug with the refresh rate is gone.

Yup. I know an instructor who starts off her Carry Permit classes by telling the students: "Write a list of everyone you are willing to die for. Now write down everyone you are willing to go to prison for the rest of your life for. Now write down everyone you are willing to give up everything you own for; house, car, savings, everything. The reality is if you use a gun to defend someone, those are very real possibilities. Be very careful using that gun." Yesterday, in the local ACE Hardware store I passed an angry looking dude with a Glock in a thigh holster. Never mind that this store has a "No Open Carry" sign on the front door, this deluded asshole was out to exercise his second amendment rights and fuck anyone who disagreed. How is it that anyone views this as necessary? For fucks sake, I just wanted to buy a piece of 2" PVC pipe in a town that has 3 marijuana stores and not a single goddamn 3 way stop light. Not to mention that it would have been child's play to grab a shovel and whack the moron on the head if necessary. WTF? I'm a gun guy but this is just ridiculous bullshit. You do realize not everyone carrying a gun is some gun nut ass hole? Great story. Here is another story that just happened yesterday. A dude and his friend were trying to steal some cars parked at a popular hiking location. A guy with a concealed weapon approached them. The thief got in his car and tried to flee, striking a women in the process and backing into one of the parked cars. After the thief backed into the women and tried to ram her a second time to flee the location, the man pulled out his weapon and shot the thief. The thief was later charged with attempted murder and auto theft. The guy with a gun quite literally saved the day in very measurable sense and if someone with a gun wasent present someone would have died.

USPA banned wingsuits for several decades. On what grounds?

What dropzones are those that violate BSR(s) on every load? Which BSRs? What area of the country? Does it matter? Most DZs do at least one thing is questionable. All drop zones have at least a few fun jumpers who dont take safety seriously. Some are better than others. Some care, others dont. I've seen TIs do 270s about 100 feet off the ground and swoop their 380 Icarus tandem in. I've seen HP landings a few from AFF student landings. I've seen half the load land north and half land south, all at the same time, in a small landing area. I've seen guys with several thousand jumps on a WL of over 2.0 yell at someone with 50 jumps because he 'got in the way' flying a standard pattern when the dude was trying to set up for a 720 HP landing. I've seen AFF-Is tell guys "you have your license now, you dont need to fly a pattern. That's AFF shit". Some DZs do this stuff all the time.

I would like to understand, but can't from that description. Start by single stowing the band. Then instead of grabbing the band and wrapping it around a second time, your grabbing the band, twisting it 180 degrees, and then wrapping it a second time which creates a knot in the band. In my case, I was not twisting the band 180 degrees, I was spinning the bag 180 degrees, but the end result is the same.

Why said anything about Cypress? I jump a Mars M2 Multi. The only real difference as I understand it between the modes (at least with Mars and Vigil) is the activation height and speed. For the M2, intermediate mode (which is student on the Vigil) is 45 MPH and 1085 feet. Pro mode is 78 MPH and 885 feet. I have an additional 200' added to my pro mode setting which means effectively the only difference between pro and intermediate mode is that one activates at 45 MPH and the other at 78 MPH. I dont understand why AAD manufacturers keep coming out with all these different modes. Student mode, intermediate mode, pro mode, extreme mode, CP mode, blah, blah. Why not just let the user set the activation speed and height? The Mars M2 Multi already lets you set your own activation height (in increments of 100'). Why not add the speed setting to so then you can create whatever 'mode' you want? I would set mine to 1100' and 60 MPH which is partway between pro and intermediate. It's fast enough that I dont need to worry about activation under canopy, but slow enough that a small WS would probably still activate it. As it is, my only choices are intermediate (45 MPH) or pro (78 MPH). A 60 MPH setting would be more ideal.

Quite right. If rubber bands on the critical locking stows are breaking every few jumps, then it seems likely that occasionally they are breaking before line stretch. Not necessarily. It depends on why they are failing. For example, awhile back I was puzzled as to why I would put on a brand new rubber band, double stow it, and the come down with two broken, new rubber bands. I found out that when I was double wrapping the bands occasionally I would turn the bag to put between my legs and I would put a twist in the band in the wrong direction. In other words, I'd put a clockwise twist in the band to stow the lines, then a counterclockwise twist as I turned the bag to put between my legs. The end result was a knot in the band that made the stow impossible to release and the PC would have to break the band to get the stow off. Once I figured out what the issue was I corrected it and I havent had problems with failed bands since then. Because I was using rubber bands, I dident even notice the issue. The parachute opened just as fast as normal. However, if I was using tube stowes and I did that, I may have had a bag lock (not that anyone double wraps tube stows).

