LloydDobbler

Agree with what Bruce said. Your best bet is to get to the DZ however you can, then post something on the bulletin board next to manifest. Also, talk it up with some other jumpers there. There are a ton of people who live in Boulder who come to the DZ every weekend. (I don't remember who all is a Boulder person right offhand...but there are plenty of them. Trust me.) Good luck! Signatures are the new black.

I usually agree with you, Twardo, but here I respectfully disagree with your assessment. Here's why: I'm not sure that you have evidence that what we're doing now is not correcting the problem. (Hear me out): In 2011, we reportedly had one wingsuit-related aircraft strike every 28 days. I'm not going to harp on the fact that those stats were apparently worldwide statistics, and included things like people catching their foot on the door while exiting - for our purposes here, let's just assume they're all legitimate. For a few months now, the thing I've been asking for has been an accounting of wingsuit-related tailstrikes in the U.S. in the year 2012. Since Spot seems to be the only person who receives reports of such things (or Rich Winstock as well, perhaps?), I wish they would furnish those in the interest of transparency. I suspect we'll find a drastically-reduced amount of strikes. Worldwide. Why? Because of awareness. Awareness is the only thing that can trump complacency. We've been discussing this thing so much that people have become aware of it. Let's keep that awareness going. What I want is the same thing that the insurance company wants (as evidenced by Jeff's letter to Robin): for tailstrikes to stop. I think that's what we all want. And if our increased awareness has led to a great reduction (or elimination) in the amount of tailstrikes, I'd much rather keep growing that awareness, because it's working. In the wingsuit forum (IIRC), Lurch had a great recommendation for an information campaign - I think we should make that a much higher priority than a new bureaucratic program to require every skydiver who wants to fly a wingsuit have someone read them the SIM. ---- I just want to see these things stop. If I had a guarantee that a USPA-sanctioned wingsuit instructor program would stop them, I'd be much more likely to be for it. As it is, I've taken a step back to try and take a balanced, objective look at the pros and cons of a mandatory WSI program. And from where I sit, the cons far outweigh the pros. For me, the legal implications and the added bureaucracy far outweigh any potential gains we might see - particularly if awareness is truly the key to stopping tailstrikes (which, it would seem based on the lack of 2012 reports, is the case). If we're doing a lot better on tailstrikes this year, it seems that a mandatory bureaucratic program isn't the solution we're looking for. So I'll ask again - can anyone give me a report of how many wingsuit-related tailstrikes we've had in the U.S. since the start of 2012? Signatures are the new black.

This is spot on. A standard set of rules - Yes A new instructional rating system - No ^^ Agreed. Signatures are the new black.

Some people will tell you to stand next to a wall and "hump the wall"...but I never bought into that. Truth is, some things only come with time & experience. As a 5'5" jumper who weighed 117lbs when I got off student status (& had the same issues as you), here's what I can recommend: 1. Get a good jumpsuit. Seriously. Jeans/shorts and a t-shirt cause drag. Lots of it, when you're a lightweight. Get a suit, and wear it. Get the right suit for the job. A suit that's made for RW/FS will generally be faster than wearing a freefly suit for belly jumps...but the booties won't let you freefly (& you'll want booties. Trust me). A freefly suit lets you do both belly-flying and FF...but it's going to be slightly draggier than a belly suit. Ultimately, if you do both, you'll want one of each. 2. Get to the tunnel. Getting started flying the tunnel regularly was the best thing I ever did for my fall rate. You can do fall rate drills where you have them turn the wind up to a slightly uncomfortable level, then practice flying. It'll feel awkward at first, but you'll get more and more comfortable with time. (And even if you're not doing fall rate drills, the more time you spend in the tunnel, the better your fall rate will be.) I know you don't have a tunnel in NY, but take a trip and do some time. It pays dividends. 3. Coach jumps. Like the above poster said, do some fall rate drill with a coach. Every little bit helps (although I find the tunnel to be a bit more bang for the buck for this type of training, because it allows you to really focus, without worrying about small things like deploying your canopy, checking for traffic, exiting, etc). And lastly, 4. Get some lead. If you're a small person, there'll come a time when your body just can't do it. You can only go so fast. And that's where a good weight belt comes in. A lot of people will tell you stories of all the people they've met who didn't need to use lead - who can 'fold in half like a taco' and fly with anyone. The people who will tell you this are almost inevitably heavier people. Take what they say with a grain of salt. (I can only give so much advice to a 200-pound person about how to fall slower. A lot of it they have to get on their own. But rarely do I ever see anyone telling them 'My friend Mark weighs 220, and he can outfloat a 97-pound girl.') We each have a natural range of our body's fall rates. For each jump, you want to be in the middle of that fall rate - that gives you the ability to take docks & fly the formation without popping up. Lead helps move that 'sweet spot' of your fall rate to a higher speed, so you can fly the formation. --- To sum up... a) Find ways to extend your range (i.e., tunnel & coaching). and b) Find ways to move the center of your range to a higher fall rate (i.e., jumpsuit & lead). Good luck! Signatures are the new black.

