gjhdiver

No they don't. They take stock parts built by other companies and bolt them together. Occaisionally they get contracted to build "theme" bikes, which are the same bikes that they make anyway, with a lot of crap welded or bolted to them. They are so many good innovative builders out there. OCC ain't one of them. Of course, if you want an expensive conversation piece, go for it I'll build you one like theirs for parts. It'll cost you about half what theirs would. There will be some beer involved too.

If you give me the size of the Wings main container, I'll tell you if it will also hold a 170. Then it would be a good deal to pick up and jump with a 170 in until you're ready for the transition. Some of our containers that are built for 150's will hold a 170 at a pinch.

I waited right up to the point I managed to convince a girl to have sex with me. I'm patient like that.

Check out the new Wings Vision at http://www.skydivewings.com

Lori was my chief instructor at Skydive City Z Hills when I was the manager there. She was a consumate aviator, the first woman to hold all three tandem ratings for Strong, Vector, and Racer. She was a ruthless AFF evaluator, and a phenomenal pilot, and one of the first to be inducted into the Smithsonian for her achievments as a female pilot. She was the biggest workaholic I ever met. Not only was she working as a pilot, but since leaving skydiving, she qualified as a special ed teacher, got her masters, learned Spanish, and moved back to Kansas to take care of her 90 year old father. I was proud to call her a personal friend. We emailed regularly and always met up when she came by the Bay Area here. I was going to email her this week to see what she was up to. Her exploits across the world always made for great reading. I hope they find her, or at least what happened to her. Her father deserves to know what happened to her. There's a lot of jumpers out there today who were taught by Lori, and a lot who managed to wrestle an AFF rating out of her. They'll alll hopefully be sparing a thought for her and the part she played in where they are today in the sport. Blue skies Lori, I'll miss you.....

I got an email from Argus today. They have the unit at the facility and are testing it to replicate the failiure. Right now, signs point to a harware failiure, but they haven't finished testing yet. They will release the full findings when they have all the information to make a definitive statement on the misfire.

What's pink, twelve inches long, and can make a woman scream all night ? Sudden Infant Death Syndrome.

Best bit of all. The song that plays over the closing credits. Jarvis Cocker singing "Cunts are still running the world". A perfect sentiment expressed in three minutes.

A lot of the time when I'm booked for an event, I'm told what level I am going to be working with. It's not always up to me, but to the club or business that is paying me to be there. If I'm booked to do large ways with experienced jumpers, I'll try to work with a lower experienced group also if that's acceptable to the boogie organizers. At Hercules Boogies for example, the largest amount of organizers are allocated to the lowest experienced jumpers, as they are often not able to complete the larger dives. There's a common misconception that the LO is provided as a target for inexperienced jumpers as part of the boogie fee. If you don't have the skills to be on the type of dive that the guest LO is doing, just work on your skills until you do, and you'll get your chance. Everyone's been there, including me. Once you clear that bar, you'll understand. Most pf the people I jump with on large ways are instructors and coaches, people who work all year round at drop zones creating new jumpers. They get to have time off and play too you know

Sometimes I'm so proud i could burst. http://www.sundaymail.co.uk/news/tm_headline=accused---of-having-sex-with-his-bike%26method=full%26objectid=19347288%26siteid=64736-name_page.html

Well, I cut mine down. not off. I literally halved it's length. The trick with the colored lines was like you said. You placed them in the wrap at the colored intervals that matched the color of the lines. However, the last set in were blue, and they all had to go in the wrap except just one. The blue line with the wrap opener on it ! If you put that in the wrap too, it wouldn't unwind and you got a streamer. Also fun was the fact that if you overcontrolled it, and a steering flap got flipped under, you had to cross control it all the way to the ground. I sold mine to David Layne at Skydive Mobile some years back. I saw the container on eBay a year or so back, so he may still have it there somewhere. I kept the Dac because I can throw it in a sport rig. It's a way to give newer jumpers an idea of what people used to go through to jump on weekends without having to strap them into a rig with pins and cones, capewells, and a nice Talisman reserve on the back of the head.

It's going to be a US version of his British show of the same name. Get the British one, or watch it on BBC America. It's being repeated now. Part of the reason Gordon Ramsay seems so shocking in the US is that most Americans aren't aware of the cultural idioms someome like him embodies. It's much different to see him doing the same thing in front of British people, who get him on a much different level, and for whom he isn't so much scary, as just someone that isn't going to be pushed around and settle for second best. There's quite a few touching moments in Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares (the BBC version). His concern for the health and emotional well being of the people he's dealing with is very touching, even when he's looking them in the eye and dropping the C bomb like punctuation marks. He really really wants them to succeed, and he'll drive them to do it.

