Liemberg

Ms Vulovic was inside the tail section of that DC9 during her descent. So actually she was flying an 'improvised' airplane / autogiro and never completely in freefall. (most of us 'old farts' have seen how ripcords and cut-away cables started to spin and slow down upon acceleration of their spin...)

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There was also a WW1 story of a pilot that claimed to have fallen out of his plane at the top of a loop in a dogfight, the plane continued the loop and he landed back in the cockpit at the bottom of the loop, and successfully landed the plane.

Apparently he was believed, and maybe even decorated for it.

Actually, there are TWO WW1 stories of aviators falling out of their aircrafts and getting back inside. Both are rather well documented with eye-witness accounts and/or photografic evidence.
First there was lieutenant Louis A Strange (RFC) who had his Martynside S1 aircraft suddenly flip upside down as he stood up to change the ammunition drum of his Lewis machine gun during a 'dogfight'.
Holding on to the machinegun drum he managed to get back inside and get the aircraft back in an upright position at 500ft. He was cited by his CO for "causing unnecessary damage to his instrument panel and seat " - after the war he came in contact with the Germans who were also in the fight and he asked them why they didn't shoot him down when they had the opportunity.
"Shoot you down?" they replied, "We were clapping and cheering for you!"
The other story is about Oberleutnant Georg Behrla who fell out of a Albatros C.V 1211/16 flown by Vizefeldwebel Fritz Rosengart.
"Shortly after reaching 4,500 metres altitude, Rosengart sees some enemy fighters and throws the aircraft into a spin, pinning Behrla to the observer's cockpit floor. Rosengart levels off at 4,100 metres and Behrla stands up to aim his machine gun. At that exact moment the Albatros hits an air pocket and drops, leaving Behrla floating three metres above the plane. The machine stops dropping and Behrla crashes through the fuselage deck just behind his cockpit. Stuck there until Rosengart can land the aircraft, Behrla is none the worse for his misadventure."

(the attachment shows Behrla and Rosengart after landing in their damaged plane)

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Can you summarize it if you have listened and could make out what he was saying?

I listened to the tape for about 5 minutes and then gave up - I'm 'double handicapped' here since I have trouble with the sound quality (as everybody else) but also I'm not really good in Australian accent.

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I would want more details about the circumstances and how it was reported and documented, before being more certain about any conclusions.

So would I but all I managed to find with the help of 'google' was another website repeating the one I gave in my first post on the subject.
Not really helpful - for it is typically (IMO) the kind of story people want to believe to be true - without any real knowledge of 'the physics of parachute openings' like one develops with a few 1000 jumps and a few decades in the sport.
The thing is that for instance the Alkemade story - complete with Germans not wanting to believe him, the incredible odds of hitting a snowy slope, etcetera has been around as long as I can remember - I even saw it pictured in a cartoon magazine when I was a kid while this story which is as remarkable I had never heard of until this week.
No cartoons, no film - nothing, as far as I can tell.
That and countless 'Mr, Bill' jumps made by the skydiving community makes me verry skeptic...

And for the 'incredible strenght at the moment you are holding on for dear life'? In 1997 in the Netherlands a pilot bailed out of a cripled C206 without an emergency rig, holding on to another jumper who pulled immediatly. The pilot lost grips and fell to his death...

Last observation: But why would he tell such a story when it wasn't true? Beats me but I know that people tell bullshit stories all the time for all kinds of reasons...

Recently on twitter someone told an (in my opinion) highly unlikely story about a WW2 pilot bailing out of a desintegrating Halifax bomber at night over Germany without a parachute above 12000ft and by sheer coincidence meeting up with his mid-upper gunner at around 5000ft, grabbing the gunners legs in mid-air at the exact moment the gunner opened his parachute and holding on to those legs throughout the opening.

Both men supposedly landed under that one parachute, evaded capture by the Germans for four days and survived the war as POW's.

My bullshit-detector went of the scale as one can imagine but the story was apparently told in a television show. The guys name is "Joe Herman" and of course I searched this forum for that name but found no hits.

(For those interested there is a website with the story and a tape recording of Joe Herman telling his story: https://www.awm.gov.au/collection/C386640)

Now of course this would have been the first Mr. Bill jump in history, and it is a terrible waste to check a good story to death but nevertheless I would imagine that the inevitable 'true or false' question has the best chance of getting a half way believable answer on this here forum - if it really happened a few of you guys would know about it...
So my question is: True or False? (My money is on False of course...)

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But, as of 3 weeks ago, it's been aching anytime I try to walk on it.

