Zing

Glad you mentioned that, Zippo, because the article did point out that the TSA's use of "subtle clues" is not racial profiling.
Just the numbers alone, 400,000 observed to be exhibiting "subtle clues" that they might be a terrorist, smuggler, illegal something or other with a mere 300 violators nabbed shows it to be a massive waste of money and manpower.
Also, the article did not say that any terrorists had been apprehended, only that 300 violators had been nabbed.
I have to wonder how many of those 300 offenders posed a true threat to airline/aircraft security. How many of them were packing a cigarette lighter, which are now again legal to carry onto an airplane? How many had a small quantity of a controlled substance? I know of one person dragged off an airplane because she didn't have a prescription for the three tabs of Viagra found in her purse. Now there's a real threat to airline security ... can you hijack or cause an airplane to crash armed with a raging hardon?
I've had a couple of those relieved while in flight, but the airplane didn't seem to mind.

My favorite skydive T-shirt says, "Perfectly Good Airplane, My Ass!"

I didn't copy the link yesterday, but did anyone else see the MSNBC story about the "specially trained" TSA crews.
They wander around airports observing people and set them up for additional scrutiny due to the observed ones' facial expressions and other "subtle" clues.
After a mere few hours of special training to spot these potential threats to airline security, they have sent 400,000 folks in for additional questioning, scrutiny and searches ... and found 300 people guilty of infractions, though they the story didn't bother to say what those infractions were.

The problem is, once you start killing the ones who need it, its hard to tell when to stop.

I got to make a couple jumps on a Para-Sled at Clayton Troutner's dropzone at Charlotte, Mich. in the early 70s.
I remember that it opened "firmly" on hop-n-pops and no one wanted to take it to terminal because there was no reefing system on it.
I think Dave Sauve (sp?) had one and was training for the US Style and Accuracy team with it, but it offered no real improvement, accuracy wise, than the parafoils and paraclouds that were also in use back then.
A few years later, someone had one at Ghoulidge that had been lightened up by removing a bunch of reinforcing tapes, but it was still a big, bulky canopy compared with the stuff that was coming around by the mid to late 70s.
It landed nice, though, even in the hot, no-wind conditions od Arizona.

Still, you'd be doing Oddball a favor by taking her in to be spayed. She'd likely revert to being an outside mouser, and you won't end up with what's left of the next litters she'll inevitably have.
Most likely, she came inside in a desperate attempt to save her surviving few babies from the last litter.

I don't think that's a K-XX.
It looks like the original Pioneer 23' tri-con. I had one that was identical to the one shown, used it twice with no problems, but they were grounded later after a few of them blew apart on terminal openings. Even without those patches, it isn't any good for anything but a car cover or a play parachute for a daycare centee.
Those tri-cons had the "cat's eye" vent that was also used in the K-series reserves.
Also, I'm pretty sure they weren't manufacturing K-XXs in 1969.

Its merely a polite way of saying, "no shit, there I was ... !"

Delta II and a 23-foot tri-conical.

Don't throw it away, put it all in the postage paid envelope enclosed, along with as much of your other junk mail you can stuff into it.
They quite sending me their membership BS after about five stuffed envelopes came their way.
Works for lots of other unsolicitated junk mailers too.

Too bad it isn't a more realistic looking gun ... then they could be made standard issue for elementary school teachers on the playground.

Well, you could land with a student out on the step, but I've seen more than one "wrestled" back into the airplane. It happens ... no big deal.

I remember Bill Morrisey coming through Ghoulidge on a demo tour with the new Strong tandem system we'd heard stories. Seems to me that the rumors were both Strong and Booth had a rig in the works.
I flew the first tandem that jumped at Ghoulidge, it being Morrisey and a woman (who's name escapes me today) who was in the front harness. If I recall, she was traveling with Morrisey and was the official tandem passenger.
It all seemed pretty straightforward, if not a bit cumbersome, and it wasn't the first Strong rig I'd seen with flaps and stuff fluttering in the breeze.
Morrisey had talked about a couple torn canopies, broken lines, etc. during the development jumps, but the tandem drogue chute wasn't in use yet.
They did a semi dive-out sort of exit, stable and all, but holy shit, did they get up a head of steam in a big rush.
I followed them as best I could with the 182 without stressing things too much. Couldn't keep up at all, but I did manage to keep them in sight until opening. I'll take my old free-packed dactyl openings to one like they had any day.
The main didn't appear to open so much as it seemed that Morrisey and his passenger arrived at the ends of the lines of an open parachute INSTANTLY upon deployment. The canopy held together, though and they made a couple jumps that weekend
It wasn't long before the drogue came into use.

