FrogNog

You only really need the ass of the suit to be camo. The rest can be any color you like.

If you're talking about wired-to-deck cameras, I have this to say: MonkeyKam used to sell lipstick camera parts and kits for connecting to and using regular digital video cameras as tape decks, but I don't see that stuff on their site anymore. I found this in a previous post. Basically you can get a camera lens and CCD that takes power and provides some sort of signal in a small package with one or two long wires, stick this on your helmet or wherever you really feel it needs to go, then plug the wires into a digital video camera that can take an external input. One problem is that my old Sony PC-1 doesn't take external video input. Another problem is that video shake reduction can be done digitally in the deck and mechanically in the lens/CCD assembly. I'm not a paid pimp for Sony when I say I understand their digital camcorders do both. Having a camera just do it digitally reduces image clarity/quality/resolution (when there are shakes that get digitally removed). I presume using a remote head on a Sony camera would eliminate the advantage of the mechanical vibration damping because the remote head wouldn't have those components. But on any other camera that doesn't have mechanical damping anyway, it shouldn't make a difference. If you're talking about wireless cameras, then basically they take one of those "spy cameras" you see in all the X10 camera ads (that aren't as prevalent on the Internet as they once were, thank goodness) and they slap a battery pack on it. The X10 denomination has next to nothing to do with the camera (but it sound sexy); these cameras broadcast the video by radio to a receiver, as you say you heard. -=-=-=-=- Pull.

In my single-digits I was scared of the door. (Scared of heights, really; this is why I did static line. ) When it opened I would actually put my hand in front and below my face so I couldn't see out and down and freak out before it was time for me to start climbing. -=-=- So one jump my instructor says he doesn't want me being scared of sitting in the door right before I climb out. I get the point that he thinks I need to show a little more bravery. So when it's time, I sit in the door, then I lean out, climb out, look up arch and go. Back on the ground, my instructor says that was good, but from now on I need to wait for him to tell me it's time to climb out; we hadn't reached the spot yet at that point. I guess the winds went easy on me. On the next jump he made good and sure to put his arm in front of me in the door. -=-=- I'm not going to go into details about the time, as a student, I tried to tell the pilot how to fly better (smoother). I quickly learned that if I don't like how the plane's flying, it's because I'm a sissy scaredycat skydiver and my job (barring exceptional circumstances) is to shut up, hold on, and then get out. Thankfully this pilot will still fly me. -=-=- Once when I was on solo status, my ability to spot earned me the privilege of leading a group of solo students exiting at 13,000 feet when uppers were 50 knots. I did my calculations and determined where I should go so the spot was as good as possible for everyone. My answer was right over this one island in the river. I told the pilot on the ground this was the spot I wanted and asked if he could start jump run there, and he said he could. (He was/is a talented jump pilot, even if people say his pattern manners could use some polishing.) No problems until I get a little nervous before boarding and convince some very experienced RW guys to go with me to check the spot. Well, they need to get out right before me because they open lower and load their canopies way higher, and I didn't tell the pilot that, figuring the pilot would probably turn onto jump run several hundred feet before the exact point I indicated anyway... So we're at 13,000 feet, the plane dumps the load for the first landing area, then the pilot makes three beefy turns and cuts the power again and I look out and... we're at exactly the point I told the pilot about. So, I have to tell the pilot (at 13,000 feet, with the door open, with people who are supposed to be getting the heck out of his airplane but are not) that I actually need that same exact jump run over again, but started 1/8 mile earlier because of the extra people I sort of put on the load and didn't tell him about. Thankfully I knew the trick of laying sideways on the floor so I don't have to hold up my student rig in a 2 gravity "pissed-off pilot" go-around. -=-=-=-=- Pull.

If they hit me, they were too close. -=-=-=-=- Pull.

I think Amazon might know a thing or two about not dying in water landings. Something about doing a couple of them and a career as a professional "don't-die" trainer... The advice of hers I remember most strongly is that hot chicks in bikinis cluttering up the boat are NOT what you want while you're outside the boat trying to get in without drowning. I think she said the best are big, strong men. (Not sure if she said that last part regarding water landings or just in general.) -=-=-=-=- Pull.

I've had exactly the opposite experience. Just goes to show, YMMV.

If you want someone to know what you are asking, name a price in the ad. If you don't want people to make a counter-offer, say the price is "firm". -=-=-=-=- Pull.

Wait! There's more! He also told me that since it was such a hot day, I could open the door at 1000 feet, so we could be cooler on the rest of the climb to 11K! Mark Was it a roll-up door or a Snohomish door? And would having the door exceed the door-open speed? -=-=-=-=- Pull.

Would wearing weights be an alternative to flying a smaller canopy with shorter lines? -=-=-=-=- Pull.