^^ What all of the folks above said. You can always rent an Intro suit, or find someone with a Phoenix2/3/Shadow/Acro to borrow from, and build up to 25 jumps pretty quickly. But as it stands now, it's akin to buying a Katana for your first canopy: it's not a Velocity or a JVX, but it's still a bit much to handle when you're still learning to fly. Good luck! Signatures are the new black.

Thanks for the more non-blurry version, Scotty! As other people can now see, there are no identifying locations or names of the incidents. I'd still like to actually know where these events happened, and hear some firsthand reports. It's currently a game of telephone, with no way to verify that's how things actually went down. Additionally, some of these don't necessarily lend themselves to the idea that a training program would help. Of the 10 listed from 2011 (I thought there were 12?), we've got: 2 incidents with jumpers with >100 wingsuit jumps 5 incidents of jumpers with more than 50 wingsuit jumps 3 incidents with jump counts unverified (but one of those is a demo jump, so one could assume the person is Pro-rated and has a significant number of wingsuit jumps) 1 incident with Euros as the amount of damage (which suggests it's not a USPA incident, and possibly took place in a country that already has training programs). A lot of incidents with missing data (which makes me wonder if any more of them happened away from the U.S.) ...and 1 non tail strike where someone got bitten by the door and broke their ankle. (I've hit the door on FS jumps more than I choose to count, and there's an incident thread open right now about someone who broke her arm exiting for a 2-way belly jump. Why are we pitching this as a "tail strike?") All of these make me wonder how big of a problem we have here in the U.S., and particularly among new wingsuit jumpers who would benefit from a formalized teaching of the existing BSRs. Unless we're going to set up new requirements for recurrency every year, I'm not sure an education program will do much. I'm obviously not convinced we need a formalized program. But I'm willing to consider it. I just haven't yet seen good, verifiable evidence that we have a huge, *code red* problem, or that this mandatory education program will fix it. I'm not wearing a tinfoil hat - I'm just trying to be objective here, on the occasion of a few people who make money training wingsuiters presenting information to try and push for wingsuit training to become mandatory. I think the best thing we can do is to keep an open mind and to get all the information out in the open, so the USPA members can do their own due diligence and make an informed decision. ------- Additionally, if these numbers are accurate, I'm curious about the trend. There were no tail strikes in 2010, and only one in the prior year by a very experienced wingsuiter. And then supposedly 12 in 2011. (Or 11, if you exclude the Euro-DZ.) (Or 10, if you don't count the door bite.) I'd like to know how many tail strikes we've counted in 2012 so far. Is it trending upward, or was 2011 the outlier moment that always seems to happen with new skydiving disciplines (freeflying and swooping included) when people finally realize, "Crap. This shit can kill you"? Signatures are the new black.

