dorbie

My rig has a Cypress 2 in it, I keep seeing these references to the "cypres" card, ... Where can I get one of these? I will be flying with my rig for the first time on Friday, I plan on bringing ALL of the above info but I have yet to figure out or even ever see a Cypres card.. Anybody had any good / bad luck flying with a cypres rig w/o the card? My cypress2 came with this card. In fact it came with two copies of the same card. I don't think the card is essential, in fact it just identifies components in a typical x-ray image. I thought similar diagrams were available on the USPA or TSA site but the info has changed within the last month. The cypres 2 manual has the same diagrams in it (from memory, could be wrong).

I hope you took names and will file a complaint. You are allowed to fly with parachutes and AADs and it's recommended to carry them on. Let the USPA know and file a complaint with the TSA. From the USPA site: Skydivers encountering problems with screeners should request that the screener's supervisor become involved. Skydivers should insist that the supervisor review " Chapter Section 17.2 of Version 4.0 of the Screening Checkpoint Standard Operating Procedure." Skydivers encountering unsatisfactory treatment should contact USPA at 703-836-3495 ext. 325 or e-mail us. Be ready to provide the airport, date and time of flight, airline and flight number, and names of TSA officials involved.

So I guess that means no handle checks, and flying the canopy in half brakes at all times in order to keep the camera on level with the student's face? Oh, and my video subjects are stars for 6+ minutes because I include pre-jump footage, in-plane footage, and a post-jump interview. If you are doing handle checks and truly flying your canopy (including full flight in preparation for landing) then the student is out of frame for significant parts of the video. When I shoot tandem video, the student is in frame the whole time, and I can get shots from a variety of angles, not just one. Are you also doing ground footage, in plane footage, and after-landing footage? Sounds like a lot to ask of a busy tandem instructor. I would bet that the video these students are getting is skydive only, from one angle only, with breaks in the coverage during landing and freefall. Doesn't sound so great to me. Of course I will be dismissed as a videographer who is afraid of losing his job. Bullshit. I don't feel threatened by the hand-cam, I just think the student's safety is being compromised for $$$ and they are getting an inferior product in the end. - Dan G But you miss the entire canopy flight down except the landing as a videographer, no matter what the TM does. Watch that video and tell me the section immediately after the canopy deployment didn't beat those post jump interviews. That was pretty darned awesome IMHO. I wouldnt' call it inferior, just different. Seems to be swings & roundabouts. You're definitely going to miss some great stuff with either approach. Maybe it's time to make a "deluxe" video package actually mean something and do both with some real editing.

I'm not sure where I read it, but I did read someone suggest that having boots that prevent ankle injury might just increase the risk of other leg injuries. It seems logical to me, if there is force to be absorbed, and your ankles don't absorb it... what will? (maybe your tib/fib higher up, or worse, your knees??) -A Well quite the opposite can happen too, without ankle support if your ankle does go over you can do additional injury to your knee. I'm sure this is how I tore my ACL (not skydiving but kiting a paraglider). My ankle went over to the outside (in a divot I think) creating a lateral bend in my knee and "pop". Anecdotal of course but we're talking about complex biological mechanisms, not a couple of ideal springs. There are many different types of injuries and it's not only about absorbing forces in one place vs another. Keeping your joints in alignment to do their job by providing a little bit of support can help with all sorts of stuff like ligament and miniscus injuries that have the potential to take you out for longer or more permanently than some fractures. FWIW I walked reasonably well a few minutes after my ACL tear, it seemed OK, the next day it was bad, swolen and immobile. I went to the doc a couple of weeks later when it didn't improve much and only then did I learn what I'd done. No injury or incident report was filed, I expect this isn't uncommon for the 'minor' stuff.

Something I've learned the hard way, see attached image.