You must not take bets as seriously as some of us do. -=-=-=-=- Pull.

Most chest strap buckles are not self-locking: they requires the chest strap to pass through them on the far side of their floating metal bar, make a 180 degree turn, and pass back through on the near side of the floating metal bar. This way any tension on the running end of chest strap will press the floating bar up against the running end of the chest strap. Friction between the bar and both ends of the chest strap is supposed to keep the chest strap from moving. If the friction does not do this well enough, the stopper on the chest strap is supposed to catch on the floating bar before the chest strap comes loose. A common misrouting is when the chest strap passes through the buckle only once. Less common misroutings would be passing the chest strap through the buckle twice on the same side of the floating bar, or threading the chest strap through the buckle in reverse order - on the near side of the floating bar first, then on the far side second. -=-=-=-=- Pull.

The most important purpose of most newspapers is to sell advertising. That is my explanation for almost everything I see, right or wrong, in newspapers. The same applies to television news and many television channels, of course. -=-=-=-=- Pull.

Is that true? A premature reserve deployment, especially while freeflying, can be painful, or injurious, but I would say it would on average be less injurous than no reserve deployment right before impacting the ground. An unexpected reserve deployment with a partially-functioning main is hairy, but still sounds more survivable (on average) than a no-out. And an unexpected reserve deployment with a properly-functioning deployed main sounds like pretty good odds to me. A premature reserve deployment in an aircraft does have the possibility of killing multiple people; that's a multiplier to consider. Perhaps most of the discussion in this thread has been about (alleged, hypothetical, theoretical, possible, unknown, etc.) negative Cypres failures because we have a comparatively large amount of faith that positive Cypres failures are rare as hen's teeth. I should hope they would be very easy to identify and report! Whereas determining that a black box on a corpse didn't do something it was supposed to requires a more technical and detailed process to determine not just that it didn't activate, but also that it should have done. -=-=-=-=- Pull.

So the pilots can fail to listen to / read them, then fly directly over your landing area at 1,000 feet. -=-=-=-=- Pull.

Shouldn't he also check the size of the slider and ask PD if they think a larger one should be on there? -=-=-=-=- Pull.

The ergonomic considerations of the Cypres are very nearly to the level of idiot-proofing. By that I mean the problem they're up against is not that it's hard to understand or operate the device in most circumstances, but that if they make it any easier (i.e. make it idiot-proof) then someone will just go and make a better idiot. A Cypres needs to have up-to-date batteries. There are three indicators for battery life: calendar age, number of jumps, and the indicator. A jumper (perhaps with the help of his rigger) should be able to keep track of these. Turning it on is easy: button and lights, then watch the three places it stops. Some people complain about how "long" it takes on the original Cypres. Puh-leeze. I couldn't buy a plain pine box from Joe's speedy drive-through coffins in that amount of time. Setting the altitude up or down is harder. Knowing that you have to is one thing, and then knowing how is another. The first - knowing that you have to set the altitude offset for the AAD - is required skydiving knowledge these days. It's part of "AAD operation theory" and if a jumper doesn't learn it, it can kill them just as if they didn't learn that an RSL is a backup device that should not be relied upon, or that maintaining their cutaway system monthly is a great idea. Setting the altitude offset on a Cypres could be made easier and more convenient (e.g. not having to set it every jump), but that could present other problems, like increasing the complexity of the device's engineering (with more buttons comes a more complex state machine and the possibility for new software errors) and forgetting to reset it to normal altitude. I question whether the difficulty or inconvenience of setting the Cypres altitude offset contributed to the fatality we're thinking of; I think it was just a training deficit (or brain fart - which can happen to anyone). But I could be wrong. I know jumpers who would realize they need to set the Cypres altitude offset but don't know how and would not miss a load to find someone to help them set it. -=-=-=-=- Pull.

Many skydivers like thin helmets. They're sexy and they do some of their protective jobs well or adequately. As I understand it, carbon-fiber composite molding is not as cheap or easy as injection plastic and foam molding. That may account for the price difference between Bonehead helmets and pro-tecs or SNELL-rated helmets with one-time-use crushable foam liners. I wear a black protec, it's cheap, it looks stupid, and it feels great when I whack my head on the wing, door, or friend's head* while I'm loading or riding to altitude. (* Not sure how good it feels for my friend's head. ) -=-=-=-=- Pull.

