ctrph8

I think that part of the mental map (for me anyway) is that the map includes emergencies or the possibility that things won't always look the same every time. It is a map with lots of different roads leading to the same place. In the case of students this would mean giving them a mental picture of what the emergency procedures look like and the tools to calmly deal with it. It also gives them the tools to identify the possible scenarios without freaking themselves out so bad that they don't manage the situation. We've all seen the student who came down from a jump and told everybody about their brush with death when they had closed end cells. I agree that just picturing a happy outcome isn't enough but I don't think that is what he is saying. I think he is saying that part of the preparation for someone, especially a student, would include getting them to think through a situation to the point that they can see all the aspects of it it in their mind. I don't discount what was said about the need to build the mental model for success. But I just don't see the process stopping there. Sorry, I am still stuck on the survival thing because of the talk of panic in the post. I have not seen (in my few months) anyone near panic because they could not make a dock on a student jump. But suppose that while the person is visualizing the perfect jump on the ride up and someone yells, Get out, get out, it's 1100 feet, pull your reserve, pull your reserve and then the person looks up and sees a mess overhead at 800 feet......Maybe some visualization of what to do next might have been good. How many people in the last 15 months cut away low and died. Why did they do that? Did "their surroundings cease to look like the mental model" that they had prepared for? (rhetorical ) Edited: If the idea is how to deal with people that are near panic with the thought of jumping at all, then I was off on a tangent and didn’t not intend to derail the thread.

I would second that. When they say it will fit a maximum of a certain number, they aren't kidding. I have a W10. I had a PDR160 in and a Crossfire 2 149. The thing was like a brick on my back. I changed to an Optimum 160 and it helped a lot. The 168 will be tight.

When the first Sabre came out, it was really likely that you were going to get your socks rolled down a few times by hard openings. I had bruises that would last for a week. That was 20 years ago. Now, the technology that is going into these canopies is pretty amazing. PD and Icarus have both really dialed in the openings. Each manufacturer has their own secret sauce for doing this but the end result is that you are likely to have really good openings on your Sabre 2. The vectran lines are great! I think that getting dacron lines would be trading performance and pack volume for protection against a problem you will probably not have.

You can. It will suck but you can. I've been doing it with an OJ and a Crossfire 2 149. After about a year of wrestling this thing into the container I gave up. The container looked crappy too. Now I keep a 129 in it. Much better. What you asked them was if it fits, not whether you can cram it in there. Believe them. Something you might try: Borrow a D-bag for an TJNK/OJ, Put it in your container for a weekend and do a bunch of jumps. The canopy just doesn't fit well. You can do it, but not well. Also, you might get the bright idea to just get a bigger D-bag. You can do that too, but it will not work very well either. If your container was ugly with the 150 and the regular bag, it will be even uglier with the bigger one.

High five Mike! Don't worry so much about deadline. Go rock this thing! I've been thinking about this for a while. Most of the online presence I see has been John coming on to refute some inaccurate statement, people complaining about something and the work that someone is putting in to the Facebook page. What I don't really see is the company seriously promoting their product. They just defend it. Show us why you think the products are so cool. Show us lots of pictures of really tricked out rigs. Show us all of your products from lots of angles and with lots of close-ups. Show us all of the details and creativity that goes into each rig. Show us a running slide show of every sport rig that comes off the line. Show us promotions that the company is having. Make this the kind of interactive website that is updated often enough that people want to come back and see what is new. I'm excited to see what you guys come up with! Let us know when it is up and running.

Nice job! They make great gear but have a terrible website. They started doing some cool stuff on Facebook. It is listed under Parachute Labs, not Racer or Jumpshack. This is just my opinion, but I really believe that if they changed their online presence, it would change their public perception.

The price is for a complete pack job. If the thing is a tangled mess I would certainly kick over a few bucks. My view is that I hand them an unpacked, untouched rig that needs no additional work in return for the agreed price. I usually tip anyway. Sometimes I do that stuff to be helpful but the expectation is that I can land, hand them a rig and get on the next load.

This is not just a PDR with different fabric. It is it's own design. I have one but have never flown it so you might get better information from other people. From the people I've talked to, it flies and lands much more responsively than a traditional reserve. Last weekend we were talking about them on the plane. The guy with the most experience with them said that his other reserves certainly saved his life but his Optimum flew and landed better. "After one landing on mine I sold my other reserves." He also said that the braked speed of it (before releasing the toggles) was very slow and that it was comparable to his other reserves in that regard. Is more expensive and if you need to do a repair on the fabric I think you need to send it in to PD. That being said, I went from a PDR160 to an Optimum 160 and my rig looks and feels a lot better.

