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We do have a policy of no advertising on the forums. However, if you would like to talk about the experiences that led you to write this book, that would be great, and very much in line with what this forum is for.

"Topping off" takes longer so they will likely avoid that. I don't know of any civilian skydiving operation that buys new airplanes for jumpers. (Ray Ferrell's PAC may be an exception here.) Given that, it's going to be a while before such aircraft are available to skydivers.

Well a typical 206 engine is rated (sea level max) at about 220kW, so 130kW at 12,500. So average 175kW to match the performance of a C206, which means about 90kwhr for the climb. Add 10kwhr for a 30min reserve (that's OK to rate at best-economy speed) and you're at 100kwhr per load. That's one Tesla battery, so you'd probably be looking at an actual design of two of them (for redundancy and reduction in charge time.) Fastest current chargers charge at about 3C, so to get 100kwhr into a 200kwhr battery at 3C will take just under 10 minutes.

Tesla batteries are lasting about 200,000 miles with frequent fast charging. That's about 3500 hours of operation. (For comparison, Lycoming recommends engine rebuilds after 2000 hours.) So it will be a tradeoff between recharge speed and lifetime.

At first they thought our system was interfering with the autoland system. So we pulled all our equipment and tried again. Same violent landing. Then they swapped out the autopilot avionics and voila! no more hard landings. But it was a tense (and somewhat painful) two days. For a while I wanted to get one of those super cushioned chairs that truckers use - although we learned that the farther you got from the landing gear, the less the impact.

Eh, people said the same thing about the previous overhaul. Things change.

The position of your upper body relative to your lower body, and the position of your legs, provide a far more powerful turning force than your hands do. Thus even minor problems with your body position will lead to an unstoppable spin if you are relying on the hands method.

Agreed. You can likely still find people choosing exit separation using the 45 degree rule with the permission of their DZ's as well, and you can find people turning by using their hands as little rudders. That does not necessarily mean that those things are a good idea.

I once spent a week in Tusla, Oklahoma doing flight test on MD-80's. They did some tests involving the autoland system that I swear didn't flare at all. We'd hit the runway so hard that the bins would pop open. (Fortunately it was just the five of us - three pilots, me and a tech.) For one landing I went to the very back of the plane and sat there for landing. You could see the fuselage actually bend down a few feet when we hit. But no permanent damage as far as we could tell.

For the 50th anniversary of the Normandy invasion, we held an event where WWII vets could run through a static line program for next to nothing and make a jump on that day. Most of them did OK, although it was effectively impossible to train them to arch. It's something that almost any DZ can do. You can meet the USPA requirements for a course fairly quickly as long as they come in with basic skills, and it's likely the DZO could find volunteers to teach and/or JM the students - thus reducing the cost tremendously. This is getting pretty far from the topic, though, so maybe better to start a new thread on it.

If you are trying San Diego try either early in the morning right after they open or late in the day when tandems have thinned out.

If it was their fault - yes. Note that that doesn't mean they were evil, or that they were bad people. It just means they made a mistake. I've made them - and gotten away with them. I've stopped my students from making fatal mistakes, like walking into the propeller of an Otter. I am sure you've made mistakes, too. If (god forbid) someday you make a mistake and it kills you, it will be your fault. Not because you are bad, but because you made a mistake.

That's sad. Flip was a great guy. I ended up sitting next to him on one of the Thailand World Team records. One one attempt, we took off, they opened the door, we stood up and got ready to go . . . and had a hold. After about 15 minutes they closed the door again; we were going to land with the plane. Fortunately we had plenty of oxygen. After a few minutes my altimeter started to unwind. I guessed we were landing. But the deck angle seemed pretty flat. And we were descending at something like 5000 feet per minute, which is a pretty screaming descent in an aircraft. Were we really descending? I looked at Flip, showed him my altimeter and said "are they pressurizing?" (Actually I yelled it as loud as I could; it was pretty loud in that plane.) He looked at his altimeter for a few seconds, then jumped up and waded up to the cockpit before the crew pressurized us right into a bunch of AAD fires. He got them to stop the cabin-altitude descent before we hit 1000 feet. Another aircraft was not so lucky, and there were a bunch of AAD's on those aircraft that either fired or shut down permanently because they detected something that shouldn't be happening.