dorbie

There is a timing element involved and if you haven't got a lotta practice doing that, or don't usually jump in windy situations I wouldn't recommend trying it at a demo...added to the mix she was jumping a drop flag maybe 1/4 of her body weight. The minimal forward drive is lost the instant it touches the ground. Yes practice is important, if you don't have the kiting skill then you will have difficulty putting this into practice. Any jumper should factor in their ability before exiting in high wind. The key thing to learn is that your response to getting pulled back is to let up on your toggles and get your ass down in your harness. Trying to kill your canopy through brake input when you're losing a battle with the wind is about the worst thing to do because before your canopy comes down the horizontal component of lift is going to become massive and kill your airspeed (you'll have an increasingly negative ground speed). That and keeping the canopy over your head with minor touches on the rear risers or break lines and body shifts are the main skills. I personally let go the brakes when I turn to face my canopy and it allows less induced drag through brake input when controlling like this. If you have forward airspeed speed due to the weight of the flag and your ground speed goes negative due to the loss of this wing loading then it's probably too windy to be jumping, but we don't have that info. However, even when you are moving backwards, the same ideas apply. In practice most people feel a loss of airspeed because a lot of THEIR body weight is resting on the ground, load the harness and get off the brakes on touchdown and don't complete the flare after you kill your vertical speed. You cannot re-load with canopy with the flag weight but you can with your own body. P.S. There are many places to practice kiting, it doesn't need a busy DZ. On landing you need not kite your canopy for a long time, you're kiting it for a short time to get it down faster and you will get it down faster and safer like this than you will fighting it on the brakes.

Yup, those are the exact defects I listed, I did seal it with gaffers tape for the test, but it wasn't suitable in the end. Some jumpers, base jumpers and wingsuit fliers apparently use them, but it seems very similar to the bike helmet w.r.t. issues. It has one advantage, it doesn't need a sticker on it disavowing any claims of offering protection. It actually has an "aerosport" cert.

I think many skydivers would be well served by a helmet like this with a lower profile chin, better seal and a suitable visor option. I tried jumping a PG helmet and it didn't quite work out. This looks like a similar option, with similar issues.

They protect you from small knocks & bumps but the reality is that most skydiving helmets are piss poor at offering significant impact protection. There's a range of protection between a cumbersome and impractical motorcycle helmet and a thin cloth pad that might be offered. The market seems to get or demand product towards the excessively thin end of the scale with few exceptions. Pro-tec is regularly cited as the better option for a reason, and that sticker is very deservedly on your new helmet.

This is about the only post needed in this thread. Folks really should try to understand the role of deceleration forces in head injury. Spreading the deceleration of any impact over time reduces the impact forces. This is by far the most important role for a skydiving helmet. To do a really good job of this takes a thick layer of deformable padding. But some deformable padding that spreads deceleration over time is better than none.

What species are you? If you think you can avoid human mistakes you are fooling yourself. You can reduce (not eliminate) your personal exposure but that often involves having less fun or looking less cool.

That sucks, it's the main reason it just ain't worth getting expensive shades/goggles for me.

Yup, I posted a link for that site to this thread two weeks ago.

This happened in 2007 to a paraglider pilot with fatal results. A pilot called He Zhongpin was sucked up to 19000 feet and got hit. I don't think it's guaranteed to be fatal however a direct lightning strike is very bad and you have no protection under canopy.

Why? To a whuffo, the skydiving you do is stupid. You choose your level of acceptable risk; they choose theirs. Probably not as dangerous as people think, but if everyone did it regularly we'd be getting incidents all the time caused by this. Fine; when they put "doing a Mr. Bill" on the A license check card, I'll worry about it. Feel free to run with scissors, I ain't stopping you and wouldn't want anyone else to stop you.

Why? To a whuffo, the skydiving you do is stupid. You choose your level of acceptable risk; they choose theirs. Probably not as dangerous as people think, but if everyone did it regularly we'd be getting incidents all the time caused by this.

New options, I searched Amazon; http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_a?url=node%3D1036700&field-keywords=safety+glasses

Technically FAR 105.19 requires strobes to be visible for 3 statute miles under canopy.

I use the L1456. This strobe is nice & bright. The metal clip is a bit iffy. I wouldn't rely on it. It's a bit like a safety pin but less secure against a plastic hook with not enough depth. I've used gaffers tape to attach to my helmet when skydiving. It worked well. It's not perfectly periodic, in that there's some slight randomness to the flash rate although it does reliably flash. I've also used it paragliding and attached it to a lanyard to dangle beneath me at sunset. It's much brighter than the usual crappy strobes PG pilots use.

http://www.safetyglassesusa.com/foam-pad-goggle.html

Some people shouldn't experiment.

My Paragliding wing has VELCRO on the wing tips so you can open them up, but the main reason is to remove accumulated debris because they are inflated by cross ports only. There is a Paragliding wing where the center 3(ish) cells can be zippered together to convert from a tandem to a solo wing.

$5 at WalMart and meets ANSI Z87.1 http://www.imagechicken.com/uploads/1242541017099428500.jpg I saw this only after I was tempted by the go-faster flames on some el-cheapo shades. Hopefully those flames will help my fallrate. Not as cool as paying $100-$250 for a set of shades.

I may have to revise my theory w.r.t. propensity to lose sunglasses. My el cheapo sunglasses went walkabout today . I'll be eyeing the budget section of WalMart for my next pair of stylish eyeware. I may glue them permanently to my helmet this time Those blueeye goggles sure do look cool, but they're above my price range if only because I'm sure to leave them lying around somewhere too.

P.S. my goggles always end up scuffed and/or marked due to being in my gear bag and coming on and off etc. Sunglasses don't steam up and seem like lower maintenence. But I'm kinda sloppy with goggles. I still use both options.

The best goggles I have are a pair of cheap sunglasses I got in a fishing tackle store. I recently added a $5 lanyard. They actually contour my face pretty well in freefall too. I find I don't need a complete seal, just something approximate that stops most of the blast of air. Not as cool as gatorz, but they do the job. If you're anything like me your propensity to lose shades is proportional to the square of their cost.

Before I was A licensed one of the videographers at my first DZ got a facefull of drogue and it caught in his ringsight and entangled. He had to rip the drogue to clear it from his ringsight. This can and does happen.

Well I'm here to try to avert that risky learning process so I appreciate the risks. However when someone starts ridiculing people for thinking they can learn this way (as happened in the post I replied to) it is absolutely appropriate to point out that some of the heroes in skydiving learned exactly this way. It's not about saying this is the right way to learn (that much should be obvious given the context), it's that our perceptions of what's required of training are based on our experiences and students don't have the experience to know better, especially if they meet a skydiver who offers to "mentor" them, so ridicule is misplaced. Try this, take a FJC student before the course, give him 2 minutes on flying the canopy, show him how to read his alti, tell him where his handles are and to chop if he has a malfunction and then walk him towards the plane. My bet is a large percentage would willingly following you ready to skydive after a brief introduction if they are not expecting a full day of FJC and might yet if tell them you usually do an introductory jump before the FJC to familiarize them. Most students don't know any better, and don't have any firm expectations of what training involves.

I suggest you go listen to Bill Booth's story about his first skydive, it's available on skydiveradio in one of his interviews, not only does he get to vote but you jump gear he helped design. I suspect a student could do as you describe, kill themselves and remain legal throughout simply by having the right gear and informing the right authorities. In this case the paraglider pilot thinks he's being mentored by a guy who is not qualified as an instructor.

PMs now enabled incase anyone tried and never got through....