It is trying to tell you what the weather will be in the next 48 hours

Seriously, I sprained an ankle on landing in 1983. Walked on crutches for a couple of weeks, learned to walk and run again and mostly forgot about it. However, during a physical examination more than 15 years later as I was laying on the physicians table he examined both of my ankles and said "the left one has been injured previously, hasn't it?"

The general rule is rest, elevation and exercise. To be repeated every time it 'acts up'

The general rule is also that you will be rememberded about some of your landings - particularly on cold and damp mornings - decades after you f*#$d up.

The good news is that this keeps you cautious throughout the rest of your skydiving career.

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I cannot recall any other case when a suspended examiner continued to conduct courses and somehow convinced the candidates that everything was fine, even when the paperwork never came.
If you go through a rating course and don't get your credentials within a couple of weeks, you should say something or realize that you've been duped or maybe you are complicit in the bogus rating.

Seems like a pretty stupid way of doing business indeed. However, if the USPA has been issuing licenses in a 'suspended guy ran the course and non-suspended guy signed the paperwork'-scenario and the paperwork did come "with an official USPA stamp" this can quickly turn into a legal quagmire for the USPA, even if they were duped themselves and did not know anything about what was going on.

Anybody that has any insight about what was really happening there? Correct me if I'm wrong but from here it seems that in order to get your USPA tandem license suspended you need to have one in the first place, but what do I know - I live on another continent and should replace my avatar with a picture of a rocking chair...

http://www.uspa.org/News-Events/News/Article/1864/USPA-Acts-to-Ensure-Proper-Tandem-Instructor-Certification

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the BPA Statistics clearly show that the injury/fatality rate drops by half or more for experienced jumpers vs. students, (1.5 per 100,000 for SL students, 2.5 per 100,000 for AFF students, vs 0.8 per 100,000 for experienced jumpers, not counting pro/demo jumpers)

Then again, you don't see many students cranking out 500 jumps per year. To simplify: If you make 10 times as many jumps as the average student but one single jump you make is "half as risky" due to your experience and being current etcetera you end up with five times the risk involved in participating in the activity i.e. not being around next season.

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A drogue bridle gets hopelessly wrapped around a student's ankle, presumably putting the tandem pair in an other-than-stable position and requiring a reserve to be fired (possibly fatally) into the drogue.

Though it doesn't deserve the 'best performance of the month'-prize when you end up with a drogue entanglement, the students ankle seems to be the best 'point of entanglement' - provided the situation is handled professionaly from that moment on.
Yes - drogue entanglements can end up with reserve entanglements, so the potential for a double fatality is there, but when the attachmentpoint is the students ankle, the +45 degree headdown position which will result gives you the best launch direction for your reserve pilotchute. Furthermore the solution is also pretty straight forward. ("Pull silver - NOW!") and reserves work most of the times, while the droplet-shape of the drogue also reduces the problem.

But I do agree that it is an incident (or serious fuckup on the part of the TI if you will) Throwing drogues before you are stable / certain that it will get free of the tandempair will get you there sooner or later. Every TI supposedly learns that in his training but you know how it is: some of us only really learn 'on the job'.

With lots and lots of tandemjumps on youtube nowadays it is not hard to find footage of sketchy drogue throws.

Great educational value for junior TI's

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I think if Snuffy was here, he would call you a Troll and give you the B!tchSlap emoticon and tell you that you aren't good enough to lick his jump boots.

I'd be sent to bootcamp and would have to give 20 push-ups, to begin with no doubt. "Young whippersnapper!"

But that's OK with me; in my ideal world every student skydiver has his own personal drill sergeant.

I never actually met him and in fact this is the first time I see a pic of him. But - he looks exactly like I always pictured him, with a grey beard, garden trousers and a 'Da Nang' cap on his head. Funny to see that my imagination fits reality.

If there are any cyber-skydivers out there that were also around in the rec.skydiving usenet-days (maybe should 've posted this in History and Trivia) - what happened to Snuffy?

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That being said as someone with less than the 200 jumps I want people to know what I personally think.

When receiving directions and guidelines on defusing IED's on a roadside without getting yourself killed in the proces, would you be intersted in the opinions of a seasoned veteran who defused hundreds in, say two consecutive tours or from the guy in the middle of his third week bomb school training?

Thats what I thought
Funny how people think it would be different when operating parachutes in a real life free fal environment and the does and don'ts when organising and filming that action.

Stupid gets you killed. Luckily not all the time, but as a ground rule it goes a long way.