The graphics will help you more for the games than the video editing unless you're doing a lot of 3D effects with software that exploits the hardware (not so common). Some packages are starting to exploit the graphics capability but it really depends on the software you use. A decent graphics bus and fast memory is usually more important, and the fast graphics bus goes hand in hand with the latest graphics cards & mobos so they correlate to an extent. As for 'dedicated' graphics this can mean many things, some manufacturers put integrated graphics in their chipsets, With ATI you'll see "IGP" somewhere in the chipset name. Sometimes these integrated graphics solutions don't have dedicated memory. Sometimes they do. Often a dedicated graphics chip is part of the motherboard design but still a separate chip and just as valid from a performance standpoint as any other option. Sometimes the integrated graphics are pretty unimpressive (Intel chipsets with integrated graphics aren't that impressive IMHO) and a generation or two behind, but there are some real exceptions. When looking at the graphics the "128 Radeon" doesn't describe much. ATI has a whole product line of Radeon Mobile chips and 128 has been used to describe everything from bus width to memory capacity. Finding out what the actual chipset graphics chip and graphics bus is would help if you cared. With a mobile system I wouldn't sweat the graphics upgrades. You can't upgrade these systems like you upgrade a desktop even if you can swap the graphics card out, you might have one upgrade option if you're lucky. If it's on the motherboard or an IGP chipset it may still be a decent system for a laptop but the chip on the motherboard extends into the higher end product offerings than an IGP chipset would.

Do you think I went too far with what's up there now, or did I change it "just enough" (I'd really like to leave it there long enough for Tim Eason to see it) You went too far, you can't take their art add an "R" and claim it's novel. If they fight you you will lose. Photoshop your own and make it a protest. This is not about duplication, it's about warning. IANAL, but this is the central issue, if your site is visually similar such that it might be confused with the legitimate site you might get SLAP'd. So don't do that. In addition, if you lift visual elements directly you won't have a leg to stand on that's copyright theft so don't do that. Your goal is to inform the public that skyride is not the best way to go skydiving, and definitely NOT to pretend that you are in any way similar to skyride. A URL that said plainly "dont_skyride.com" would be better IMHO, I'd recommend changing (sorry), but even if you run with 1800skyrider do not use their art or try to copy them, even if they do that to others, their bad behavior won't protect you from the consequences of your bad behavior. Defense against trademark infringement centers around whether joe public will be confused into thinking that you are skyride in any way. Even if he isn't confused yuo still can't steal art.

I don't think google objects to legitimate links with real dropzone sites etc, they only get upset with fake sites and link backs & blatant google gaming. If all DZ sites including dropzone linked to the skyride protest site it would be entirely legitimate and rise to the top of the rankings almost instantly. Make it clear on the front page that you are a protest site. Protest sites have survived trademark disputes, I know skyride steal from photographers & web artists but you might as well keep it legit and unassailable. A protest site that has a few horror stories of people who were ripped off by them would help. So, a warning page, links to USPA and the lists of legitimate dropzones, a description of how you really arrange to go on a skydive, ... call to book and just show up with cash or CC, and a section to post the horror stories of people ripped off by skyride and their no refund "policy". Let us know when the site is up so I can add a link to my site. P.S. I can't emphasize enough, DO NOT take anything from their site, not even the telephone number art. Make your own, "borrowing" their art is theft and you wouldn't have a leg to stand on if they tried to SLAP you. Keep it legit, you don't need to take anything from them.

Of course but as I've speculated already it may be a precaution merely to eliminate a potential concern. People make mistakes, borrow rigs etc.

??????????? Why not in TANDEM MODE without realizing it. Sorry but your remark makes by my opinion no sence at all when it comes to riding down with the plane without switching it OFF (like with the expert and tandem Cypres. I am glad they have your symphaty but I see here riggers, experienced skydivers and engineers raising their doubts... Femke Are you serious? It seems that you have a problem understanding my post. I'm speculating that because it might be set by the user to *any* mode including those with low speed activation, deactivation could be a sensible precaution for the device instead of "dumb". It's a really simple observation to understand. Your other post was confused about the Vigil's programmability stating that it made no sense for expert versions. Once again a single Vigil can be set to one of several modes it is a multi-mode AAD. Maybe there's a language problem here.