^^THIS. Seriously, folks. If you're throwing a 900 on a JFX, you oughtta know better than to fly a Cypres Expert or a Vigil (or any other standard, non-speed AAD). Are we going to need an AAD rating now? Signatures are the new black.

http://i397.photobucket.com/albums/pp55/mjosparky/Skydiving/Redacted-Tailstrikes.jpg Sparky Glad someone finally found that and shared it. This is still my primary issue (of a few) with this entire discussion. Take another look at that blurry list image you posted. How many locations do you see? How many specific dates? Where are names that can be verified? You won't find them there. Or anywhere, for that matter. This is just a typed out list of aircraft names and events that supposedly happened. That no one can verify (except for the person who put it together via word of mouth). Let's assume all of these did happen. How many of them actually involved damage to the aircraft, and how many of them were "near misses" as was originally reported? What constitutes a "near miss"? Why all the secrecy? Why are we basing this whole discussion on hearsay? I've asked repeatedly for specifics so I can know the justification for what's being proposed, and the person putting this together tells me he won't reveal them because he wants to protect the confidentiality of the DZ's in question. (And also he wants to make sure that people will continue to tell him when bad things happen.) Call me crazy, but making sure that people tell you what they heard happened at the DZ today is hardly a good basis for a study of how many incidents we had last year. Eyewitness accounts? Awesome. But so far, I haven't met anyone who was actually there at one of these supposed incidents, with the exception of one. If this were a courtroom, the person presenting the evidence would be asked to come back with something more substantial. And here we are, trying to discuss a big change of regulation in our sport...all based on a report with details redacted. Whoever passed this list along to Air, Inc., obviously left out some important details. And as discussions on this board can verify, things can look pretty darn troubling with details left out. This troubles me. -- I'm not saying I would immediately jump onboard with a wingsuit instructor rating if all those details came out. But at least if we could verify that they actually happened, and get some more info (has this person been jumping wingsuits since 1999? Are they new? Were they already breaking the BSR's?). If nothing else, that could help us discern whether taking what's already written in the SIM as a BSR and making it so someone with a rating has to actually teach it to you will help the issue, or if it won't. Signatures are the new black.

Same guy? yes But the real question on everyone's mind... Who had September 9th? He's not dead. It's called Bounce Bingo, not Got Hurt Bingo. True story...and I even thought about that as I was posting it. Still, perhaps we should revise the rules. Seems there ought to be a small payout of the pool for someone who called the day of the (first) femur. (Kinda like getting 5 numbers correct, but not the Powerball). Signatures are the new black.

Same guy? yes But the real question on everyone's mind... Who had September 9th? Signatures are the new black.

Isn't it a bummer when you don't have a precise definition. Then your interpretation can be as wrong as anyone else's. One of the unfortunate side effects of pushing a judging process and record criteria through without a significant amount of peer review and discussion (not that we've talked about that before, or anything). Le sigh. **As a side note, the level of vitriol from wingsuiters in these forums lately - and the lack of agreement to disagree - is disappointing (to say the least). It seems to me that the facts here speak for themselves, and the mud-slinging and character assassinations really just make those doing the mud-slinging look immature. Or unsympathetic. Even when I agree with them. Folks, just because wingsuiters wear nylon dresses to the dropzone doesn't mean we should act the part of drama queens. (Just sayin'.) Signatures are the new black.

Gotta agree with AggieDave. The hands-down, softest-opening canopy I ever jumped was a Spectre-170 with Dacron lines, loaded at about 0.9 to 1. (I was still a student. And it rocked. Although the first time I deployed it, I thought I might have a streamer, it took so long to catch the wind.) Signatures are the new black.

