FrogNog

Actually, my acquaintance has a Safire 2, not a Safire 1. A friend of mine and I had some miscommunication. A helpful note to gear manufacturers: either put "1" after all your model names or quit making new, different products and putting "2" after the name. -=-=-=-=- Pull.

By the way, please nobody tell me a Batwing 170 might behave in the manner I'm looking for. Tell me it would do something totally wrong for my declared preferences so I feel better for trading one a while back for a Kong 300 I could jump for novelty. -=-=-=-=- Pull.

I've never run across a Firebolt or anyone that has one as far as I know. I'll keep my eyes skinned for one. And, are you sure you mean "snappy turns, soft openings" instead of "snappy openings, soft turns"? I just want to be sure. -=-=-=-=- Pull.

Someone at my DZ has a Safire 1 189, apparently; I'll be leaning on him shortly. (You know who you are.

Go classic: USPA logo.

OK, I will find a Safire 189 to try out. I think someone near me has one around, if not I'm sure I can reach out further. Anything else I should be experimentating with? -=-=-=-=- Pull.

No worries.

Now the short answer: 1. will fly somewhat slowly in the pattern if I want it to, avoiding the "napkin-missile" effect as much as possible. 2. don't need to be Olympic sprinter / land-skier to land in no wind. 3. flies smooth with a lot of single or double front riser input. Smooth means no bucking, and more input = more turning and/or diving. 4. turns more smoothly than a triathlon of similar size. 5. doesn't open like a SabreCracker. I am prepared to feel stupid if this is basically _most_ higher-performance canopies at 1.1 to 1.4 lbs/sf. -=-=-=-=- Pull.

This is basically it. By "same neutral flight speed" I mean when I fly a Hornet 190, it goes X airspeed. If I fly a Hornet 150, it goes faster. I expect if I fly e.g. a Stilleto 150 it will go faster than a Stilleto 190, and as a starting point I would guess the Stilleto 190's regular flight speed would be in the ballpark of the Hornet 190's regular flight speed - I certainly guess the Stilleto 190's speed will be closer to the Hornet 190's speed than would be the Stilleto 150's speed. Obviously there will be a difference because the wing is more efficient, it's not exactly the same square footage, and it's trimmed different, but my main point is I don't want to fly an e.g. Stilleto 150 on the advice of people saying "you have to load it to get performance; if you don't want to load it, don't bother getting an elliptical", and my main reasoning is I want a canopy that doesn't rocket down to earth when I'm not yanking on the strings. (I like my thinking time.) I don't know if I want light front riser pressure. I can put a lot of strength on a front riser and if I don't have enough, I can build more. But I do want a canopy that, when I bring in a front riser, can do some serious turning / diving without bucking madly. (Preferably without bucking at all.) And I don't want to have to solve the bucking by lengthening the brake lines to the point I can't get a full flare. (It is my opinion that Hornets will never do great front riser turns for people of regular arm length because of this brake line issue. My Sabre2 experience has been similar but not as bad.) Final landing speed is basically stall speed while landing. I like standing or walking on medium wind landings and running (not sprinting) only on no wind landings. At higher windloadings, landing stall speed increases. I think a longer recovery arc would be good too, and perhaps more important than responsive turns (which I take to mean precise and snappy). I have been happy with the responsivity of turns on my Hornet 190; I have felt how downsizing increased responsivity by comparing with Sabre2 170, sabre2 150, and Hornet 150, and I accept that at low wingloading and with longer lines, I will have some amount of turn start/end "mush" issue and maximum turn rate. No problem as long as it turns more responsively than a Triathlon. I think a longer recovery arc means a canopy that has more of an "affinity" for flying above its "neutral speed" once it has been pointed at the ground, vs. the Hornet and Sabre2 which try with all their might to return to neutral speed immediately after I let up the front riser. (I swear the canopy is trying madly to return to neutral speed _while I'm still holding the riser_, which is why it bucks. It's skeered of going too fast. ) Basically I think I want something that will fly well deep in front risers (i.e. not bucking) when I want it to, will flare and land well with a slow ending (i.e. brake lines not lengthened to where I have to pull the toggles with my toes), and doesn't have a huge forward speed increase (such as if I just downsized a couple sizes). I was actually impressed with an Original Sabre 190 I demoed - the toggle turns were a bit rough but the front-riser flight and flare were great. The subterminal openings were beating me to a pulp, though. Because higher-performance canopies don't seem to be found (or even made) in large sizes as much, I lost 30 pounds (from almost 200 down to 170) to do my part in this equation*. I think I can go another 10, to get me to 1.26 lbs/sf on a 150 or 1.11 lbs/sf on a 170. I was going to try and start finding large (~170 sf) ellipticals to demo and see what I liked. It was my understanding that higher-performance canopies tended to have shorter toggle strokes so lengthening their lines didn't necessitate gorilla-arm flares, and had varying recover arcs. (* OK, that's not the only reason I lost weight. But it is an important side effect. The other reason was my ass was starting to look too big.) -=-=-=-=- Pull.