You should remember your pull priorities. 1) Pull 2) Pull at the correct altitude 3) Pull Stable Look at the position of number 3. It's good to pull stable but it is more important to pull with plenty of height and definitely more important to pull. Instability in not the end of the world, just slightly more risky, but you know how to handle nuisances & malfunctions. If you remember this relax and arch like crazy, secure in the knowledge that it's not your last option you'll be fine. Even when you're on your back you can watch your altitude and you can pull without waiting on your instructor. That knowledge may take the edge off your fear.

Yup, relax. As for legs, my instructor had a nice technique for teaching this. He got me lying on a creeper arching, and took a hand under each foot, next he got me to straighten my legs and as I did he pushed me along, then he told me to steer by adding pressure with my feet and steered me appropriately. Constantly monitoring the pressure I was applying through my legs with his hands and telling me "more! more!". Later we threw in a bit of arms & dearch. It prepared me well for my dive. If all you're doing on the ground is arching you're actually applying the opposite muscle you need for leg extensions, so getting some resistance under your legs and pushing against it may help develop some muscle memory before you try it in freefall. Having the turn input based on what the instructor was feeling I was doing was invaluable.

A vigil is multi-mode the one unit can operate in student, expert or tandem mode. Hence I expect the catchall warning, it makes perfect sense to me if they're covering for the possibility that you may have it in student mode and not realize it. Making the assumption that this is because of a product flaw or plain dumb instead of a sensible CYA precaution for a user programmable device is taking things a bit far IMHO. P.S. it makes even more sense when you consider that Vigil is having to satisfy the concerns of parachute associations in scores of countries and gain a measure of acceptance. They have my sympathies

Wrong. The documentation says it will fire when it measures a 1050 foot pressure and greater than 78MPH. decent rate In a stable belly-to-earth configuration this occurs at 750 feet. Pitching at 1500 and snivelling will fire it. I've seen video showing 2000 feet on an altimeter, immediate deployment, and Cypres fire. If you plan on deploying at 3000 feet, your Cypres won't fire even if you go a bit low (say 2500). If you plan on deploying lower it might. Edit, OK I understand your point about the pressure difference in a snivel vs belly. It maybe adds an extra second and a half so you're talking about ~5.5 seconds. It doesn't much matter if you snivel past the AAD trigger altitude or fall past it, if you'd pitched ~5? seconds later you'd have unquestionably hit the ground at speeds in excess of 78 MPH without an AAD which would make for a very bad day. Any way you look at it 5 seconds is a thin margin of error. It could reasonably be argued that at those altitudes you should have been pulling your reserve anyway, not your main. So you have serious altitude awareness issues. Student versions of the original cypress had higher firing altitudes (from memory ~2000ft)and lower speeds for firing. The new ones seem to have only lower speeds. I'm not saying an AAD won't fire high, it would be foolish to make such a claim, but we don't know what model of cypress was in the video you saw and one anecdote even on video doesn't make the case.

Student cypres units seemed to have similar issues when I was learning at my old DZ. The instructors ensured they were deactivated before any descent. The problem AFAIK is the danger of the aircraft exceeding the lower descent rate trigger of the device when beneath the firing altitude. It doesn't seem like you'd have to tell the pilot to wait unless he turned back real low. The student gear had the AAD easily accessible beside the reserve pin making this simple. This may just be a sensible precaution for a device which optionally supports a student mode, i.e. lower activation descent rate (and possibly higher altitude?).