As the others have said, I wouldn't think you would have any problems with it. While I have no particular experience with a Pilot 188, I've psycho-packed for close to 700 jumps on canopies including a Sabre-150, Sabre2-135, Safire2-120, and Pilot-104, and all have worked out fine (the Pilot now has ~100 psycho-pack deployments). I've never rolled the nose as they recommended in the video you showed, and never had problems with off-heading openings. My Sabre2 used to suffer from closed end cells, but it did that when pro-packed, as well, so I can't blame the packing method. Overall, I think you're fine doing it...but I echo what others recommend about adding a short bridle extension (just enough to allow the bag to slide cleanly around the roll without too much tension on the bridle inside the bag. Reason being - in case you haven't heard - that there's a hypothesis that psycho-packing can damage a canopy over time as the bridle slides around the fabric when the roll inflates. By adding an extension at the attachment point, you take out the tension that would cause that sort of friction damage to occur.) Good luck! Signatures are the new black.

I hear that there's some guy in the midwest trying to put a PT-6 in a C206!!?! Would make a great jump plane for ya! There *was* a rumor floating around about that, wasn't there? Signatures are the new black.

Were it me, I'd go for a CYPRES 2. If you haven't seen the many threads on accidental Vigil misfires, do a search of the site. Many are operator error...many are things as simple as the pilot's window in the plane opening. Here's the latest one. I've been on the fence about it for the past few years - I'm not one who likes witchhunts. But as I've seen more and more near-incidents - and watched the Vigil manufacturers do nothing - I'm now beginning to think that it's only a matter of time before we see someone pulled out the door when their Vigil fires...possibly taking a chunk of the side of the plane with them. Signatures are the new black.

Brad, you make some good points about the skills that come from tunnel instructor training. (& we share a birthday, so I'll give you the benefit of the doubt.) But I gotta disagree with you on this one, for one main reason: tunnel time does not equal skydives...and AFF instructors are teaching skydiving, not freefall. As many have said, there are things you can't teach in the tunnel - spotting, aircraft emergencies, canopy flight, etc - that you get to practice on almost every jump. As you and others in support of the change have responded, "You still have to pass the course, and 260 jumps is enough to learn about spotting." But all those things are irrelevant. IMO, what the course doesn't evaluate is what that freefall time is there to represent: the intangibles. If you've made 360 skydives, you'll have had more bad openings. More bad spots. More line twists. More chances at having to cut away. You may have seen a student land on a roof, or in a tree. You'll have landed off more often. You may have seen a student stand up and fall off the trailer on the way to the plane. God forbid, you may have been there when a close friend died. All of these things can't be learned from a tunnel. Nor can they be tested in a ratings course. They're just things that make you a better instructor. This is why I'm in favor of adding a 'time in sport' requirement to the AFF-I rating. There are certain things you can't know, unless you're there. You know I'm a huge fan of the tunnel. Hell, I would've had a much harder time passing my AFF-I course if I didn't have as much tunnel time logged as I have. But in this case, you have to ask yourself: what's best for the student? Because that's what's most important here. Does it help a student to allow people with extensive tunnel time to skip a few jumps in their quest to become AFF-I's? If all AFF-I's pass a practical exam, then no. That should be weeding out the ones with inferior freefall skills. Does it hurt the student? Not necessarily, either. But it seems more likely to me that someone with only 260 jumps' experience spotting, or dealing with emergencies, or riding the plane down, etc, would hurt a student more than help them. I agree that some AFF-I's could be better on their belly with some tunnel time. No doubt. But I'll take a grizzled old skydiver with 500 jumps and decent flying ability (decent enough to pass the practical eval jumps) over a 240-jump-wonder tunnel instructor any day. Because they've been there, done that. And more importantly, they've had the patience to recognize the value of experience. They understand that it's about the student, not them. (And I say that with about 800 jumps and almost 50 hours of tunnel time, paid for out of my own pocket.) Signatures are the new black.

It's also made Gizmodo... ...who points out, "If the video doesn't deter you from ever jumping out of a plane, I don't know what will." Luckily, all the commenters seem to be focused on a bungee jumping GIF that someone attached, rather than spouting the regular "skydivers are idiots and deserve to die" trollishness. Signatures are the new black.