I've worked with EB (Emmet Buchanan) and very briefly, Cat. Both were great teachers and very nice people. Once you progress beyond back flying, the instructors charge their own rates for personal coaching in addition to the tunnel time. I was just quoted $200.00/hr in addition to the tunnel time by a different instructor who is not on the list that 3mpire mentioned. I have not worked with him before so I can't comment on his style but I can say that when he found out that I had requested coaching with my upcoming tunnel time, he e-mailed me, introduced himself and checked in with me. Nice touch!

Really? If you do, could you post pictures here? I've only seen the grainy pictures that Irvin and Pointer's used.

I can see what you are saying. I have a vision of what "reporting" should look like and the reality of the way the forums work is sometimes different. I still think I'll only report what I actually know but I can see your point. I do remember when the beer line wireless network was pretty much it as far as reporting went. Discussion and learning opportunities. Even the 'speculation' that some whine about generates new topics for discussion and more learning opportunities. Let's not get all involved with tunnel vision thinking every post in the thread should be strictly about the facts of the incident. I couldn't agree more! I kinda look at it the other way around... I take it for granted that the report isn't rock solid accurate in most cases. It's not a professional investigator or journalist posting, it's a skydiver with a perspective. What he saw, heard, remembers etc. isn't an NFL 'booth review', it's gonna be flawed. Add to that a degree of difficulty some have expressing themselves, differences in terms or vocabulary - and misinterpretations are to be expected. That's okay...what the incident report DOES is let everyone know 'something went bad someplace' ~ A wake up call that just may reduce some complacency, if you don't know bad stuff is happening you may develop a false sense of security. In most cases you at the very least get a gist of what happened, 'the type of incident' ~ Enables us to recognize trends that may otherwise go unnoticed & thus not dealt with in a timely manner. Usually get an idea of the gear used and the environmental conditions present, the specific independent variables. ~ Gives us food for thought regarding finding ourselves in similar situations. I like the speculation & the varied input discussing possibilities...it's enlightening, educational and often entertaining. It encourages thought about situations you may not have heard of or expected and ideas about how to deal with them. Many times I've come to realize the idea I had in my head on how to react to a certain scenario is outdated, been improved upon, unrealistic or just plain wrong. Several times I've spent the better part of an evening following up on an idea I saw in the thread...checking several sources and working to clarify my understanding. No matter where you are as far as skill & experience in this sport, you STILL don't even know what all you don't know. As my fellow old farts can attest, back when we jumped rocks for gear & the interweb wasn't even a dream - communication was slow & much MORE inaccurate...gotta wonder how many lives may have been saved or injuries avoided had we been able to discuss incidents at length as we do here.

Seriously! I didn't see that one until it was too late. I'm limiting myself to the one right now...OK, two, but if I had the room I'd have a whole floor of them. There is a part of me that REALLY wants a harness machine but I don't really want to do much harness work. I just want to be able to.

That part was just less out of line than the rest of the post so I focused on the first part. Are you saying that your post is NOT speculation? Or that there is a guilty party who deserves consequences? Or that someone recklessly endangered someone? Those are very serious accusations. Do you not see how inflammatory and irresponsible that is? It will probably not be proven or disproven here. The results of whatever investigation happens will most likely not be posted in large part because of the kinds of things you are insinuating. I'm not saying it would be because of you specifically. You just give the clearest example.

No. That's not what happened at all, even a little bit. That kind of speculation and crap slinging is exactly what I'm talking about. Think of that post as a shining example of what not to do.

You don't give back to the sport by reporting speculation. I have some pretty strong opinions as to what happened with both incidents, but they are just that, opinions. I don't actually know what happened, only what I saw and heard around the DZ. In this case, that's not enough. If I were to report just that, it would be doing the people who were involved and the people who were reading it a disservice. It is my opinion that the only people who should be reporting an incident are the people who were directly involved with it or someone (S&TA or someone who is officially sorting this out) who has really investigated the incident. Take a look at the incidents section. Most of that is just noise with a few really good reports in there as well. I saw an excellent example of how to report something not too long ago. A question came up that Ian Drennan had some information about. He chimed in, told everybody that there was an investigation going on and that he didn't want to comment or encourage speculation until it was complete. Later when he had all of the pieces of the puzzle he came back and discussed what the investigation turned up. I thought that was so classy and well done.

