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I'm very glad I don't, and I will oppose attempts to turn us into one.

I don't think they need my agreement, allowance, or even cooperation to subrogate--that's up to them. Like I said, I looked through my policy and there was nothing obligating me to respond. I didn't, it's been well over a year, and nothing has happened. Strong disagree. If I'm not obligated to cooperate, I see only downsides and no upside to the DZ for me helping someone sue the DZ. The only possible difference in outcome is an increase in likelihood that the DZ gets sued. I'm curious to know what headaches you think can be avoided. Again, I'm completely missing the upside to making it easier for them. Giving them what they want isn't you controlling the process, it's them. I told the doc exactly how I hurt my foot. I had no reason to hide it.

I got a questionnaire from one of these when I sprained my foot. I didn't find anything in my plan obligating me to respond so I simply ignored it.

The question was "why does USPA do [these things that are easy] and not do [this thing that's hard]". All I did was point out the obvious answer.

Setting a minimum opening altitude is easy. Setting a minimum number of jumps to fly a wingsuit is easy. Coming up with wingloading rules that will work for everyone is hard.

I seem to recall during the stream, someone on comms made a call to activate the BRS. Obviously that didn't happen and we can only either speculate why or ask the team. What I was trying to explain was: We can either assume (1) the engineering is completely incompetent and reckless (I won't rehash, please see my previous comment), or (2) they identified the main risk (which is completely obvious), and mitigated it in the most obvious and straightforward way, displaying an absolute minimal level of competence. The disparity between these choices is so drastic, I think it's really objectively incorrect and unfair to assume (1). This is a logical trap it seems many have fallen into. The statement lends *zero* implication that they did not have the ability to activate the BRS remotely and manually, either by a modified CYPRES or additional system. Are you presenting this as your opinion or as fact? Do you have any references?

Repeating yourself over and over again doesn't make you any more correct.

My life has been really crazy the last couple months and I'm late to the party, but I have some pretty strong unpopular opinions on this I'd like to share. I've thought carefully about this so if you choose to respond, please do so in kind. I watched the stream live from beginning to end. Luke asked for permission to do the stunt, they were denied permission, and they did it anyway, obviously breaking the law. This is inaccurate. "Permission to do the stunt" was never required or requested or a thing of any kind. They requested an exemption to one specific reg, 91.105, which was denied. They did the stunt, and now the FAA says they violated 91.105. That's the situation. Well, Luke must have understood they were about to break 91.105 or otherwise they wouldn't have asked for the exemption. This is a logical leap. It's entirely plausible that Luke believes he did not violate 91.105 and has already had a compelling argument prepared for some time. Asking for the exemption implies Luke felt there was some risk that the FAA would accuse him of violating 91.105 (doesn't make it true), and that he'd prefer to avoid the conflict all-together if possible. Legally he should be no worse off than if he had never asked for the exemption or worked with the FAA at all. Just read 91.105, it's obviously an air-tight open and shut case, duh 91.105(a), which determines whether or not (1) and (2) below it apply, is not clear at all. I'll split (a) into two parts because I have two completely independent arguments: What does this mean? Surely if it was intended to mean "in flight", they would have just said that instead. Is an aircraft in a nosedive straight toward the ground "en route" by any meaningful sense of the phrase? By any legal definition? I haven't seen any argument for this beyond you can clearly tell by the way it is and you're an idiot for even asking. Maybe this platform can do better than Facebook and Reddit. I've not been able to find an applicable definition for "required flight crewmember" nor have I seen an argument that the number of required flight crewmembers can't ever be zero for any flight. (Again, beyond the usual you can clearly tell by the way it is and you're an idiot for even asking). I had the pleasure of being called naive and stupid by Paul Bertorelli on Facebook for posing these arguments, so that's cool. Of course, he made no actual attempt to refute them. He claimed he did later and I had to remind him no Paul, all you did was call me naive and stupid. I think he may be getting senile. Let's talk about the spirit of 91.105 in the context of the rest of the FARs I think this audience understands perfectly well that you can (for example) drop a car from an airplane without breaking any FARs, without any exemptions, and without any "permission" from the FAA. The only thing that makes this stunt special is the fact that the object happens to be an airplane which brings in 91.105. From a safety perspective, this does make sense: a car will more or less fall straight down, while an airplane could glide off into the sunset and crash into who knows what. But, that can be mitigated pretty easily. First, they designed the aerodynamics and autopilot to keep the plane travelling straight down. But, obviously that's pretty complicated and even though they tested it many times with a safety pilot, something unexpected could happen. So, as a failsafe they added the BRS. But the BRS failed--clearly they had no idea what they were doing! Everyone seems to be assuming that the BRS was intended to save the airframe and I think that's really silly. First, if you look at BRS on production aircraft, they are generally not intended to save the airframe, they are meant to save people. The Cirrus for example, which seems to be entirely designed and marketed around the BRS, is not expected to be reusable after a deployment. Now you look at this one-off experimental 182 with a giant airbrake hanging off the belly and you somehow imagine that the BRS was put there to save the airframe? This requires a bit of inference and speculation on my part, but to me it's pretty obvious that the real reason for the BRS was that in the event something went so wrong that the empty aircraft entered some sort of stable flight regime that threatened to take it outside the safe zone, they could remotely deploy the BRS which would very reliably turn it back into a falling object. This mitigation essentially makes the stunt no more dangerous to nonparticipants than dropping an object, therefore the exemption to 91.105 should have been granted. Period. Yes, lots of other precautions needed to be taken for this to be done safely and legally, just like dropping a car. These are covered by other FARs that were not part of the exemption request. The FAA's job here was not to analyze the stunt as a whole and give a red or green light. IMO the FAA denied the request simply because they wanted to so they made up a reason. There's nothing Luke could have done to change that outcome. People handwringing about this being a bad look for the USPA are being overly dramatic. This is an ultra-partime unpaid elected position on the board of a parachute club and I think the FAA is smart enough to be able to tell when he's representing us and when he isn't. If you're more worried about this than the Noonan incident, I think you're crazy.

