lurch

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mythology Reality. A harsh place, its not for everyone. Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

To each their own, up until their choices start seriously endangering others in the sky with them. Be as reckless as you want, it's your carcass and its a free sky, but understand that when you do stuff you don't necessarily know much about such as megasuits, you may be endangering the shit out of everybody and totally unaware of it. I'm exactly your weight and build and fly a suit of similar but somewhat lesser scale... S-Bird. So I know the issues you'll have backwards and forwards and aside from the fact that guys built like us really have no need for suits that big anyway, one thing really screams out at me. Its a combo of 3 things that explains your problems. 1: asking about full flight. I'd bet you're already habitually pitching if not FULL full flight, certainly with wings at least partially open. 1.5: That megasuit is going to make things much, much worse than they were already. It is a good idea to try scrunching for a couple seconds -before- the pitch so you slow down forward and speed up downward. Consider it pre-priming for the pull. If you give it a solid 5 seconds, it will solidly eliminate hesitations, but that solution is a bit clunky used alone. As part of a technique for managing deployments though in conjunction with the right gear it helps a lot. 2 to 3 seconds is usually sufficient. 2: Your G4. I assume you mean the popular Mirage. Its a great rig, no doubt, but its designed heavily for general purpose jumping and specifically freeflying. Tight bridle protection, rounded corners, tightly wrapped and shaped main container box. That main container, unmodified, especially combined with full flight deployments is very likely to have such a good grip on the Dbag that the pilot chute has to tug and wiggle at it for some time before it pops out. Bridle pulls pin, container opens and reveals the Dbag, PC hits end of bridle, and the bag just sits there not-launching being held in place by nothing except a nice tight fit and fabric friction because the PC is barely strong enough to lift the thing in a burble. I've watched exactly that happen a zillion times in midair but most of the time its brief enough the pilot doesn't even know it happened. I watched it happen to Phil Peggs who has so much experience and was so used to it that he casually reached back grabbed some bridle and chucked the Dbag by hand without missing a beat or even wobbling in flight. It was an amazingly impressive demonstration of being not-flustered by such an event, but after we landed I was like "Uh, bro, that was awesome, but you REALLY gotta do something about that deployment setup..." That right there may be the source of all your hesitations. Look up the "cut corners" mod. It just opens up the stitching on the bottom edges of the container and allows the bottom of the container to flop open like a truck tailgate instead of remaining box shaped where it can grab and flip or tumble the bag as its being dragged out and over the "windowsill" of the rig. It also causes the rig to let go of any grip on the bag it may have had. I don't have the cut corners mod because I jump a somewhat floppy old non-freefly Javelin that doesn't even have a bridle pocket. A lot of wingsuiters can and will get away with a G4 unmodified because with smaller wings higher fallrates and heavier birds tending to do more straight-down deployments, its effect is trivial. But with a light bird in a huge suit at low fallrates pitching without a shutdown and without changing direction to straight-down fall, that rigid rig box is gonna fuck you up bigtime. A rigger can do this in a half hour or less. Cut your corners and watch what happens to your hesitations. And 3: your NO mods... see above. For the combo you're using you need at least 8 foot bridle, 24 to 28 inch PC and preferably a ten-footer. And at that, it will still hesitate UNLESS you use proper deployment technique and scrunch like a mother. My daily driver setup is a 26 incher on an 8.5 footer and it would hesitate or just plain tow every time if I didn't pitch, and then get as small and skinny as humanly possible, twiddling just the tail with my toes for steering, body position and canopy control as detailed above. When you have problems like this you must systematically identify all possible causes and then work your way through them one at a time till you've eliminated the phenomenon and this is how. Hesitations are one of the easier phenomena to beat because we know all the wingsuit-related causes, and we already have gear and techniques to address them. Start by cutting on that hardbox rig of yours and back it up with an appropriate PC and bridle combo plus a decent scrunch both before and after you pitch and your hesitations will disappear. Count on it. Oh... and the cut rig mod will also get rid of or at least cut down on those pesky random line twists you will have been getting from time to time that you couldn't explain. A wingsuit-tuned packjob and good body position will eliminate the rest. I haven't had more than a single 180 half-twist in over 1000 jumps. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Ideal configuration is, reconsidering the wisdom of attempting full flight deployments if you're still new enough at the physics to be thinking a student cypres might be a good idea or asking questions like this one. On a more practical note, the gear package best suited for that particular act is the same as the well known typical wingsuit mods in use for the last decade: 10 foot bridle, increased pilot chute size of pilot's choice, and the cut corners rig mod if rearward bag extraction tends to be an issue for you. Without trying to be a dick here, if you have to ask this question, if the most basic of wingsuit knowledge such as the three mods above and what they are good for and why are unknown to you, what the heck are you doing flying the biggest production suit on the market? After I mastered fullflight pitching I quit doing it. It pointlessly maximized the hazards of deployment in exchange for looking cool which nobody could see since