From the fark intake Live Turkey Parachuting They don't go into details of packing. Personally, I dispute their cost analysis. I don't have to feed either of my nylon canopies. -=-=-=-=- Pull.

Are you replying to the right thread? The third post down on the page you linked to says if someone had cut away their main, they would have died because their reserve exploded. And you replied to my note that I disconnect my RSL for high-wind landings and hit-and-chugs - situations where I plan to cut away as soon as I get to the ground. And other people (well, the original post) were talking about disconnecting their RSLs before trying to get out of canopy formation wraps, some other sort of entanglement, or a 2-out situation. So I am confused how this all relates.

I believe this is the historical post you want to answer (and ask) all these questions for you: [URL]http://www.dropzone.com/cgi-bin/forum/gforum.cgi?post=1503119[/url] -=-=-=-=- Pull.

What ramjets? Where? Do you mean the model aviation turbofan engines it looked like they were using on the previous, real flight? -=-=-=-=- Pull.

I have only disconnected my RSL for high-wind landings and hit-and-chugs. -=-=-=-=- Pull.

I'm considering doing this - jumping a high-performance canopy shape at a low wingloading - because I have started to like light wingloadings for neutral flight speed and final landing speed, but i want a canopy that can be made to dive more / fly with front risers more. The wingloading I expect to try out some higher-performance canopies at is 1.0 to 1.15 pounds per square foot. I will of course not go under the manufacturer absolute minimum weight for a canopy. But barring violating absolute minimum weight, I also am curious what the dangers could be of light loading. I reckon the primary danger I'm looking at is not wingloading, it's the shape of the canopy - the more responsive any canopy, the more skill and training it takes to fly it safely. And all the control inputs and outputs will change drastically compared to tamer shapes. -=-=-=-=- Pull.

I find the hard, irregular shape of the pipe can be easier to feel in gloves than the soft, teardrop / spherical / baseball-stitch-shaped hacky. However, I don't like the way the irregular shape can present a different shape to my grabbing hand every time. When it comes to pull time, I like consistency! I went with the hacky because the cool kids use it, it works well enough for me, and overall I like it. Pipe's fine too. I'll even jump a small monkey's fist if that's what's connected. -=-=-=-=- Pull.

My Cypres and I are competitors. It is my goal to always win and do everything I need to manage my canopies correctly so my Cypres never gets to do anything except warm the bench. Turning my Cypres on reminds me that solving emergencies is not optional and also reminds me not to hit my head on things like the plane or other jumpers. -=-=-=-=- Pull.

CrazyDiver and I have opposite impressions of Sabre vs. Sabre2. I think that's a sign you (i.e. the original question poster) need to jump the canopies and decide for yourself. -=-=-=-=- Pull.

I think they shouldn't have called it the Sabre2. It just produces confusion. :) I know people who swooped the hell out of the original Sabre. From my own limited experience, I found the original Sabre had more front-riser flying smoothness and more flare power (than a Sabre2 - which is still a fine-flaring canopy). The one I flew sure kept opening like a ton of bricks, though. -=-=-=-=- Pull.

Use it as cheap raw material for anything you want to sew out of that fabric, like a kite or a jacket. -=-=-=-=- Pull.

Just "OF" - Over Fifty. Or Old Farts. -=-=-=-=- Pull.

When a bad spot happens, it's hard to go against hundreds of jumps of "training": point at the LZ, fly to it, make some turns and end up landing into the wind. I think periodic safe training for suboptimal landings / patterns would be valuable. Seeing as the ground will be wet at my DZ for the next six five months, I should put some shorts on over my legstraps and do some downwinders.

Tom, if you had never jumped, in 25 years you probably would have seen very few people die in front of you, and have read hundreds fewer death reports. But wouldn't you (or all of us) still know good friends who had died, some from stupidity, some from bad luck, and all unexpectedly? -=-=-=-=- Pull.

Some dropzones (OK, one that I know of

Crayola has some stuff... -=-=-=-=- Pull.