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The "correct" prodedures though, sounds a bit scarry in case the main decides to come out.

Which is why I have always been advocating:

1. Only jump rigs with some sort of velcro / tongue / magnet closure on your main risers
2. Cut away & pull reserve.

Again, there's the 'I'm wasting time analysing' conundrum - that is best counteracted with 'I'm probably just as stupid as the next person, so I better follow ONE course of action that works ALWAYS.'

YMMV - what else is new? ...

Actually, knowing how your (human) mind works in emergencies / high stress situations is of the utmost importance when premeditating a course of action.

If there IS a decision to be made - other than "I just did what usually stops the freefal portion of the jump, counted to three and I'm still in freefal - NO OPENING SHOCK --> Sh#t! --> EP's!" - it follows that - once you allow yourself a choise - you have to analyse what is going on and then decide if you chose A: your repeatedly trained EP's or B: something else (grab your bridle, shake your ass, go into sitfly, smack your container or any combination...)

It also follows that this analyses could eat up a large portion of the one thing you are running out of in 12-8 seconds from NOW: Useful time...

It also follows that even choosing B 'as fast as you can' holds the risk that this was the wrong choise (can't get hold of the bridle, shaking my ass doesn't work etcetera) and you end up choosing 'delayed A'...

Even if you are succesful here, logic dictates that with 'delayed A' you will be under an unfamiliar canopy, closer to the ground than you would have been had you just reacted like an 'automated Zombie' (After pull in freefal? EP's ASAP) No time to catch your breath - you will land, wether you are prepared or not... And al of a sudden it is doubtful if you can safely cross the crocodile pond / dense urban area / high trees / high voltage powerlines / the railroad track / vineyard / lions den etcetera

Wether the benefit of 'saving the day' by choosing B, thus not having to pay for a repack, buying beer for your mates and a bottle of liquor for your rigger outweights the benefit of choosing A and (in all likelyhood) saving your life - I leave for you to decide...

Some wisdom from the days (long gone) of pull-out pilot chutes where there was a pud connected to both the bottom of your PC AND a straight pin that held your container closed. Though it guaranteed a 'positive opening of your PC' you could end up grabbing the lower right corner of your container only to find that the pud wasn't there anymore.

Since most of us didn't have AAD's either the most common way to get yourself killed with that setup was spending the rest of your life feeling for the pud that "had to be" dancing around near the lower right corner of your rig...

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More importantly, he had the handicam working just fine.

Which allows us to see that it isn't a seatbelt hang-up but rather a 'right lateral passenger band' hang-up. And also to observe (at the end of the clip) they are so proud of this new achievement that they advertise to which establishment one should go for some whole new levels of fast paced adrenaline adventure during one's first skydiving adventure...

I guess it is safe to say this is a double fail - first in preventing the added danger by not rigorously following procedures and second in giving yourself a black eye two years after the fact by sending your student on his way with his video to post that footage of 'you with your pants down' on youtube where sooner or later the DZ.com crowd will find it and give you some constructive criticism.

Easy tiger...

Other than that ( since someone else opened the can of worms / line of questioning) I'd trust some people with a nighttime witchhunt broomstick demo any day of the week but the fact of the matter is I wouldn't trust most of you with correctly tying your shoe-laces or your necktie
Thank G'd I'm retired...

If you can get your plans past Airtwardo and/or riggerrob and/or John Mitchell I do not exclude beforehand the possibilitty you might survive some stupid shit...

Doesn't make stupid shit any less stupid...

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I think that I've decided that people need to have at least 30 actual jumps before advising others on skydiving.

Now you are seriously underestimating the power of crowdsourcing on the internet. With my mad computer skilz & google & wikipedia I often find the right answers online even before you have formulated the questions!

Its a gift.

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I hate videos like this - tomorrow there will be a busload of oldies, zimmer framing their way to the hanger with a press entourage, having the expectation they have a god given right to do a skydive because it's on their bucketlist! [Crazy]

Double your price since you have to take special safety precautions given the age of your new customers, smile as you take their money and giggle all the way to the bank!

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The heels can cause excess wear.

Not like a premature opening of the tandem main would

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I don't think the US will even consider extradition until the final appeal has been heard. By that time, Rudy Guede (whose semen and bloody handprints were found inside and on Meredith Kercher) could very well be free, raping and murdering other young women.

Why would you think a black displaced economic / political male refugee would be much more likely to kill a young white woman than an american ingenué - that is into the music of Schubert, for crying out loud? And rewarding the true killer (you know, boring physical evidence) with a reduced sentence also doesn't do much for truth-finding usually but hey - they invented law in Rome, so they must know a few things.