I'm often the last to deploy anyway. There is really no other benefit to it in a skydiving environment. It just jacks your odds of a hesitation. I'd be the last guy to scold somebody for asking questions on the net, thats what this place is for and its where a lot of us learn stuff like this including me. But the nature of the questions you are asking and what they say about how thoroughly you did -not- do your homework before scoring the biggest suit money can buy raise concerns. Reminds me of the stereotypical guy with 150 jumps who just bought a sub-70 VX and shows up on the canopy forum asking how to swoop it or what exactly do I do with the front risers anyway? You're catching flak for your questions because with an X2 you're expected to have known this stuff already. How many flights you got anyway? Again, by the time you reached an X2 you should have had multiple hundreds of flights in which to have done experimentation with different PCs and bridles and worked out a package that suited you. I'd suggest playing around with learning how to fly the deployment in not-full flight. There is an amazing depth of knowledge and technique available to learn about using the wingsuit's tail to control the canopy during openings. Some prefer to use the arms but for me the tail is the way to go, with a little arm if needed. Play around with THAT long enough and you get a giggle as you easily defeat and tame a canopy trying to twist up by commanding it through subtle tail inputs. That big ol' 7 cell of yours will be slow to respond but you can still learn to boss the thing all over the sky any way you want without so much as touching a riser. Much more useful skillset than full flight deployments, and then you won't need that big canopy to protect you from bad body position.

"Art Student pfft" Thats what I was thinking. Coddled. Ivory tower entitlement baby. I'd say the kid ought to voluntarily take a year off, grab some tools and jump into the ring, get some experience in the harsh and gritty Mosh Pit of Life. But as an art student he'd probably call it a "sabbatical" or something and it wouldn't help cause he'll believe he can bail back to Mommy's purse strings whenever he feels like it or the going gets rough. If its just a simulation and he knows it, it ain't gonna help. If he believes its ok to wuss out, he will. Damn glad I was NOT a trust fund kid. You don't learn squat when all your needs are provided for you. If he doesn't learn the law of the jungle now, he will later and its gonna hurt a whole lot more because he'll be under the illusion that the art degree was supposed to make sure that can't happen. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Guppie: Just a thought... if this kids not gonna get off ass you could do what my dad did when I cut loose. He equipped me with $2000 in postdated checks, set for $100 a week to guarantee my survival for the first six months, the postdating serving to protect me from any impulse bad judgement such as a possible choice to cash in half of it at once to buy some toy. Other than that, anything I want, toys clothes phone, car, basic survival beyond eating, I had to work for. When I was trying to save up a few hundred bucks on minimum wage, 4.25$/hr at the time, my brother thought I was being stupid and I should have defeated my dad's safety mechanism by selling the checks at a pawnshop or something to get my hands on the cash all at once, and use it to buy the car I couldn't really afford. I decided my brother could go on thinking I was stupid cause my dad had gone to the trouble to create that safety net and I'll be damned if I was gonna disrespect his judgement by deliberately defeating that net and pissing it away. What if the car breaks? Even if I'd cashed in everything I had left, $1400 still doesn't buy you much of a car. Then I'll have no car AND no money. I let the car I really wanted to buy go, bought one within my means, and made that safety net last the full term it was intended to, kept me eating when I was in between jobs while my brother was spending the rent and food money on a nice new Pioneer head unit for the car he'd bought that was fated to last less than 6 months anyway. So if the kid keeps copping an attitude, tell em "If you think -we're- being hard on you, try the world. There's the door, heres some cash so you don't starve, its all you get so make it last, piss it away and you get to choose from a fine selection of dumpsters to sleep in. Have fun." And see if the kid mans up. It worked for me. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Yo Twardo... Right on. You remind me of my dad. Reading about this 19yo I'm shaking my head like "man. I thought -I- was messed up then." At 19 I'd been out of the house for over a year already, was on my third job, (carny) had bought and replaced 2 crappy 300$ cars and was acquiring my 3rd car which lasted me a decade and made me a serious mechanic. By 19 I'd been on my own a year already. Won't say I was doing "fine", but ya gotta start somewhere. My dad managed to communicate that he was willing to be last ditch emergency safety net and if I'm in trouble don't hesitate to call, but this ain't reality TV and you're on your own kid. I decided that really meant I HAD no safety net and acted accordingly just because I figured I wasn't gonna make my dad come rescue my cocky ass from anything unless I really took on something too big and was about to get eaten. A couple times I hit the edge... just about out of options, cash and resources... once, called my dad from some pay phone, depressed, discouraged, few bucks left, car disintegrating around me in the middle of the wastelands in Wyoming. Told my dad I think I chose badly there was a good chance in the next 12 hours I was gonna be sitting by the side of the highway in an immobilized wreck with a stripped out drivetrain, out of parts, cash, gas, options, everything. Cause I was down to my last couple hundred bucks and the hardware was not gonna survive another 2,500 miles of this. The best dads let you fly, PUSH you to fly... and let you know they're still waiting to catch you if you fall. Mine did. Told me if you don't make it, I'm here, gimme a call and you'll have backup.