It's not as simple as that. Options have an important place in some economics theory: discriminatory pricing. Some people want a container and they don't have a lot of money. Other people want a container and they do have a lot of money. Perhaps they have so much money that they aren't as worried about paying more money, if they can get a higher quality product - and "quality" has a lot of definitions. If containers have only one price, then for the seller to pick the point on the price/quantity graph to maximize revenue (for a competitive market; oligopoly and monopoly markets are different) is easy but inefficient; the price/quantity curve is roughly a diagonal line and the revenue of any price point is roughly a box, leaving two triangles of unrealized revenue: people who won't buy because the product is too expensive, and people who happily bought but would have paid more and still bought. Ideally, the seller would figure out how much each buyer will pay and sell the product to each buyer for that unique price. There are some obvious problems here, one of which is that people get upset when they learn what someone else paid for something and it's less. Another problem is actually determining what someone will pay. One way around this is to have multiple models that do basically the same thing, but have different prices, and let the consumer choose how much they want to pay. Some people will pay more because they perceive they're getting something for their money, and depending on how they value their money, they may be willing to trade a lot of money for the increased quality they perceive. But for some products, having multiple totally different models has prohibitive production costs (e.g. a new TSO for each one). Enter options. In order for options to make a single product with a relatively fixed production cost [footnote 1] span a large price range, the options have to be priced much higher than their actual cost. This is why getting power windows and door locks on a car, from the factory, can cost $3,000 or more. And to many people, it's well worth it, even if it only cost $500 more for the factory to put it in (and the company to market it, and the engineers to invent and support it, and the dealers to recall and repair it, etc.). From personal experience I know there are many people who think paying $75 to have someone at the factory spend $15 worth of labor to cut and sew $2 worth of foam into a $2,000 product to make it feel slightly more comfortable with zero degradation in beauty is a great deal. As an aside, if people are selling containers to intentionally make zero profit, and they aren't concerned about satisfying everyone who wants one and can only pay the cost of the cheapest container[footnote 2], then they can sell options at cost. -=-=- footnote 1: a relatively fixed production cost per unit is assumed because price/quantity/revenue graphs used for prediction typically relate to a single short-term average production cost curve which represents things like workforce, space, and tooling management. If individual units can cause a varying movement along the short-term production cost curve, then determining marginal profit on the graph would be impossible because it would become a function of great complexity. (The cost to make one unit would depend not on the number of units already made, but on the cost of the options of this unit plus the cost of making every unit already made - and all those units may have had options, too....) footnote 2: I assume that the community of container buyers is large and varied enough that diseconomies of scale and variation in short-term production costs will necessarily mean that containers could probably never be produced for the absolute minimum possible per-container cost, even if the manufacturers wished to make no profit (of either type) overall or on any individual container - i.e. if the manufacturers were complete charities. -=-=-=-=- Pull.

How much do you want for it so you can try again for a slight smile on your next one? -=-=-=-=- Pull.

Well put. -=-=-=-=- Pull.

I believe he means he "unsews" his container/harness from his wingsuit so he can do some non-wingsuit jumps. -=-=-=-=- Pull.

I pull that way on hop-and-pops sometimes, where going head-low doesn't happen as quick or matter as much. It is a lot of fun. -=-=-=-=- Pull.

It's not wasting money if it keeps you from breaking a bone. Even a cheap broken bone will probably cost more than all your gear. If you have good insurance then you may not have to pay anything, just sit around not being able to jump (or do any sports ) for 4 months. I believe the Dropzone.com collective wisdom on downsizing and changing canopy types is that they should be done separately because they are cumulative risk factors. I do not recall which one people recommend doing first. -=-=-=-=- Pull.

Good job not dying. Good job not breaking anything either. We have reserves not because (or not just because) sometimes we mess up, but also because skydiving is chaotic and sometimes shit just happens. That's a justification for why using a reserve shouldn't automatically indicate jumper screwup. But even if a jumper does screw up, we're human and it's going to happen with some frequency and some degree. We just try to keep both of those below some threshold that we consider "safe enough". And we have reserve canopies (and other safety devices) to help us try and live through the screwups. Maybe in the context of jumper screwups, embarrassment is appropriate because it helps us want to try to improve for next time. Personally, I think bone-chilling mental review of what could have just happened does the trick. Also, being yelled at by the DZO / S&TA as soon as they're sure you're going to live. But nobody yelled at you, so I guess you need embarrassment. -=-=-=-=- Pull.

The problem is within most of us. We jump what we want to, which may not be what we should. Some of us have enough experience and risk tolerance to make this OK (even when it ends badly due to chance - always a factor to some degree) but it's not obvious to strangers who has experience and risk tolerance and who does not. One solution is a nanny state. This does seem to work fairly well for the first 25 jumps or so. Currently it falls apart after that. Another solution is to make people want to be safe. The problem here is it's hard to force anyone to want anything. I want to not wear a cast again, shower on one foot, ask strangers to carry my lunch tray, and get fat, depressed, and weak. But does anyone have any idea how to get other people to want to go slower and be smarter? As an aside: Trae's mention of the "Go Fast" energy drink slogan brings to mind Red Bull: it gives you wings. Hope it doesn't give you a harp too! -=-=-=-=- Pull.