Jumpah

Scheduled for August 16th, 3PM ET http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA Note: While this one will be tame, there are other threads in the IAmA that are NSFW If you are unfamiliar with these "I am , ask me anything", it is a forum where people can ask the original poster anything. Other readers of the forum can up-vote or down-vote your post. Posts that do not add to the discussion tend to get down-voted by many, and at a certain threshold it stops being displayed to others. Posts with the most up-votes tend to be the most interesting. IAmA's are not usually celebrities...because it can be done quite anonymously you get quite an array of subjects.

Jason, We gathered around your camper last night and had a good time remembering you and all that you brought with you. You are missed by many. Blue skies!

Instead of polling the anonymous Internet, contact PD and ask them what they think.

Look for other traffic

Not disagreeing with you, just adding that I think forward penetration is often misused as an excuse to downsize. Skydivers need to think locally...a jumper on a square with a 1:1 loading at a DZ with 15 - 20mph and surrounded by soy beans is one thing...going backwards and landing off is not likely to be a big deal. That same jumper and conditions at a DZ surrounded by trees, buildings, powerlines, and bull fields with only a couple of outs is where more penetration can be helpful to give the jumper more options of where they can land. ....and there is always the option to stay on the ground. People often discuss the merits of downsizing or not, but rarely do I see it summed up as "a smaller canopy gives the pilot a smaller margin for error". To me that is what it comes down to. Whether we are talking about being able to fly a precise pattern, get enough landing separation or to survive a low turn or a no-flare landing, it's all going to be easier on a larger, slower canopy. Just this weekend I saw a whole bunch of landings where jumpers flared asymmetrically. No great problem on a Navigator loaded at 0.75, but potentially career ending on a Velocity @ 2.7. Smaller canopies can be more fun, but they bite much harder and faster. Absolutely! When I say downsize, I mean a sensible downsize.

The jumper that is in a bad area needs to stay on the ground, not get a higher performance canopy. Not necessarily...someone with 1,000 jumps is likely capable of a downsize for this sort of situation.

Not disagreeing with you, just adding that I think forward penetration is often misused as an excuse to downsize. Skydivers need to think locally...a jumper on a square with a 1:1 loading at a DZ with 15 - 20mph and surrounded by soy beans is one thing...going backwards and landing off is not likely to be a big deal. That same jumper and conditions at a DZ surrounded by trees, buildings, powerlines, and bull fields with only a couple of outs is where more penetration can be helpful to give the jumper more options of where they can land.

Not so huge. In fact, barest tip of the iceberg. While true that it is the barest tip of the iceberg, accomplishments are relative, someone going from nothing to an A has often just completed something extradinary, relative to their life up to that point.

I'm with you on this one... I'm certain many children could learn to skydive and do it safely, but skydiving has unknowns that no amount of skill can prevent, and those unknowns present liability issues to other people. We never skydive alone. Skydiving requires pilots, instructors, ground crew, investors, private businesses. Can laws in the US truly protect everyone involved in a child skydiving fatality to the same degree they would protect them if that child were an adult? My understanding is No, they do not. Sure...we deal with children doing dangerous things all the time...playing football, driving cars, joining the military. My issue is one of liability.

You don't need shelves of ammo for it to be useful.

Deland is a good place to go...don't wait until you go to California. You'll get world-class instruction there. However, once you get to California, be sure to be humble and take time to learn any differences between the two DZs.

My grandmother's neighbor would walk their dog in her yard. For a while I cleaned it up when I mowed and figured they'd stop, but it continued. Finally after stepping in it that last time, I collected what was there and left a good sized pile on their front porch. Never happened again.

In addition, YouTube uses services from Akamai to spread the distribution of videos out to a massive network of servers that are dispersed world-wide. Content is moved and cached between servers so that the consumer (you) are watching the video from the best source possible relative to where you are. There is probably much more to their formula, but thats the gist of what they do. Dropzone.com is probably hosted at a single location, so everyone goes to that one location to watch videos hosted on the site. This can cause issues for streaming quality if a lot of folks are watching, or if there is a bottleneck between you and dropzone.com. Akamai/YouTube reduces some of those risks by eliminating some amount of distance and hops. Also, using YouTube to distribute the videos vs. hosting them locally probably reduces the overall costs for running dropzone.com as they aren't paying the bandwidth to stream all those videos. Or maybe their ISP costs are fixed, in which case its just a matter of performance.

It is also written as a banner and hanging in a cubicle in the movie Tron

Thanks JohnRich, was about to post the same thing

I'm blaming the tunnel...makes people with few jumps better freefall fliers which allows them to be on bigger/better/more complicated skydives. Creates problems at breakoff altitude, poor tracking, or just simply flying a pattern with all that traffic they just jumped with. Not hatin' the tunnel or folks who put the time money and effort to learn this way.

Get someone who has done one before to go on the jump and help you organize. As someone else posted, never get over the raft. Very dangerous.

Admit the mistake, take the lashes, move on.

I've seen it both ways...people joking about a narrowly averted disaster on the next load, and people getting angry when a joke was made about the whole thing. Delivery and timing...sounds like you bombed on stage. Consider talking to the DZO when things are quiet and they've got some time, and maybe you'll get more info on why he was so upset at that moment. A comment that may be funny to seasoned skydivers could be horrifying to an AFF level 1.

Captain!

I'm on a Katana 150 (1.6 loading), and love the openings. I don't do anyting special with the nose other than ensure it is neat, slider neatly quartered and against the grommets, and I double stow all lines except the center locking stow (habit...don't think this matters much). I use up rubber bands fast, fortunately the DZ I jump at gives them away to help with safety. When I first jumped it I was using risers to fly on heading during deployment and got spun up badly once, and nearly a couple other times. Reading the Katana manual I found that PD has a recommendation here: "...will get the best results by keeping your shoulders level as the deployment bag lifts off of your back and keeping your weight even in the harness until the slider comes down. "Steering" with the risers before the slider comes down or allowing your weight to shift excessively can actually cause or exaggerate off-heading openings" The fact that i'm on a bigger canopy may be a key difference, tho the PD manual says nothing different about the Katana sizes and things like openings. The 150 has mesh along two sides of the slider which is not on the smaller sizes. Hope it all works out

Rawa is a great helmet...you won't tire of it.

You did fine...the main question is can you survive the landing? You evaluated, you decided, good for you. As you get more time in the sport you'll have more experience which will help develop other options you could choose that you would be comfortable with. I had a steering line disconnect in my hand when I had about 50 jumps. Big student canopy, 210 or so. I had no significant turns with the good break unstowed, so I practiced rear riser flares until I entered the landing pattern. Aimed for soft grass, PLF'd the landing like I was taught. No big deal other than some grass stains.

nice! See you there.

It had been a while since the last huge thread on this worn topic. I was wondering what was going on Here's an attempt...instead of telling them they've been doing it wrong for years and years, show them the new method and why it has advantages.