Skwrl, I don't know if even Chuck Blue could manage to do that twice in a row. The man took the thread down with a single one-liner and I wasn't able to breathe normally for a half hour after reading it. On the other hand, never underestimate him. For all I know he has a massive stock of those somewhere. [Paging Chuck Blue, Chuck Blue to the PD Pulse thread please? Thank you.] Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

We could say the same to you, after that rather nasty and inaccurate dig at brother Spot. For starters, he's a lot more durable than you're giving him credit for. If he'd actually broken in half, there'd be two much smaller Spots kicking around and sister, we don't know what to do with just one of him. Second, you got any particular reason for being that vicious and rude? That was totally out of line and uncalled-for. In our community it is customary to show a certain professional respect for one's fellow birds even if one does not like them. There are a few members of our community I don't particularly hold in high regard myself, but you'd never know it because I am polite to them anyway. Because I know to show that certain respect. They are my fellow wingsuit pilots, they have earned it. They may need me to save their lives in a hurry someday and I, them. You might want to think about that for a minute. If you're ever injured in the sport I sincerely hope nobody decides to dig it up and use it to take cheap shots at you as you've done here. Since you seem unfamiliar with the concepts of basic respect and decent manners, perhaps you'll learn them by example when they have been demonstrated to you. Have a nice day. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

I'm not talking postapocalyptic anything here, that kind of thing is for religious lunatic fringe. Ask Chuteless about that if he hasn't yet levitated to go see jebus. I'm talking about whatever society is actually going to exist between one and, say, three to four thousand years from now. Or do you really think we're still going to have a Pentagon, an NRC, drive through mickeys, fifty states and roadside attractions in 2k years? Because safe responsible management of the nuke sites in question is largely dependent on the ongoing existence of the political and social systems that created them. And those systems are historically notoriously short-lived. Few hundred years at best. 'Nother words, for as long as this piece of the world is recognizable as the good ol fashioned US of A we all know, fine. But human societies are not built to last... and the shit we make as nuke waste IS. The longest running continuous cultural and historical record would be, what, the Chinese, at like 6000 years? And for how many of those years would they have been fit to guard a nuke site? Make the period in question 8500 years and consider: Not only has no human society come close to lasting that long, we have every reason to believe our current one won't last in its present form any longer than the oil does. Ours is by orders of magnitude more energy intensive than anything before, and is burning through its easily available resources as if we didn't expect there to BE a planet in a hundred years. When our hyped-up mass consumer culture and American Way have burned out and gone, theres still likely to be somebody living here and they're going to have to deal with it, probably in ignorance. The state of advancement that has existed on this continent for roughly the last 100 years in particular is historically a fluke, a big bright flash of expansion and progress, but the default natural ground-state of typical human societies through history has been 99% ignorant chumps working their entire short lives to grow enough food to live and support whatever parasitic government is currently taxing them. After the Romans' expansion ran out of gas roughly at Hadrians wall and the empire withdrew and collapsed, the Brits largely reverted back to the way they'd been before. All the mighty shit the Romans made became pretty background ruins for a sheepherding society that didn't have Senates and Forums and whatnot. Take Stonehenge... max of about 6500 years, not only has it barely survived to the present day, how long has it been since the last human died who actually knew what it was for? Our nuke waste is our Stonehenge. And "soon", real soon, by nuke waste lifetime standards, there will be nobody left who knows what that shit is, how it got there, or why. Civilizations wash back and forth across this planet like a tide and when they pull back and fall apart, whatever got left behind gets neglected. And in 8500 years all that shit, or most of it, will still be cranking out enough radiation the casks will probably still be warm. I'm saying the only halfway responsible thing we could possibly do is make the stuff go away for good, i.e. dropping it down the hole... and we ain't gonna. Some of that shit will still be dangerous in 100,000 years. Some of it for many times longer than THAT. And we're just gonna leave it lying around on the surface. Tsk, tsk. We are