plastic

Hi Graham, Nice to see you are still about, are you jumping with andre at the world meet? plastic

Hi Andre, Not too sorry about the retirement, i did it once before but must have got it wrong. Maybe we should just forget the parachuting thing and get a reunion going in las vegas! Plastic

Hi Andre, Not me, i retired from team after last year, in fact i have almost totally retired from parachuting now. Who are you jumping with? I thought you had a rots team? I think Ian Marshall from our old team will be there. I do remember the drinking sessions from Eloy which is still my best memory of competition. Good Luck. Plastic

um, i thought they landed ok, but then i thought the ar-7 landed not too bad, but i'm not as tall as i used to be! Maybe there is a connection. Plastic

Hi, I was on a sequential team (circa 2000 - 2001) that jumped diamants, and we were coached by the guy that designed them. They are a canopy designed for experienced competitors, they are not the easiest canopy to use (although in the right hands they were at the time the best sequential canopy around) they are also unfortunately not compatible with any other crw canopy around today. I would not advise beginners or low experienced crw jumpers to use them. Sorry. Plastic

Hi, Some crw jumpers jump with pointed tip open bladed knives but the thing to remember if you are in a multi person hi speed wrap there could be bodies spinning and banging into each other everywhere and if you draw a knife like this you could easily end up stabbing and either seriously injuring or even killing them or yourself. Although some times this may be the type of knife you need, your choice, if you want one a good source would be a scuba diving supplier. Personally i jump with a jack the ripper on my chest strap (tied on with a lanyard) and a smaller poly carbonate type in a pocket on the front (not the side, too prone to lines catching) of my thigh as a backup. However 1000+ crw jumps and i have never had to use one yet, i saw one used once and that was just to cut a bridle line. Hope this helps Plastic

Hi, Nice video, i have given up warning people of the dangers of crw on high performance canopies, if they do it and that happens and they survive they wont do it again (hopefully) and if they dont survive then they really wont do it again. Plastic

A pity about the divx, maybe they just needed the codec to play it. Another year or two and i think most dvd players will support divx, mine does and it is 18months old. Plastic

When you get to my age memories are all you have so they have to be good! Plastic

Hi Andre, I seem to remeber in eloy 1998 your team had some canopies that were pretty much like ar7's. They seemed to land ok though, at least looking from a distance! Plastic

I Belive, having been coached for several years by vincent ferrer - ex french team and designer (or at least part designer) of the diamant\rubis - that many years ago the french team purchased from aerodyne the rights to make their own canopies based on the design of the ar7. This was when the team moved away from the contact manufactured by parachutes de france, i think after bill haslet's team won the rotations in thailand 1990 on ar7's. From time to time they would make minor changes to each canopy to improve the characterisitics of the canopy to match their techniques. Although the canopies are now much changed from the original design, the ar7 landing characteristics still remain i believe with the rubis. We (uk sequential team, world meet 2001) did buy and jump diamants for a while and found the landings ok, although i have never jumped a rubis. The diamants were a good sequential canopy but took a lot more getting used to than a lightning and we did not get enough training jumps on them before the world meet and our scores suffered for it. After 2001 i left the team and my diamant with it. I believe i have my facts more or less correct, however if anybody knows better then feel free to correct me. Plastic

Hi, I hope the guys you are going to jump with also have ar-7s as these canopies are not compatable with either lightnings or triathlons. I have a few jumps on an ar-7 and we had a couple of teams in the uk that used them in the mid 90's. As for packing, they pack the same as a lightning, the openings are ok but they do not land well which was the main downfall of this design. Plastic

You could do similar with somebodys freebag!