High five for doing all the work in the tunnel. You obviously have the kind of determination it takes to learn new skills. Now take that same determination and use it towards the other skydiving skill sets that go along with becoming a well rounded skydiver. Be methodical about learning canopy control and to some extent, basic rigging. I'm not saying you need to learn to pack a reserve (yet ) but learning how to set up and maintain your gear properly is important, especially because the speeds that you are flying at now are significantly faster. Your gear needs to be able to manage some serious freeflying. There are lots of people who can teach you canopy control if you want to accelerate your learning. Look for a good teacher, not just a hot canopy pilot. I'm still thinking about this theory, but I suspect that a lot of the people who get in trouble but have mad tunnel skills sort of "take a break" when it comes to pressing hard to learn many of the additional skills of skydiving. There are also lots of stories about people who do exactly what you are doing and learn everything they can. Be that guy. When I had 100+ jumps, I flew like I had 100 jumps and people kept an eye on me. If I was flying like you are now, I think people might have given me less crap about the stupid things I did... and I'd have paid for that.

I am really liking this series. Thanks!

DSE is exactly right. I watched most of the first incident and a bit of the second incident. It was a rough day. I wouldn't dream of reporting it here for all of the reasons he mentioned. The main reason I wouldn't personally report this is because although I was right there, I don't have all of the information. Many many times, someone reports an incident but is fuzzy on the details or reports what they thought happened, not what actually happened. I'd also add, while there are certainly things that can be learned from any incident, reporting it here pretty much just turns it into the usual flotsam an jetsam spouting off crap that is either irrelevant or just plain wrong. There are some insightful things that come up but for the most part it is just noise. I don't see much benefit but I do see a lot of reasons to be very careful about what is presented here.

Seriously! Slinging that much unnecessary crap and then whining about people calling him on it is not cool. Sooo not cool.

Back to the OP's question: I did pretty much what you are asking about. I ordered a rig that would accommodate a PDR 160... Technically. It was at the upper end of the spectrum. I packed it and had the manufacturer pack it just to see what a really good pack job would look like. It looked like crap. It felt like crap on my back. Later I switched out to an OP 160. The rig feels, looks and packs like an entirely different rig. Do yourself a favor and get a rig that is sized right in the middle of the range for the reserve you are going to use. This also addresses opening speeds. Buy a container that was tested and built for the mid-range of the container volume. Each manufacturer has LOTS of experience sizing your canopies properly to the rig. Call them. All of the major manufacturers will speak with you. If you go through a big gear dealer, (Chuting Star, etc.) they will also guide you in the right direction because they have probably seen exactly what you are asking about many times.

MEL probably has everything you need. Here is his info: http://www.skyworksrigging.com/

The course requirements can be more stringent than the FAA requirements to take the test. If you run a course, you can set it up any way you like. I think he does it that way so that everyone learns his method of packing and inspecting. Doesn't count according to who? Pretty sure the FAA would disagree with that one.

There is SO much to learn just to get the basics down. It is entirely possible to go there and learn what you need to learn but I'd suggest doing as much learning as you can in advance so you can focus more time on the concepts that are giving you trouble and less on the other stuff. Start sewing! Have someone show you how to do a basic patch and go wrestle with that for a while. The more you do, the better. You don't need a big commercial machine to practice (although it would help). You just need to get the patch done correctly when you are learning. My first patches were UGLY! There is an iPad/iPhone app called Groundschool that was helpful in learning the FARs. It is not perfect but it really helped me digest that information. Get both Pointer's manuals and Sandy Reid's book. Get familiar with how to find information. They are going to ask you questions that you will have to look up. The tests may differ a little from examiner to examiner but in my test I didn't just have to perform a task, I had to prove by some FAA document (usually those books) that the task I just completed was done correctly. Assume that you will have to have the instructions out for every task and be able to find the information. High five for starting this! There is a lot to learn but it is worth it.

I watched that a few times. Those were fast! I want one! The reality is that I'll probably never "need" one as opposed to an RSL... But I want one. I also hope to never find out exactly where the line is. Also, I've looked for other skyhook videos. The owner of that one should change the title or add key words so that it comes up under a search for "Skyhook".

I was looking for the video of that for my first post. Could you find a link? That was what opened my eyes about the Skyhook. Quote There is also the case at the Dubai cup 2011 when a Petra canopy collapsed mid turn. Pilot cut away and lived because he had a skyhook. /reply]