SUCH a messy culture... -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Hmmm, dunno if I buy some of this... "Cause it doesn't need to be deeper. Even surface storage is reasonably safe." Tell that to the egyptians. How many of their eternal tombs made it to the current era unlooted? Take Tut for example. He made it to within a hundred years or so of us, and nobody had a clue what was inside his box. If he'd been buried with some egyptian-era nuclear waste and found by people who didn't have geiger counters, his discovery would have gone down in history as the deadliest nastiest treasure ever found. Imagine how far the damage would go in a postindustrial society that has forgotten things like electricity and reverted to pastoralism, say, Great Britain around the arrival of the Romans. How long it would take such a society to figure out that even being near artifacts from that tomb can kill you? "Keep in mind that the waste from the Oklo reactors hasn't moved much in 2 billion years " Bill you just proved my point for me. Sure it has... very recently as such things go... we just dug it up, didn't we? I argue same things gonna happen to our nuke waste. Except our junk will be much easier to find much sooner because instead of being a hidden natural reactor stumbled on by mining mineral analysis, all through history people have a habit of deconstructing all human artifacts as soon as everyone has forgotten what they were for. And our society is going to leave behind some really big, fascinating ruins for our successors to poke around in and wonder about. Somebody in 4,726 years is really gonna wanna know what the hell we were doing in those huge tunnels in the mountains of Nevada in the middle of an otherwise useless wasteland and since the default human assumption is that we wouldn't bother making such facilities unless we were stashing some kind of valuable treasure for the ages, they're gonna dig until they find it. Its a valuable treasure, all right, just not one they'd have any use for or comprehension of. I say inside of a thousand years, our descendants are going to be really, really pissed at us for the stuff we left lying around the landscape for them to find. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Question: Why always half steps? Yucca mtn for example. Why so shallow? A nearly surface-level tunnel storage facility in a mountain strikes me as hardly effective at actually sequestering the stuff for the geological ages required. We already know its a fairly simple matter (relatively speaking, for a major drilling concern or oil industry) to drill one bigass hole miles deep. The russians took like 20 years to drill a 40,000 foot hole, then Exxon did it in 60 days, motivated by oil. Why do they not simply drill a line of holes about 30,000, 40,000 feet deep and just drop the shit down the holes? I get the idea Yucca is intended to allow monitoring of the stuff, but this makes no sense to me. Why bother to monitor it when we know damn well no human institutions last more than a handful of years. The stuff has to be well and truly inaccessibly secured for hundreds of thousands of years. The whole idea of a so-called "deep repository" thats actually so shallow they take tour groups through strikes me as just fucking stupid. If I look to things like pyramids and ancient tombs for examples, the contents of Yucca would be "secure" for maybe a few hundred to a thousand years and will be thoroughly dug up and scattered about by whatever society exists by then when our government and nuclear management institutions are long gone to dust. If they're lucky some scholar specializing in ancient history, 20th century languages and early industrial ruins might recognize a radiation symbol as "Hey guys, I think that symbol they etched in the stone means the ancients stored something really, really nasty in there..." If its accessible, it will be dug up within a few thousand years at most. If its dropped down an 8 mile deep hole 1/3 of the way through the crust and the hole filled in with 7 miles of dirt, far below water tables, the ecosystem, everything... that stuff ain't coming up... ever. Whats down there has been down there for 2.5 billion years and showed no signs of coming up on its own if we hadn't drilled holes there to see. If they're worried about something forcing it to the surface, fill the entire hole with concrete. Surely a 7 mile plug of concrete is enough to effectively restore the integrity of the basement rocks after the hole is made. Sure seems a safe bet to me. Really, the only safe bet. So why don't they do it? -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Seriously I'll put up some stuff when I get enough of it assembled that it looks like more than a not-entirely-disorganized pile of fabric. I'm using the first one as a chassis to build the second, when enough of model 2 is present I'll start deleting everything I don't need. Which, I'll include as a hint, includes some rather startling parts of the customary wingsuit flying package you wouldn't think you could do without. Major parts.