It's a personal choice. It's more about educating oneself on the pros and cons of owning one and making an informed decision. Owning one simply to "beat the odds" can lead to dependence on the AAD ("Oh well, I know my CYPRES will save me if anything goes wrong"), which leads down the dangerous road to complacency. I over simplified my position to summarize my views at the start of my post. Getting informed is the right thing. However playing the odds is the right strategy. I have a video of a tandem pair on final approach at about 500 Feet experiencing a CYPRES fire and landing under two canopies. Don't get me wrong - I am a CYPRES fan . . . I own one and have a lot of confidence in the product. But it is a mechanical device and despite its high quality and modern engineering it can malfunction. Interesting, but no note on the cause or era of the failure? For me this does fall into the playing the odds category. People are good at focusing on problems and missing the big picture, i.e. the benefits far outweigh the disadvantages. It probably communicates that this person is in need of more than just an AAD. It indicates they are in need of some re-training and a serious look at the dangerous nature of this sport. People who are switched on and continually respect the danger of skydiving, doing all they can to mitigate the risks, are around for a long time. Big time, but my point was only to highlight the weakness of using low pull 2 out scenarios as a case against AADs.

It's easy to see that different tests could impose conflicting design requirements, especially if the impact speed and acceptable acceleration was changed. For example, minimizing the G forces in lower speed impacts would burn valuable compression space that might mitigate greater forces in higher speed impacts using firmer material.

Get an AAD, most of the arguments around not getting one are specious, skydivers are saved by AADs and I haven't heard of one incident of anyone one being killed by one, so do the smart thing and play the odds. If you have a two out with a cypress it means that you hadn't deployed by 750 feet. i.e. another 4 more seconds of inattentiveness and you'd have hit the ground at a fatal impact speed. If this ever happens to you then you've just proven that of all people *you* really need an AAD even if you pulled your main just in time. It's unlikely you'll trigger a pro in a swoop, the students have/had lower thresholds and this might have happened, but since you're getting a pro (right) you needn't worry about that. The devices are well shielded (This was the old vigil issue but only for massive electrostatic voltages). I'm confident I won't get an accidental deployment due to an AAD, but if I do the chances are it'll pop on the ground where an active AAD spends most of it's time. This is what happened with a couple of vigils and they were grounded & recalled for upgrades (every one of them), so you can be sure this is not happening with any regularity with current AADs or we'd all know about it PDQ. AAD's self diagnose when powered on. The cypres 2 is no exception, one thing it can do is measure power from the battery. The old cypres used to give you a voltage readout, the new one just counts down and tests internally. I trust its ability to detect power supply problems and predict battery life with a healthy margin of safety and simply tell me to send it for service if there's a problem. It doesn't have to guarantee battery life or have infallible reliability etc, it need only run a thorough self test. If it goes wrong in 4 years it is going to tell you. You also keep your end of the deal by switching it on and checking it before each jump.

Found a company called Oregon Aero that does custom liner upgrades to skydiving helmets and has some interesting products of their own. Skydive helmet upgrades: http://www.oregonaero.com/p77_2001.html#skydive They also detail a drop test here the ANSI 290.21 helmet test: http://www.oregonaero.com/p6971_2001.html#results Seems if they can improve the properties of a decent flight helmet they can probably improve on cloth pads with enough space.

Nope, it is the point. By adding a helmet you're increasing the risk of something else, ie: a basal skull fracture. TBIs aren't always fatal or seriously debilitating, but a basal is.Quote Basal skull fractures are not always fatal and the risk of one would depend on the scenario. Getting over the issue of MC helmets and just looking at skydiving helmets for a moment, one can speculate on scenarios all day long but without statistics and analysis it's just speculation. At the very least the degree of additional weight vs protection needs to be considered. In my opinion most helemts I've seen offer only the illusion of the kinds of protection you need with a significant impact. Padded helmets needn't be significantly heavier some foams are very light weight and the shell needn't vary much from existing designs. In the end it's down to personal judgement but saying that the case for better head protection is silly seems to make too many assumptions. This helmet interests me, but it still isn't full face. At least this company takes the issue of protection and impact forces seriously. http://www.gentexcorp.com/helmetsystems/pmhalo.htm Safety standards need a benchmark for testing, they tend to be limited and somewhat arbitrary. but it doesn't make them worthless. I would be interested in simple weight & deceleration numbers in a standard drop test with a dummy head in the helmet. It would definitely influence my helmet purchasing decision. Gentex has these numbers but doesn't exactly serve our market. Nobody ever said a magic bucket is out there. This started with me looking at my 1/4 inch pad that compresses to about 2mm of hard fibre with no effort and knowing that it's going to do nothing to help my brain in most collisions, so why shell out $300? To make a fashion statement? Like I said if I'm buying a helmet this is the time to consider the kind of protection it offers and it seems to me there's a whole spectrum of possibilities between a cloth lining and a motorcycle helmet that wouldn't be all bad.