No worries youse guys ... its senioritis, and I suffer from it too often myself of late. Good thing we got Airtwardo running lead for us on the "old" jokes!

Howard, I believe the Army airplane in the first photo of your post is a Pilatus Porter ... quite a different animal than the Helio Courier or the Helio Stallion.
There are also a few Porters around that were built with a normally aspirated, horizontally-opposed engine. It had impressive short-field take-off and landing capabilities, but were dogs as far climb rate was concerned.
Interestingly, both Helios and Porters were designed for the same purpose. It was the mounting of Garrett or P&W PT-6 turbo-prop engines that REALLY made the airplanes perform.

"Yah, DZ pilots are going to start writing their own ticket soon or DZs won't have pilots or have a very hard time finding qualified/experienced pilots."


Seems I might have heard this same prediction before in the 70s, and the 80s, and the 90s ... and now, hear it is again in the fourth decade.

Is that a Russian, a Chechkoslavakian or a Chinese AN-2?

Some of the first Strao-Hammers seen in Arizona were the ones the Canadian team got while they were practicing at Ghoulidge. This was the team that won gold at the world meet in Australia, but were stripped of their medals by Canadian authorities for having "too much fun."
In a very few days, almost all of the team were limping around with sore ankles and knees and there was one broken pelvis. At least we all got a free belt that used the same aparatus as the Strato-Hammer's brake releases as a buckle.
About a year later I jumped one on a rig i borrowed from Dempsey Morgan from the team Desert Heat, and had THE hardest parachute landing I've ever experienced under an open canopy. I don't think i hit any harder the time I really did bounce.
We raffled a brand new Strato-Hammer off at one of the Ghoulidge Boogies that same year. D-Ray won it, and was disappointed when he just about had to give it away to get rid of it. D-Ray had no intention of EVER jumping one and no one else wanted it either.
Between the hard landings, slammer openings and the initial malfunction rate, I'd wager that the Strato-Hammer set back the general acceptance of square spares by a minimum of five years.
It was a long time before I finally bought a square reserve ... and it didn't come from Para-Fright!

Well, y'know Al never liked them thar ultralights much either!

That was just Al Frisby stopping by on the way out of here.

What's a Billvon?

I've deployed my main parachute off the wing of a glider, the bottom wing of a Stearman, the top rear of the fuselage of a Twin Beech and from the horizontal stabiliser of a Twin Otter ... and did a hop-n-pop off the top of the fuselage of a Skyvan.
I've also crawled out to the end of the wing of a low-wing single and exited off the front side of the wing.