Ok... Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Just when you thought it couldn't get any harder... Coming soon: The return of the industrial grade wingsuit. Hardcase 2.0 Harder Than Ever. If you thought the first one was a little strange, you ain't seen nothin' yet. Construction begins February 2012 Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Shouldn't take much, if anything. First I'm just going to have a good look at what I get. Tony revises his suits so often he may have implemented a better solution by now in production suits. The ones I've seen being flown in skydiving use so far just had various ties and bindings to keep the handles from pulling out. Anyway I figure, it was intended as a BASE design, and any skydivers using it are accepting the risk of off-label use of a design like that. If I still think its sketchy when I get it, I have a simple mod in mind... not sure I can do it till I get a closer look at it, but it looked doable. Just a couple of slits above and below the handle, a little velcro to close the big slit behind the lift web. That'd put just the relevant 6 inches of lift web plus handle outside the suit entirely and leave the rest of it alone, pretty much eliminate any chance of handle suck or suit induced pull I think. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Hah! I just ordered an Apache also for just one purpose, competition dragster. I'll load it so lightly it'd be good for nothing else anyway, but it ain't gonna feel mushy, the speeds I'll be hammering it at. The poor suit is going to feel confused... "You bought the biggest most advanced suit you could get, and you're gonna use me for...freeflying?" Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Ok counting myself and one other that came before I heard rumors about, that makes 3 Lurchs I've heard of. How the heck did this happen? I got mine from old Charlie Burgess at Pepperell. When I first started as a student I was what I suppose you could call a leftover Goth kid before there even WERE goth kids. Screw the makeup, piercings and fishnets those modern posers display- I dressed all in black, wore shredded leather, black jeans and shirts and carried more razor blades knives tools and junk in my pockets than most people have in their cars. Plus I wasn't exactly social, I get the impression most people thought I was too scary to even speak to. So one of my instructors called me Lurch and it stuck. Anyway after a couple years of jumping and associating with other jumpers, the influence of the community sort of rubbed off on me. Its hard to stay permanently depressed when you're part of a community of clowns dressed in bright colors. So one day I decided I was sick of looking like a funeral being held in a garage so I went and got a nice bright blue tie dye shirt and nobody recognized me for a half hour. Tom Noonan finally did and said "Whoa! Its Lurch Lite, all the gloom, half the calories! Haven't laughed that hard in ages. Now I have a vast collection of extremely bright tie-dye courtesy of Bethy, who is just plain awesome. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Yo. Just got word from JC. Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

I'm a bit of an S-bird performance freak. Weight: 135 lb. Height: 5 foot 10. Current max: 13,200-2400, 4:00. Pulled 76 seconds for 1k in competition, but the suit won't sustain speeds like that, though. That was a carefully calculated energy buildup and burnoff timed to burn out when my altitude and arms did. Shortly after exiting the comp window I would have stalled out and dropped like a rock if I didn't put my head down. Suit's got its limits. Tell me your height, weight, current max time including exit and opening altitudes and approximate wingsuit jump numbers so I can get a feel for how deep -your- feel for it is going to be. When I know your height and weight I'll know exactly what your theoretical limits are in that suit and can tell you how to reach them. A little detail about the techniques you're currently using wouldn't hurt either. There are some very subtle tricks built into that suit that can get you another 20-30 seconds, no kidding. Maybe more, maybe a LOT more. But you're going to need to put in some serious zen wingsuit understanding to get it. Most pilots don't. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Skydive Pepperell. There's a property just across the river no more than a couple hundred feet off the DZ with a small private oval horse track as its main feature. Nothing else there but trees and nowhere else to go. Thermals off the runway combine with the typical prevailing winds there and lightly loaded student canopies means students and newbs have a strong tendency to get stuck downwind if they're dumb enough to go downwind in the first place. Unable to break through the thermal wall or get penetration across the river, they wind up in the horse track. Even with a 135 at 1.2 I've learned to stay very wary of that area. My first canopy off student status was a worn out PD 210 loaded at about .75 which was great for annoying the hell out of everybody because when I figured out the thermal off the runway I'd go hang out on it for 5 minutes after everyone else had landed. People on the ground going "Dammit Lurch will you quit that and get down here, we wanna put up another load!" I'd be happily surfing up and down the runway at 1200 feet sometimes gaining as much as 