It's not just him. Working in a top flight kitchen is a very similar environment. It goes with the job culture in many respects.

He did. The guy's name is Marco Pierre White, the original enfant terrible of the culinary arts. He makes Gordon Ramsay seem like Ghandi in comparicon for temper and naked agression. He also trained under Marcel Roux, the owner of La Gavroche, the first guy to get a Michelin star in the UK, and not known for his bedside manner either. Basically, Ramsay is just driven to exel. He's one of those people that just cannot accept anything sub par being produced under his supervision. His passion gets the better of him of course, which is why he makes for such good television. Before he was this famous, they put cameras in his kitchen at his first restaurant, Ramsay's in Chelsea, London. Those two series, Ramsay's Boiling Point are the best look at the man in his own kitchen with his own staff during a time when it was make or break for him. If you think he's bad on Hell's Kitchen, get those on DVD. He's literally incandescant with rage 99% of the time.

I just hang them in front of a fan for a minute and call it done.....

I had the OSI on my Delta II, but I cut it down, as all sane people did eventually. I found someone to sell me a Volplane too, until he realized I was actually going to jump it, not put it in a museum. Then he bailed on me. I'm still looking for a Barish Sailwing or a Vortex Ring canopy.

I's probably me getting confused then. I'll drag it out today and look at it. It's got it stamped on the data panel. It's probably TSO23b then. It's been a while since I read it.

The sq ft of it is about 249 I think, and the suspended weight was about 170 for the jump int he video. MIne is a ater one. It was manufactured in 1980 by Advanced Air, which I believe was Jim Handury's company.

Indeed. I nearly crapped myself. The manual says to do that real high up. I don't even attempt to flare it on the toggles. I just grab the rear risers and push them out and down at the same time for a landing. I pack it just like the pictures in the manual, but I bought it 15 years ago to save it from becoming a car cover and put it back into service. Since that day, I've never seen another or met anyone else who's jumped one, so I've been kind of making it all up as I go along. I'm sure there's all sorts of ways to fly it that I haven't worked out yet. We did it oout on the low cloud days at Byron as you saw from the video. I took it to terminal once and the damn thing nearly broke me.

Wing loading on that jump was about 0.7 I'd say. It can land quite well at that loading as you saw. I have to PLF it if my fat 190 pound ass jumps it, though I have stood it up before. The Paradactyl does indeed carry a TSO23c certification as a reserve, and mine was originally used for that, as it has no nose slider, and why you really don't want to take it over about a 10 second delay. I know, reserve and Paradactyl shouldn't really appear in the same sentence, rather like teeth and penis.

It would be nice to see a few more out here, but as far as I know, I'm the only one who's got one in the area. I got rid of my Delta II parawing a few years back. If I had kept it, I might have considered jumping the thing again, and no good could have come from that

Here's what we do at Byron in the rain. My old reserve Paradactyl being jumped as a main by Tim Mattson. Byron's now probably the only drop zone where you can see one of these flying regularly. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZbTQr7KcHwE

Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read.

An incorrect assumption. Swooping is a small niche market. Factories maintain swooping teams for the same reason that motor companies maintain F1 teams. It's for visibility and name recognition. As you correctly state, the main market is in more docile canopies. If the companies had to rely on sales of high performance cross braced canopies to survive, they's all be out of business tomorrow. Swooping may fun and cool to watch, but it's essentially a dead end as far as high volume sales go, and it's usually at best a break even proposition for drop zones. Therefore, it only takes one or two doofuses to mess it up before a DZO will decide thart it's not worth the risk to continue to allow it. At Byron, we have now set aside a separate area for swoopers. If you want to do 270 aproaches or greater, you get to land elsewhere. We have the real estate to do that, a lot of drop zones don't.

Swooping is not a crime - correct. It's not a right either. The DZO has no obligation to lose money on low passes, and risk the extra liability to their business and income from potentially reckless behavior. Some DZ's have a separate area for swoopers. If this is the case, there's no problem. If swoopers have to mingle with other traffic, then they don't get to do 270's. Despite the rhetoric, this isn't exactly on a par with Rosa Parks sitting up front on the bus. Just expect not to be able to do a 270 on every load if you didn't get out on your own low. Lastly, get over yourselves. The average whuffo seems way more impressed by nice soft stand up landings than by aggresive swooping. It's not really attracting new jumpers into the sport, rather just giving them an option once they've been in it for a while.