Alright so this thing is out and it's $1500! hahah. Does anyone actually own one? Why not just set your AAD to student mode if you're flying a docile canopy? Seems like the easier and safer option.

My Wear apps (Smart Altimeter, L/D Vario, Rockdrop Pro) are legacy apps, they were built for Android Wear 1.5 2-3 years ago and not updated since. With AW 1.5, you need to have the watch paired to an Android phone, then you install the Android version of the app from the Play Store, it piggybacks the Wear app and pushes it to the watch when they are paired and connected (and if you have WearOS 2.0 already on the watch, then you find the app in "Apps on your phone" section of the watch'es own Play Store). When Google introduced AW 2.0, they added support for iPhone, but to install any apps, you need to have AW 2.0 or later on the watch and the apps need to target 2.0. With iPhone, there seems to be no way to install legacy 1.5 apps on Android smartwatches. PS. Fortunately, unlike with iphone, one doesn't have to pay a fortune to have an Android phone with a Play Store on it; walk into any Walmart and buy any prepaid phone (for example, I have a Motorola E4 for 40 bucks and Huawei Ascend XT2 for 50 bucks for various utility uses, like maps, browser, music, etc.). You don't need to enroll in any phone service; just don't insert the included SIM and skip everything related to that during the initialization. Then login to Play Store with your gmail account and boom! - you can install any apps you want, as well as pair Android smartwatches to this phone. Alright, I got an Android phone and I was able to get it up and running on the watch. A few questions. Does the app use the GPS for anything? I thought about leaving the watch in airplane mode at all times to conserve battery, but that would disable the GPS. I noticed the sensor info screen seems off sometimes. I normally get 167 Hz. refresh rate for the barometer, but I've seen it go as high as 1000 Hz and a few numbers in between. What is the lag of the altimeter readings? I took the watch up and down in the elevator and it seems to react reasonably quickly to changes in the elevator, but the speed function seems to lag behind. When the elevator is at a complete stop the MPH speed is still counting down to zero. It seems like the speed maybe averages a few hundred samples to get the number I see on the screen? It's a cool app. It would be nice if it was developed more including different skins for the altimeter and different options as well as customization options for the sample averaging. I'd pay money for a more advanced version of the app.

He came back on under the user name "Clipped wings."Hmmm I cant find anyone named that on the forum. A search turns up nothing.

That's like claiming you saw someone speed and they didn't get pulled over, so traffic laws and police are useless wastes of money. I have heard people (DZO's, instructors, organizers) talk to tandem masters about 90 degree turns - and they based it on the BSR's. So it happens. I am sure you saw a case where it didn't. That happens too. Those things happen a lot less when there are rules to back them up. Can you cite examples where the USPA actually took action against a DZ for violating BSRs? I can only think of one example, but 100% of the drop zones I have visited did at least one thing that was in violation of BSRs. Some DZs do it openly. One rather famous DZ with many well-known jumpers has a sign in manifest that says you need a B license and 100 jumps to jump camera. The SIM clearly states you need a C license. Some drop zones violate BSRs on every single load everyday. It's exceedingly common.

Sure, I get that. But the USPA's focus is safety, not convenience. If we all said that dual parachute systems were too expensive, do you think it would be reasonable for the USPA to okay jumping with single parachute systems? The focus should always be safety and finding ways to increase competency. Even with the 10 group jumps, the standard for a C license is still really easy--easier than it should be. Again, you're not required to obtain a C license. It doesent stop you from jumping. I've only been to one DZ that actually requires one and there was a different DZ an hour away that would let you jump with an A license. I find it strange that we are trying to argue for incompetency over competency. The notion that we would argue to lower the standards in an otherwise very risky sport is extremely bizarre. We need to find ways to increase the standards and training, not lower them down to the easiest, most convenient, and ineffective level possible just because they are inconvenient. When the consequence is life or death, the training needs to be effective no matter how many people fail to meet the standard. In the special forces some 75% of students dont graduate. You dont see the military lowering their training standards because of it. The students increase their level to match the standard or they take a hike. You dont decrease the standard to match the student's [lack of] ability regardless of what the reason is.