50 feet in any given pass. I coulda kept it up all day, till I slipped off the downwind side of the thermal and couldn't get back on it. Old jumpers had warned me about the Horse Lady, said there might have been some bad blood from some kind of shenanigans that may or may not have gone on about 30 years prior involving what may or may not have been a Cessna, an empty 6 pack of Corona, spotting practice, and a roof. This is after the lady bought the property, next to an airport, and then proceeded to try to shut it down whining about the noise. But last I'd heard rumor had it the Horse Lady was dead, and in any case, I figured out I was hosed and like it or not I was gonna have my first off field landing same as everyone else does, in the horse track. Made my decision, busted out the landing, stood it up in the brambly stuff, feeling very proud of myself. Plane flies over, aerial recon checking on me. I wave, I'm fine. Theres a house on the property. I'm hiking across the track heading for where I think the driveway is just around the corner of some trees, and the door opens. Hell hath no fury... I don't even remember what she looked like. Impression was Morgan LeFay. From maybe 150 feet away she begins to SHRIEK... not just shouting or yelling but the ragged, cheese-grater on the eardrums cracked shriek of someone having a full-on psychotic emotional meltdown: "GET OUT!!!! (points at driveway) THATS THE WAY OUT! NO!!! SHUT...UP!!! DO NOT OPEN YOUR MOUTH!!! DO NOT OPEN YOUR MOUTH!!! SHUT UP!! I'M CALLING THE COPS!!! GET OUT! SHUT UP!!! I'm standing there stunned, which quickly turned to anger, then defiance, followed by awareness that as a skydiver my behavior reflects on all of us. So I can't be as much of a dick as I'd like to, but I can NOT let this go unchallenged. I waited patiently till she ran out of breath and was forced to take a pause in her repeated shrieks about not opening my mouth. I then tipped my borrowed student Pro-Tec to her like a proper gentleman and shouted back politely in a jaunty happy tone, "Thank you, have a nice day!" I then sauntered out of sight along her driveway, taking all the time in the world, acting like I owned the place with a lot of body language, all strut and swagger. The second I was out of sight of the house itself, I RAN. Reached the end of the driveway just as my pickup car arrived. I piled in in a hurry like "Lets get the fuck out of here!" The next time I landed there maybe sometime in the next two years, another jumper name of Allison who happens to be police a few towns over, also got stuck on the far side of the river and landed out with me. I felt MUCH better having a cop handy right about then actually, but I was disappointed and never got to see how that would have played out because there was no response from the house and we got off the property without seeing a soul. That was now almost ten years ago, and I think, judging by the lack of stories from others who've landed there in the years between, that the Horse Lady is definitely dead by now. If there's any justice, judging by her demeanor she probably died of an apocalyptic stress-stroke that made her skull explode like those people from "Scanners". I never landed there again. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

One of my earliest and greatest mentors, Chip Steele, while I was doing AFF- I still think of this one as a reminder to self to focus on what I'm doing. Chip: "Ya know whats the most important skydive of your life?" Me: "Uh..." Chip: "This one... its the one you're doing right now." Expanded version, "Whats on the ground, stays on the ground. Only thing that matters now is this skydive...the most important skydive of your life." I miss Chip. One of the greatest teachers I ever met. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Ok this is getting very interesting very quickly. I've already been contacted by others with concerns about this, and I have taken those concerns into account in my own thinking about the idea. There are two sides to every conflict. I'm going to try to discuss/lay out both sides here. Warning: long. First, the place I started myself: Against. Why: I -am- one of the self taught freelancers out there teaching. I am -not- a self-proclaimed "instructor" only because I went and got a PFI rating back when those were current...PFI#62 if I remember right. But I went and got that manufacturer rating purely to gain credibility and recognition from the established technical and teaching authorities of the time of what I had already been doing. What I wanted was a higher authority's approval and confirmation that I was doing the job right because I didn't feel right about teaching wingsuit without having somebody who knows better review my work. Back home, there were no BMIs or PFIs. Wingsuiting was exotic and rare and lethal as hell with an even worse reputation than skysurfing. Nobody knew better, nobody knew the rules, and there was no higher authority available. Since I was the only wingsuiter around at the time with hundreds of flights, I became the local authority by default. I didn't take up wingsuit instruction by inclination. I was pushed into it. Since I felt quite uncomfortable thrust into the role of instructor I took the job very seriously. I put a lot of emphasis on things like exit technique... wind and direction judgement, safe gear combos, heavy on the survival behaviors and threat vigilance. Look