This was on the wire this morning. Lori is quite a character and I always enjoyed running into her over the years.
I spent 6 months flting aeromag surveys in Ghana and traveled some in the surrounding countries. There's a lot of space there that is difficult to search.
I'm keeping my fingers crossed that she'll turn up.
Digg del.icio.us AIM print email
By JENNIFER KAY
Associated Press Writer
MIAMI --
The first few hours of silence after Lori Love's plane disappeared off west Africa weren't too worrisome.
The "lone wolf," as she liked to call herself, didn't like mid-air chatter. She had asked for this solo flight through long stretches of sky not covered by radar.
She exchanged a cheerful, routine radio transmission with another pilot about an hour after taking off from Accra, Ghana, last Friday night, said Steve Hall. A longtime friend, he had hired her to ferry a single-engine Beechcraft from Florida to South Africa.
That was the last time anyone heard from Love. Ghana air traffic controllers failed to establish contact with her about 15 minutes later. Her expected arrival in Windhoek, Namibia, late Saturday morning passed without her wheels touching down.
Most troubling: The ace pilot and skydiver never activated a handheld emergency beacon that would have tipped rescuers to her location by GPS, Hall said.
Search efforts from several African countries have stopped tracing her expected flight path, failing for almost a week to find any sign of her plane or her emergency raft, Hall said.
Love would not have taken off from the Ghanian capital if she hadn't been confident her plane was fine, Hall said. A minor electrical problem in the plane's alternator switch had been fixed during a brief layover in Accra, and she had 18 hours of fuel to bridge the nearly 2,300 miles south to Namibia.
"Something catastrophic must have happened," he said. It's not known whether the electrical glitch resurfaced, or if it was part of some fatal problem.
"I'm just praying she will reappear and give me hell and say, 'You gave me a lousy airplane,'" he said.
---
If it flew, Love knew how to keep it in the air. The 57-year-old Wichita, Kan., woman was certified to teach flying and skydiving, rig parachutes and fly helicopters, gliders, single- and multi- engine planes that could touch down on either land or sea, according to Federal Aviation Administration records.
Never staying in one place too long, she logged 15,000 hours as a pilot, and completed 4,000 parachute jumps before a bad back made her give up skydiving in 1999, her colleagues said. Love also ran her own airport in Alabama for five years before feeling the itch to move again.
She kept her late 1970s Dodge Maxivan rolling, too - 555,000 miles and counting, Hall said, tuned with a set of tools at least as old as the vehicle.
"Everything I own is inside it," Love told a National Air and Space Museum photographer for a 1997 book about women pilots. "I honestly thought by now I would be tired of that lifestyle and be ready to settle down, but it hasn't happened."
She had a couple scrapes: a brief marriage after college; a tangle with power lines that dumped her crop duster upside-down in a cotton field. Nothing she couldn't walk away from.
Love wasn't a daredevil child, but it was hard to keep her on the ground once she picked up skydiving at the University of Kansas, said her father, Loren Fred.
She once parachuted off a utility pole in Oklahoma, he recalled. She also dropped tools from her helicopter to lumberjacks in Alaska, and defied a chauvinist crop duster in Arizona.
"He wasn't going to hire a woman pilot, but he consented to put her in a plane and in the most difficult positions and see if she couldn't get out of them," Fred said. "She did, and she got the job."
Love recalled in the book "Women and Flight" that she couldn't remember how she figured out girls could fly; her family didn't have a television, but they would drive by the Wichita International Airport to see the taxiways lit up at night.
She later learned that flying eased the strain of scoliosis on her back, her father told The Associated Press.
"That was a relief, really," he said.
After years of moving around the country, Love settled for a time in Gainesville to pursue a doctorate in special education at the University of Florida. Three years ago, she gave up her studies and returned home to Wichita to care for Fred, 95, when his health began to fail.
Love had just started ferrying planes again, commuting from Kansas to Tampa whenever Hall had work for her. She wanted to make enough money so she could take time off this winter to finally finish her dissertation, her father said.
---
Hall looks for a special breed of pilot for the international aircraft delivery company he runs out of Tampa: eccentric, mountain climbing-types who can handle flying alone nonstop for nearly a day at a time to remote air strips.
Love's independence made her perfect for the job, Hall said.
"She didn't like to travel with people," he said. "When she didn't call the other pilot after one hour, that's Lori. She didn't want to talk to you."
They had worked together on and off since 1978, and she called him up eight months ago looking for work ferrying aircraft again.
She asked for the long flights to India and Russia, even Afghanistan if he'd let her. Hall trusted her as "a good stick," and knew she wouldn't check in with other pilots more than necessary.
On her last job, she had hopscotched from Tampa to Maine, the Azores, the Canary Islands and then Ghana over eight days. She wanted to make it to Capetown, South Africa, in just one more jump after Ghana, but Hall persuaded her to add the brief rest in Namibia. Heading there, she disappeared.
"Her biggest fault was she was a lone wolf," Hall said. "If she had been coordinating with the other pilot, we might have had some insight (into her disappearance)."
Love lived for the adrenaline rush of flying, but she left nothing to chance back on the ground. She always left a note that began, "In the event I don't come back...," on a counter in her apartment, detailing instructions for taking care of her ailing father and beloved 22-pound cat, Jeda, friends said.
"It was kind of a school-teachery thing. She was very organized like that," said Judi Ladd, a fellow UF graduate student in Gainesville who has been entrusted with Love's cat.
Love, who had no children, looked after those who couldn't defend themselves, friends said.
A vegetarian, she doted on animals, volunteering to round up feral cats in Wichita, where she had been piloting skydiving trips over the past year.
"It was kind of interesting to see her around the airport. She looked like somebody's grandmother more than a pilot extraordinaire," said Martin Myrtle, owner of Wichita's Air Capital Drop Zone.
Love was pursuing her special education doctorate so she could advocate for the severely handicapped, Ladd said.
Love had recently double-checked with Ladd to make sure she was OK with being listed as Jeda's caregiver. She wasn't worried about the long trip, Ladd said.
"She had done that run at least once before," Ladd said. "To her, it was pretty run-of-the-mill, just back and forth."
Associated Press writer Kwasi Kpodo in Accra, Ghana, contributed to this report.

You know what they call the person in the harness when folks try to parasail a sport canopy?




The dope on the rope.

That's what I was thinking. Isn't that the hydraulic opening shock inhibitor on the left side of the skirt?