NEVER TALK TO THE POLICE.

especially if you have to adress them in a foreign language...

That 'double jeopardy' thing you have over there across the water is something that is lacking in several European legal systems. Then again, we are not in the habbit of executing convicted killers - even repeated ones. ..

I think the tunnel can be an excellent tool for transitioning from static-line to free-fall, but I would be inclined to modify the progression system a bit and send them 'all the way up' after they have proven they can actually save their own life - by pulling a free-fall parachute system at least once or twice, preferably while being belly to earth/into the wind without losing stability in the opening. Just let them open @4500ft the first longer freefalls and put audible back-up gadgets on them.
(Yes, you should explain the pitfalls...)

In the tunnel they can practice just about everything you need to survive a free-fall - you could even have them train a high speed malfunction, pulling / throwing a pc and keeping an eye on an altimeter without going all over the place.

Granted - you would not want them to try a tracking, but regaining stability can be learned in a tunnel, just as a stable pull. And the beauty of it is that apart from the travel cost, any serious static-line student will immediatly recognize the 'bang-for-buck' the tunnel can give him.

For the safety of the student at pull time there is not much difference between coming from +5000ft for a 15/20 seconds delay or coming from +9000ft for "a longer spell of the real stuff". They have to pull their main parachute at terminal velocity at the right altitude and preferably stable but 'Hey, it is no big deal!"

There really isn't much point in having people go through several five- eight- and 10 second delay jumps, they often get frustrated and find it hard to ease into it.

If you build enough tunnel-airtime into the program I bet you can even teach everybody to wave off before the pull

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I have trouble believing someone would jump a rig so dirty that dust flies off of it when a pin cover is opened.

Truman Sparks would jump a rig like that!

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He doggie smiles!!

He is looking forward to taking a firm bite out of 2014

Are video's of your pet's achievements allowed also? Cause conquering scary steel slides that are cold on your paws maybe a small step for mankind - but it was a giant leap for my dog Leo, nonetheless.

Almost like starting to skydive...

http://youtu.be/7nBtN5McpjM

Climbing the playground-objects he's been doing for more than a year, but until a couple of weeks ago I could never seduce him to go down the slide. Way to scary! And guess what? As soon as he successfully managed to do it twice in a row, 'unassisted' he actually seems to like it and now he appears to be hooked to the sliding sensation...

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I think 500 tandem min before wearing a glove cam and then getting a very thorough brief in how to use one.

Since modern handcams can be lighter and smaller than (analogue) altimeters and no one has ever seen an issue with TI's wearing that on the back of their left hand I find that exaggerated. Sure, getting carried away with aiming for the best shot can get you side spinning drogue side down seconds after exit but it is no more rocket science than the tandemjump itself. At least, with go-pro's (in a glove, not a case), contours and the likes.

(Classic cams like Sony PC are a different beast of course...)

After all, it is much more a mental thing, like 'don't think about elephants' than a technical issue. I think it should be part of the TI's training, just to make sure that all the possible issues are covered. With the right tool for the job (small, lightweight, wide-angle, one-click-operation, 'unsnaggable') and the right briefing (forget from exit till drogue throw, forget during opening / emergency, forget from 20 seconds prior to landing) it may be a lot smarter to train TI's from the get-go when they are about to get their rating and make a few more training jumps with an examiner who has like +500 handcam tandems and perhaps always carry the handcam when making the required familiarization jumps with trained skydivers.

This has two advantages:
1. The obvious - the TI is more versatile and brings the skills the market requires nowadays
2. The TI is not 'left alone' when he tries to re-invent the wheel but instead will be trained from the get go by someone who knows what is real and what is not in terms of increased danger.

In fact, the original poster illustrates this point when he asks about additional dangers and specifically seems to worry about interference with emergencies (no more than a big altimeter on the left hand) and fears several non-issues, yet doesn't speak of the real danger which is designating one limb for 'stable camera platform right in the passengers face' when all four limbs should be working exclusively to get the tandempair 'belly towards wind & under drogue'.

If we think tandemjumping deserves specific training then why not build 'handcam jumping' into the training program? (Like f.i. make five solo jumps with the glove + cam before starting your TI training...)

Yes, it may be true that several fatal tandem jumps had handcam as a common denominator, but like any other skill it can be teached. My idea is to do the teaching incorporated in the total package. Makes much more sense.

My $ 0,02