for sneaky things that can kill you. The lives of the pilot and anyone remaining on board depend on you spotting these things FIRST. Like the combo of low tail, higher exit speed than normal, bigger suit and loose wings. We were all explorers at the time, working in unfamiliar new territory. Many, maybe most of us early adopters took a very diligent and systematic approach to hazard awareness and management- it probably slowed down our progression some but thats pioneering, it was up to us to find out and pass on what is and is not safe to do. It was as "wild west" as any explorable territory that exists, these days... Total freedom, total self authority, total self responsibility and we loved it. I eventually went and got a Skydive University Coach rating... one of the only times I have taken off my wingsuit in the last nine years... because I wanted to actually learn a thing or two about teaching, and boy, did I. Going to learn at the knee of Rob Laidlaw was one of the smartest things I ever did, taught me a whole new world of "Wow I didn't even know I was that ignorant." I doubt I retained more than 1/10th of what he taught me but that tenth made me ten times better a teacher than I had been. What I notice is this: When I started I was properly scared. All kinds of "One wrong move and I'm dead" stuff. I paid attention to every little thing. Since I didn't yet fully understand what did and did not matter, everything did. Nothing inspires vigilance like being handed a responsibility you don't think you're ready for and don't want. It made me very determined to not let people down. I did my homework. I read everything I could possibly find about wingsuiting so I didn't accidentally destroy the aircraft or kill people with my amazing new powers. Much of it, learned on this same forum. My instruction technique is still somewhat awkward and all over the place, but I tend to be that much more thorough to compensate. I still use notes sometimes to make damn sure I'm not forgetting to teach something important by sheer oblivious familiarity. Its easy to assume somebody knows how to turn, for example. Or when. Easy to forget just how overwhelming a wingsuit flight can be, especially for first-timers. We have made it look too easy. Now. The game has changed. We are no longer rare or new. Wingsuit flight is no longer the same mostly uncharted territory it was. It is no longer viewed with quite the same fear and respect it used to be. It is everywhere... and familiarity breeds contempt. And complacency. Even among its teachers. Yeah, that includes me. Especially me. When it was something even multi-thousand jump jumpers were afraid to try, it was treated with the proper respect necessary and there were amazingly few incidents considering the relative inexperience of the total wingsuit population at the time, but we tended to be very well informed. Know or Die. It is no longer restricted to the most experienced and competent jumpers looking to expand their horizons. Now that it is something theres video of from every dropzone, we get goofballs who think its no big deal, rack up 200 jumps just to get past the guards, then strap on half a dozen GoPros and an X2 as their second suit for their 15th wingsuit flight and teach by example with a fresh dent in the plane. These people are learning a casual and dismissive attitude before they even start. Which brings me to the opposing opinion in this matter: FOR: The opinion: We need a nationwide USPA Wingsuit Instructional Rating. Call it Coach, Instructor, whatever, but the argument is we need it, we ought to have it, and the current proposal is how it ought to be done. WHY: See above. The wild west exploration days are done. The Miami Tailstrike Yahoos are out there and they're growing in number. Any place where there's nobody who knows any better, that shits gonna keep happening. Take a good look at swoopers in the last decade and their amazing splat rate. That's us, that's where we're headed if we don't get a grip, right now. Except given our inherent properties including interacting with the aircraft in ways swoopers do not, we have the capability of making a MUCH bigger mess. If any of us fear regulation NOW, just wait till one of us drops an Otter into a suburban neighborhood. Extra credit if we bag more than one family while we're at it. The Miami Tailstrike boys obviously weren't considering the possibilities. They most likely didn't even know them. We got lucky. Therein lies the problem. We've BEEN lucky. For how long? So far we've mostly only bagged ourselves when we screw up. Thing is, we got a perfect storm of factors working to increase the danger... the combo of a sudden population burst of people armed with wingsuits and no real clue what they can do, cultural exposure saturation making it easy for newbies to get the impression wingsuits are no big deal, and a sudden flood on the market of easily and cheaply available wingsuits of such performance that it makes it very easy, much easier than it used to be, to get in real deep trouble, real fast. Wingsuiting is in many ways even less forgiving than it was when I started, right when enough people are taking it up that we're statistically certain to include a subpopulation of ignorant and careless yahoos in great enough number to show up on radar with the incidents they cause. The proposal to create a USPA wingsuit rating is an attempt to address this. Its effectiveness