bofh

That surely is included in the price for the option. It seems they don't advertise many of their options on their home page. Perhaps they don't think it is worth it?

I think a lot of it has to do with people not knowing enough about moving air. There are people coming from a skiing background knowing almost nothing and there are people coming from a skydiving background knowing not much more. Its too bad the fatality list doesn't cover the victims' experience. There is also the same problem we see in wingsuit base and swooping, the desire to do all the cool things the experienced people do, but without the skills. Flying really small wings, doing maneuvers near the ground, swooping, flying without outs and so on.

You don't think products made for each discipline has evolved since then and have become better at their respective application? There's more to it than the size and looking similar. Last time I checked the parachutes were optimized for being able to open in freefall, having inlets optimized for that and a construction that survives the forces involved. A speed wing is optimized for being easy to launch which is important when the wind is high at a start where being dragged is dangerous. A speed wing is also optimized to recover quicker if it collapses in turbulence as well.

Are the crossports of equal numbers and sizes?

Why drag it when you can put the bag between your knees and walk towards the container?

Have you seen Ozone's patent for SharkNose? It would be interesting to see how that concept would work on a parachute: http://downloads.flyozone.com/pdf/PG/ozone_shark_nose_en.pdf

I've never found the rear risers to be hard to operate on my skydiving canopies and I've not noticed them being made easier to operate on my speed wing (a Skate). Perhaps you're thinking about trim systems that most speed wings have? That is not something you change in the middle of the landing. I don't think many people use the rears for input on speed wings at all, unless doing some acro move.

I noticed my legstraps had got a bit fuzzy at the rings after about 100 jumps. I took a look and noticed there were some hot-knife cut material that had got a tiny, sharp edge on it. We removed that and they stopped becoming more fuzzy.

Different types of rings perhaps? My rings are normal slider rings, with two tiny loops attached to them. Really light weight compared to some of the specialized rings for other RDS sliders.

My old crossfire2 129 packed about as large as my Safire2 119. My Scirocco-77 (9-cell crossbraced, with 4 mini-cells in the three middle cells) packed about as large as a Crossfire2 109. So of these canopies a crossfire2-120 would pack the smallest. I demod a Storm 135 once. I don't remember how it filled my container, but my container doesn't fit anything packing larger than the crossfire2-129, so it packs smaller than the crossfire at least.

I put the slink hats on to keep the rings up. Without, if I didn't pull them down they would sometimes fall down on their own, blocking the front handles. If I did pull them down, they would sometimes fly up. I also didn't want to have to pull them down over the brakes. For me they don't interfer with the brake lines when sitting at top.

The openings are quite long if I don't pull on the rears, but it does open after a while. I spoke to the manufacturer about it and they said it was because of my longer risers (25") and they do recommend a specific size for each canopy size. I always control the openings with the rears on my Scirocco. I've had one major line twist with it when I missed one of the risers and still started to pull for some stupid reason, but I managed to kick it out. The turn was so fast that I managed to hit myself in the head. I've also had a few minor linetwists when the bag or risers has snagged something (uneven opening of the riser covers perhaps?), but I can't blame the canopy for that. When I'm current the canopy opens straight for me, when I'm not it turns around 90 degrees during opening. I don't find it worse than my old X-modded VX or the few velo jumps I've made. But I guess it depends on the WL and size.

I think you have already answered your own question with regards to why people don't want to answer you, there are just too many variables. Even if one can say that under 1.0WL, you can't activate a brand X AAD and over 4.0 its hard not to activate a brand Y AAD, what good does that information do for you if you were between those wingloadings or jumping a brand Z AAD? If you want to know how close you are to the risk zone, make a couple of good jumps with a GPS logger and look at the peek speeds and where they are and compare it to the AADs manual. If you are still in doubt, send the graphs to the manufacturer and ask them. I'm sure there is someone at your DZ that has a flysight and can help you turn the data into a graph via one of the many programs used for that, someone with a wingsuit is a good bet. The statistics says that an AAD lowers the risks more than it increases it so I don't see why you think it is a bad idea? Have you tried asking the AAD manufacturer and what did they say?

I logged my jumps with flysight and sent a Paralog diagram to Airtec who suggested that I should switch to the speed cypres. That was with 270 turns.

Sounds like your brakelines are too short. See if the tail is pulled down as you pull on the fronts (it should not). If it does and you want to do anything about it, talk to a rigger.

I love the usage of sexism when telling people to grow up.

You have checked that it has the right size slider? It has happened before that canopies are delivered with the wrong size slider (or it being turned 90 degrees).

Not at all. There's a difference between stacking the odds against an incident vs pretending like an incident won't happen because of the criteria. The bottom line is that not everyone is going to be happy but EVERYONE has an avenue to get one. Whether they do or not is up to them. Ian Yes, I expressed myself a bit poorly there. What I meant is that PD does assume some responsibility in choosing who will have the opportunity to buy the canopy. The buyer can of course decline to buy it if approached.

Its also a rather bad analogy from a technical point of view as those cars are designed according to specific race rules that not only prevent the ultimate performance, but also make the cars harder to drive. Street legal cars with more power are available for anyone with enough cash and they can be driven by your average millionaire. But it is an interesting move by PD. They take responsibility away from the buyer. So what happens when someone still dies under a peregrine? Is there a happy lawyer that claim they encouraged the jumper to get a too fast canopy by approaching him with the offer? Or that they were negligent when they didn't use the same power to prevent someone from buying a velo?

So lets say you could fly 100m on your comp velo in some weather, but you only go 90m. With the peregrine you could go 110m, but since you are not so skilled you only fly it at 90% and get 99m. So without improving your skills at all you get 9 meters longer. Is that really such a waste of fabric? Can't you keep improving your skills on the peregrine or do you stop improving once you change canopy? If you just improve 1% you would get further when you ever could with the comp velo in this imaginary scenario. Would that be a waste of fabric? If we follow your reasoning to the absurd, why should anyone fly a comp velo or even a velo? I doubt very few people has flown any canopy at 100%, least of all many times in a row, so perhaps we should all stay on a navigator or perhaps the good old manta? No?

I don't like PdF's risers, but their toggle mounting is the best! I got myself a pair of vector 25" risers with Louie Loops and had chuting star do the "russian mod" on them - installing PdF style toggles (from Paraavis) and I'm really happy with them. See http://www.chutingstar.com/info/paraavis-pin-toggles for more info (check under the expert advice).

Try to buy one of these: http://www.airborne-sys.com/pages/view/raider-hi-glide But on the other hand, that it is a bit problematic to combine it with a normal dropzone. They want to drop the next load and people dont really like falling down near open canopies.

Here is another one. http://www.laboratoridenvol.com/projects/bhl/bhl.html

And also are too heavy and protect too little...

http://www.dropzone.com/cgi-bin/fatalities/search.cgi?query=wingsuit