Hi Cheryl, Good points and very true, the whole object of the exercise is to get clarity of the rules and then make sure that dives are judged to the rules as printed. The lack of clarity and different interpretation of unclear rules even at international level is making this much harder at domestic level. Considering the 2-way competition was meant to encourage new teams in the discipline the problems being experienced may well start to have the opposite effect if this continues. Plastic

Having re-read my posts i have decided that the comments i made may have been seen by some to be a personal attack so i have requested the moderator to remove all my posts on this thread. Can't find my dummy though. Plastic

Ali, Just to put the record straight. The team i was on was in last place, and by a long way, The reason for this was that we jumped like a bunch of muppets on the day and no amount of re-judging was going to change that. I feel that is a reason i can make an impartial comment on this. However you may have a point in what you say so i will ask the moderator to remove all my posts on this thread. As for discrediting the event judges though i think they may have done that when they walked away from the competition before it had finished, at that point I had not entered a protest either, not that it matters now. If you want to make comments on here, at least register a profile with your real name, lets people know who you are and what your opinions are, this is not personal, and nor was anything intended to be personal in any comment i made about any of the judges. Regards Plastic

Will Do. Before the competition started, we showed one of the judges the omniskore video of the us nationals where chris gay's 2-way team scored their world record 16 points. This judge (who is not fai qualified) announced to us that a lot of the points were busts, when we told him that this was an official score as judged by fai judges his response was "I dont care what they say, in my book i would have busted a lot of those points". at that point we knew we were going to have problems. This has come as a culmination of 2 years worth of problems with the same judges. The main reason for the protests this year was that this is a selection nationals for the next world championships, and there is a criteria for teams to get funding which is based on previous world meet scores, so it is improtant for our competition to be judged to the same criteria so as to make a fair comparison. plastic

Hi, Ignore the 2-way results. The judging was found to be so inconsistent that most of the teams put in protests about the judging. The judges then threatened the competitiors that if they did not withdraw the protests they would leave the competition, the competitors refused to be blackmailed in this way so all the event judges resigned and left before the competition was complete. No medals were awarded for the 2-way and the discs have been retained to be judged at a later date by a qualified fai judge. One example of this was heat on rd 4 only did 7 formations but were scored 8 points. The chief judge asked the event judges to review this dive they did and claimed the score was correct, despite all the teams being able to view this dive on camtrix which was playing all the dives on monitors around the dropzone and all being in agreement that they had only reached the 7th formation in the sequence, apart from heat who made no comment. Interesting note, heat were jumping i believe velocity 99's or something similar. Due to bad weather only 3 rounds of rotations were done and the sequential never got started and will be re-arranged for another date. plastic

Here is a tip, if your dz makes aad mandatory and you are thinking of a way of circumventing this rule, just do it and dont advetise it on a web site that is read worldwide. How do you know that some of the staff from your dz dont check this forum from time to time. Alternatively, if you think that you don't need an aad or just dont want to buy one then jump at a dz where one is not required, or dont jump at all. Be careful about circumventing rules cos if you go in you may get somebody else in trouble as a result. If you go with an aad then the cypres really seems to be the tried and tested tool for the job. plastic

I have only done crw for the last 10 years (a handfull of freefall jumps maybe) which amounts to about 1000 crw jumps. I dont have a cypres but if my dz made me get one i would turn it on, why not. The only real problem you may experience is a potential cypres fire when doing a fast low downplane but i dont do them anymore and i would not recommend a: doing them on high performance crw canopies and b: taking them low, reason being i believe at my stage of the game they are an unnecessary risk for minimal amount of reward. If you go through 750' in a wrap that is fast enough to fire a cypres then you are in a world of hurt anyway so a cypres may do you as much good as harm. Ever hear of a tail strike on a crw exit, i have, one lead to a jumper being unconcious and unable to pull, with no aad, result = fatality. Alternatively remko will tell you to get a tertiary, again a usefull piece of kit if you ever need it but will not keep the "cypres is mandatory" brigade happy. All food for thought. Plastic

Same resale value as a fury, maybe $50 Nobody does crw on f111 canopies any more.

Divx will give you the best compression rate.

I think the point wildcard was making was, if your descent rate meets the parameters for a cypres to fire it will fire. I get the point. Plastic

Sounds like a plan!

Outstanding story. I have had risers with hard housings for the last year or two because of the possibility of getting risers twisted on a bad wrap (the old sequential days of gaff to boomerang spring to mind). I am curious, do you guys really go from no2 to piolt without having hands in the toggles or did i mis-read your post. Glad you survived. Plastic