at accomplishing that is very much open to debate but I personally think it will at least help, depending on how it is implemented. As I see it, its more information-promotional than regulatory, the idea being to aggressively push the information out there and make it available. The existence of a systematic and universally recognized codification of wingsuit survival basics could go a long way toward cutting down on ignorance as a source of incidents. And having to pass a rather rigorous examination in exchange for the credibility and the right to call oneself an actual "USPA Wingsuit Instructor" will act as a filter. Anyone wishing to hold that title must and will have to be skilled enough and informed enough to train and learn seriously enough to get it. The idea is, anyone holding that title DID pass muster with someone equal or greater in knowledge and skill, with regard to an actual objective standard... which we do not have yet because that rating doesn't exist. Conclusion, my own opinion: I see it as a good thing for our community provided one qualification: Keep it optional. There is a USPA Coach rating. So far as I am aware, its existence does NOT forbid freelance, unrated coaching of advanced skydivers. If I want, I can go look up and pay for lessons from YippeKiYay's Freefly School, and Mr. Yippee who is without any ratings at all but has roughly 45,329 freefly jumps is still free to teach me whatever he wants. His school succeeds or fails based on whether his product, the actual lessons, are actually effective and accurate. But if Yippee WANTS to, he can jack up his recognition and credibility tenfold by going and getting The Official USPA Coach Rating and tack on some "Real Credentials." I'd like to see us move that way. Create a rating as a standard to look up to, not a barrier to get past. Leave the field open to competing instructional methods. If it is made too difficult to spread what knowledge you have, I.E.. by forbidding freelance wingsuit instruction without a USPA rating, then it will be counterproductive and may have the effect of actively suppressing one-on-one knowledge propagation because of fear of getting busted teaching something without a rating that says you're allowed to. THAT, is the regulation we fear. I'd like to think I've made something of a contribution to the wingsuit community over the years. I could not have done much of it if there had been rules forbidding me to do it without jumping through hoops and submitting to someone else's judgement first, someone who may not have even been as informed and experienced as I at the time, especially considering the -relative- rarity of wingsuit pilots with multiple thousands of flights under their belts, even today. There are and will be others, like me, operating on their own, being as careful and conscientious as they know how, and creating new knowledge for all of us. I don't want to stop them. If we listen, we might even learn something. -B We're free. Lets keep it that way. Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

JR, I agree with your positions from time to time but this time you're full of shit. "Hate America so much" my ass. Don't put words in my mouth. Don't you dare. Especially not those words. My comment was a wry observation of the fact that our government's policies have rendered the word "defense" into a euphemism... attacking every third country on the planet for whatever the excuse du jour is this week is not "defense". I've got a buddy who put his ass on the line for this country, got blown to hell in Iraq. Few things piss me off more than honorable people misused for imposing foreign policy goals that have nothing to do with the defending they signed up for and everything to do with the greater economic glory of those who did the sending. I've got quite a few friends who are current or former military and I'll tell you straight up right now, regardless of what I think of the wars they may be used for, I would never...EVER... trash talk or dishonor their service. I recently encountered an ancient crusty Navy carrier man in line at a convenience store. I don't know WHAT all the stuff on his hat meant except that he'd spent an awful lot of his life in action. I stood aside..."You first, sir." He probably thought I was ex-military myself, (I'm not). I bet he doesn't get that from civilians a lot. For me it was just an impulse to show a little respect. He could have been commanding the ship that rescued the Maersk Alabama for all I know. And so, when the SEALS go kick some righteous ass on some assholes who desperately needed it, in the process actually doing something that -actually- defends American citizens, (i.e. rescuing them), I applaud sincerely. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

*Quietly dies laughing on the floor* Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

I don't need to guess, and I don't need to ask. Given whos been working on what in our community I think I know. I've examined the work behind this in person if its the same effort I saw, going public. It is far, far more thorough and professional than anything else I've seen including my own wingsuit instruction work... by a long shot. I'll have to seriously improve my own game to meet this standard. And I agree, this needs to be very thoroughly discussed, in the open, by the community. I think it will be. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.