Thanks, I hadn't even considered looking at this.

I'd trust my brain to an MC helmet before I'd trust it to a typical skydiving helmet. The lack of absolute protection does not make a case for almost no protection. I can understand the arguments w.r.t. hard openings (although a camera helmet seems worse considering the mass and the longer moment of inertia around the neck) however saying better protection only prevents TBI for relatively low impact seems to ignore the point, reducing impact forces with a thicker layer of foam preventing TBI is a good thing but it also reduces the severity of potentially fatal injuries. This is not a binary thing and I don't think this is about surviving a truly high speed impact. It's just that if I'm shopping for a helmet I might as well consider real protection if it is an option, even 1 inch of foam would be better than a 1/4 inch compressible soft cloth pad and some foams can be nice and light especially if they're something like a sacrificial bicycle helmet. I'm definitely off the MC helmet idea now but maybe I'll get creative with an oversized havok.

An algorithm in this case is referring to the software that interprets the sensor information and decides to deploy or not. It would include mathematics, tables and heuristics that both measures and model the physics of what's going on and constantly monitor for conditions that should trigger deployment. An algorithm can easily apply mathematical filters to smooth pressure variations in a burble for example but I doubt they'd be entirely reliable. For example you may find that smoothed variations result in a lower mean pressure and you can't tell if someone just fell rapidly for a brief period or the sensor rolled into a burble on the belly vs a sit. An algorithm can be really smart or fairly simplistic. Essentially an AAD need only measure pressure and the rate of change in pressure and activate on a very simple condition, but that would be an overly simple algorithm, AAD's at the very least adjust for ground pressure for example and reset ground if the rate of change is slow and the altitude remains constant for a while (I expect). You develop an algorithm like this by writing software based on the known sensor output, physical theory, modeling & testing. Over time your software might get smarter at interpreting what's going on by applying better filters & heuristics or using additional data but this is the stuff of trade secrets. I think some of the objections given are overly fussy, but I do jump with a Cypres2. If Vigil was the incumbent and the Cypres devices just arrived you could probably poke a few holes in it's design so this does not mean it's not a usefull lifesaving device IMHO. If more skydivers have an AAD because more can afford it then it's still making a contribution to safety IMHO. I bought my Cypres2 over the counter and there seemed to be no shortage of them, some folks have these in stock so getting one shouldn't be a problem.

I second that, although folks were pretty helpful with me, I paid for SDU. There is a gap in between AFF and A license that can leave students in limbo and they can't even jump with other skydivers to learn anything. Only coaches and almost all of those guys charge. That doesn't make a good intro to the sport for someone just done paying for AFF and contemplating buying a rig. To cap it off I just learned that one of my local DZs won't let coach rated jumpers jump with AFF graduates, you need to be an AFF I . Let's hope that nonsense doesn't spread.

You certainly have big problems :-), but I figure a shell is minimalist protection, it might help if someone tries to stab me in the head but substantial impact protection comes from space and firmness to prolong and reduce deceleration forces. If you need it you need it and many head injuries have a lot to do with your brain whacking against the inside of your own skull.