Agree with both Butters & the Bird Doc. Although there's one other factor - how big a boy are ya? I fly a Shadow, because at 5'5" / 125 lbs, I had to fly with arms swept back in order to flock in a P2. A shadow better suits the middle of my range. That being said, you can flock in either, or do acro in either. Jarno flies his Shadow quite a bit, and does just about everything in it. So unless you're really big and going to need the surface area, or really small and going to need less surface area, I think you can't go wrong with either.

Well done, Gary!! In other news, I'm wondering how Stoney will react to hearing that someone else has followed in his footsteps, jumping from a helicopter and landing a wingsuit. ...care to comment, Stoney? Signatures are the new black.

Unfortunately, the movie you linked to is about 8-10 years old, and has nothing to do with the movie that's being discussed here (Red Bull's "Human Flight 3D"). Signatures are the new black.

Hey, Jon - Not quite. There are lots of variables that determine who's at the top of a Google organic search results page, but number of clicks isn't one of them. As a dropzone, your best bets are to: 1 - Build legitimate backlinks, in a non-spammy way. (Jumpdude, the sites you mentioned have worked in the past, but have started getting penalized by Google lately.) You need people to link to your site with the correct anchor text, and you need the backlinking sites to be relevant, high pagerank sites. Doing a link exchange by adding links to other dropzones from a "check out these other dropzones" page on your site is an excellent idea - Jon, you're spot-on, there. 2 - Have optimized, fresh content on your site. Do your research, target the keywords you're after, and use them appropriately (but not overly so - again, Google and other search engines penalize the spammy use of keyword stuffing). Start a blog as a component of your site, if you can find the time, and regularly add new content (again, targeting specific keywords). 3 - If you can justify the cost, move forward on paid search/pay-par-click advertising. This means you want your site to look as slick as possible, and give them an option to go ahead and book online, so that when you pay for a click for someone to visit your site, you convert them to a sale. Unfortunately, Skyride sites still tend to look better than most dropzone websites out there, so they hold the edge in converting people looking for a dropzone into paid customers. 4 - Get your DZ an updated profile in various online directories. Make sure your Google page is up to date. Add yourself to Yellowpages.com, Yelp, and other local review sites. Solicit people to give you reviews (REAL reviews) when they come to your DZ. Optimize each directory site for keywords, just like you would your website. ----- There are lots of other nuts-and-bolts of SEO, but those are your basic, key things that someone can easily do to help their sites rank better. Anyway, not trying to split hairs - just want people who are trying to optimize their sites to not go about wasting their time on the wrong things. Clicks mean nothing - it's your site being optimized for search engines that makes a difference. KC (Content Marketing & SEO since 2004) Signatures are the new black.

+1. Howard, wish I had gotten to meet you outside of DZ.com. Thanks for sharing the history with us young skydiver-types. The context you added (& the way you added it) was priceless. Blue skies. Signatures are the new black.

Yeah...different excuse for me, though. (In the process of buying a new house, & time is of the essence.) Still, it's the first one I've missed in 4 years! Bummed - you guys have some GREAT flocks for the rest of us! Signatures are the new black.

There was a phrase used decades ago when shades of brown and tan were popular...bounce and blend! Gotta confess, I've never really understood this whole camo gear thing myself. It looks really cool on the ground...but if you're looking for people to skydive with, it might not be the best choice. It's going to be awful hard for them to see you if you go out first... Signatures are the new black.

@Joellercoaster makes a good point about the weight & wingloading. I'm assuming you're going to be safe with it - there are lots of us smaller folks out there, so I'm hoping you're one of them. You have 100 jumps, so I'm also assuming you know enough to talk to instructors at the DZ about what sizes are appropriate for you. That being said, all of my 200 or so wingsuit jumps are on a Micron. Most on a V310, some on a V304. It's been a great wingsuiting rig for me. I've never had the cut corners installed - but I do fly with a longer bridle and a stowless bag, and it's worked out fine for me. Good luck! Signatures are the new black.