That's right, I'm an MD and a pilot and a FAA medical certificate holder and I'm disagreeing with you on the internet. Could it be that these qualifications grant me some insight into this situation about medicine, medical privacy, and FAA medical certificates? No, I must just be stupid. You apparently know better. What was that about being purposefully myopic in order to be argumentative? My dude... I don't mean to beat a dead horse and I think the reference wolfriverjoe provided should set you straight, but as a medical doctor and engineer with a medical device startup who got said device through FDA clearance and working with health data, this kinda hurts. I can assure you I am quite well versed in HIPAA. If you don't believe me, I don't know what else to say. Spot. On. 100%. USPA has authority to revoke a TI rating for any number of reasons and this is not controversial. USPA has no authority to declare an FAA medical invalid, and this is the topic under discussion. Not that getting it "right" would excuse USPA's alleged actions here, but from the narrative presented it sounds like they got it wrong, the TI is not taking the drug in question, and his medical is in fact valid.

No, the validity of the FAA medical is between the medical holder and the FAA. USPA has no say in it and has no obligation or authority to "look into" anything medical. Really, where are you getting this from? Certainly not a USPA policy? USPA policy is to let the FAA handle it--that's exactly what it means to require an FAA medical. I guess legally (though completely shitty) the USPA could try to tattle on the TI to the FAA and try to convince them to invalidate the medical, but that's all they can do. They have zero legal authority to declare it invalid themselves, zero ability to gain access to the health record to investigate, and zero expertise to interpret any of it anyway. This is completely irresponsible and shameful and if it really happened I want to know who and how.

I don’t understand what you mean by this. Could you please elaborate?

To be clear, I don’t think USPA is violating any laws here. Only internal policies and societal taboo. e: funny you should mention pot. Every TI that uses marijuana on his own time has an invalid medical. Simply not true. HIPAA does not apply to USPA in any way shape or form, regardless of any data they may have.

HIPAA is often misunderstood and I think a violation anywhere in this scenario is unlikely. It would be completely impossible for USPA to violate HIPAA (as it doesn't apply to them) if that's what you're thinking. Thanks

By format I mean the core mechanics of the platform, not the styling. There's no reason a forum couldn't be designed to work as well on mobile as any other platform.

I am fully willing to raise hell with the USPA over this, but I'd like to be more confident first that the key facts are correct: USPA obtained health information of a member USPA retained this health information for consideration USPA used this health information in an action against the member Do I have this right? Can you please provide corroborating details or evidence? Direct message is fine. Especially helpful would be identity of the TI and actual copies of any communications between him and USPA regarding this issue. How did you personally hear of this story?

USPA looking at health information of its members is incredibly disturbing and inappropriate, regardless of anything else that might be going on.

You've missed my entire point (my fault, I thought it was obvious enough to be made implicitly): Health information is confidential/private and protected in a special way that no other information is, and it's a cultural taboo for USPA to be concerning itself with it. If USPA has some policy or procedure to review health information of its members, that needs to stop *immediately*. USPA policy should be that if it stumbles upon any health information accidently, it should do its best to forget. Edit: I'm going to add some context here. As a medical doctor, USPA member, and FAA medical certificate holder who was recently diagnosed with cancer, I find this incredibly disturbing.

I really like the forum format and I think it's a real shame it's gone out of style. Still, I wouldn't mind being on a Discord, too.

That isn't relevant. An FAA medical is an entirely FAA process that the USPA doesn't suddenly get invited to depending what activities that applicant intends to do with it. As far as the USPA is concerned, he either has one or he doesn't, and they can learn that status by asking the FAA. For them to be poking around in his health information is incredibly inappropriate and a very bad look.

"No results found. Try searching for something else"

IMO USPA has or should have zero authority to police that potential issue. If FAA enforcement of it's medical policies is lacking, that doesn't somehow make it appropriate for USPA to step in. USPA shouldn't even know about the TI's medical issues or medications, it's quite explicitly none of their business.

I'm not sure what we're disagreeing on. (1) We are over the peak nationally so deaths on average are going down everywhere and (2) I'm not going to dispute what you say is happening in your local area, I just don't understand the significance you're placing on it. Some places are going to be hit worse than average and some are going to have it better. Those that have it better for one peak may have it worse for another. It doesn't necessarily mean anything. The national death numbers are what they are, unless you mean to implicitly dispute them in which case I'd ask you to use your words.

What are you talking about? Nobody is disputing that the case fatality rate is much lower, but where are you going with that? Total number of severe cases/deaths (and therefore need for ventilators) is comparable with previous waves.

Compared with what?

No shit...