ficus

A warning about Flite Suit -- they are very hit and miss. The RW suit I bought from them is in okay shape with a few hundred jumps on it. The bootie leather is starting to separate, though. The camera suit I bought was much worse. The wings were sewn very far front like sit wings, and it started to blow seams after less than 50 jumps. I got maybe 150 jumps on a $400 suit and have since retired it. Both suits had to go back for alteration before I was able to jump them. Fortunately I am located close to the factory. That said, a couple of friends have Flite Suits that are still running great after 1000+ jumps. But after my experience, I won't buy another suit from them. I don't want to chance it. I have had similar problems with the camera jacket I bought from Tony Suits to replace the bum Flite Suit. The only 100% great experience I've had with a jumpsuit so far is my freefly suit from Firefly. I love that suit. But the wait times can be pretty brutal. I only went with Tony for the camera jacket because Firefly was 12+ weeks out at the time. Ficus

Andre, The kinetic chain created between the pilot chute and the harness is going to yield in ascending order of resistance. This is true on the ground and in the air. Even if all of the free stowed lines pay out simultaneously, they are going to achieve tension before the locking stows give. At worst, I could imagine this contributing to tension knots, but it is not going to have an effect on snatch force or hardness of opening. If the locking stows give first (e.g. small stows, oversized rubber band, very little tension, I think this would actually be difficult to achieve in this design), then the tension holding the D-bag in the canopy must be less than the force required to pay out the free stows for anything out of the ordinary to happen. If that does happen, it's bag strip. Cliffs Notes: "Line dump" is BS. Derek, Sorry for hijacking your thread. I like your design, but I think it would be easier to make the free stows if the pouch peeled all the way back like the Lazy Bag (or a tail pocket). Do you have an opinion about this?

The only way that's going to happen will be if the force required to extract the locking stows is somehow exceeded by the force required to pay out the free stows from the channel between the magnet. Isn't what you're describing called "bag strip"?

Andy, Don't be so quick with your dismissal. I understand that he might be able to obtain the patent even with all of the obvious prior art in existence. I wasn't saying it would be a hard sell to the USPTO -- nothing is really a hard sell with them. I just can't imagine it being worth the trouble and legal expense. As I'm sure you know, patents are not even close to free.

Andy, Seems like a hard sell for patenting especially after Jerome posted a picture of the Seven d-bag which is pretty much the same thing. lilchief, I can't imagine how this would have any mentionable effect whatsoever on snatch force. Derek, Cool bag. Did you base the pattern on something or make it from scratch?

PIA TS-120 is "AAD Design and Testing Report Format". http://www.pia.com/piapubs/TSDocuments/ts-120a.pdf (How hilarious is it that the filename in that URL is ts-120a.pdf?)

It really isn't. Would you ask your engineering staff to explain for us what the difference between CR123 and CR123A batteries is? I suspect their answer will not be verbose. Argus manual, p.7: Energizer does not manufacture a battery labeled CR123A, and yet their batteries are specifically called out in the Argus manual. I hope this is just a communication problem between you and your technical staff, and that they understand this: CR123 and CR123A are equivalent, period.

Aviacom should specify either exact part numbers (e.g. Duracell CR123A, Energizer CR123, Panasonic CR123, blah blah), or preferably list a standard the battery must conform to. IEC and ANSI both have standards for this battery. IEC calls it CR17345, ANSI calls it 5018LC. Just like the battery commonly known as AA conforms to IEC LR6. Just like I said in my first reply to this post, they are the same battery. We already use military and industry specs for hardware, and those are considered interchangeable regardless of manufacturer. It would not be a huge leap in protocol for this to work the same way. This is a deficiency in the Argus manual IMO.

Willem, Could you enlighten us as to the difference between CR123 and CR123A batteries and why ANSI and IEC both classify the two under one specification? Every major battery manufacturer seems to think these are interchangeable and my understanding is that the difference is purely that of trade name. Do you have information to the contrary?

They are the same thing.

It should be noted that this picture was taken across the roof of a moving car, and Ken was driving it at the time. RIP Ken, we'll miss you.

Larger window of time in which to bail? Do you mind explaining your reasoning? You can spend a longer time turning and you get on your line much higher. So what might be stabbing out on a short-arc parachute would instead be a little rear riser input to shallow yourself out, or speeding up your turn a little more. Being off by 20 ft is a way bigger deal when you're turning from 250 ft (or lower!) than it is from 650.

Both of these paragraphs are true, and good advice to the OP about safety concerns, but they kind of contradict each other. So we have to ask ourselves, which characteristics are better or "safer"? Neither or both? The most concise way to think about this is that the more modern designs carry a higher penalty for error, but offer a lower chance of making that error by giving you a larger window of time in which to bail. It's a trade-off.

The Argus has a swoop mode, which will inhibit firing of the cutter once deployment has been detected. (As opposed to the Speed Cypres's strategy of bumping up the speed required to induce a fire.)

A couple things: 1) Dump the Stiletto. Seriously. If you want to learn to swoop, that parachute is not going to do you any favors. You will get tired of whale watching and start turning lower and be somewhat in the corner all the time, always stabbing out. This is why your setup sucked in the video you posted. You know that if you had gone ahead and turned to final in the correct place, you would have planed out at 50 feet. So you took it too deep, made a slightly >90 degree turn, and flew across the wind line, potentially cutting off anyone else on final behind you. You may have been the last one down, but this is a terrible habit to develop. Flying that Stiletto, you won't develop the mental process of flying through your recovery arc, seeing the line, and making adjustments, because you have no time in which to do it. Get a Sabre2 or something like it. 2) Be careful with downwinders. They alter your sight picture such that you will think you are higher in the arc than you are because of the extra forward push you get from the tailwind. It is very easy to get in the corner, and worse, not realize it. Combine this with the fact that you are already erring on the low side with that short-arc parachute, and trouble lies ahead. 3) Spend some time digging through old posts on dz.com and realize that these guys are at your throat right off the bat because you are the 5000th guy to make essentially this exact post. Keep at the 90, it is a more productive turn to learn from (IMO) than the 180. And the pattern is significantly easier to fly both from an accuracy and traffic perspective. Good luck Ficus

Ask a CRWdog, from what I understand they are hit by Lightnings on a regular basis.

Maybe not for you, but I have been busted more than once by a tunnel instructor (or fellow flier) for looking at my wrist after a minute or so.

Here's a picture of some elastic stirrups on a bootie suit. Indeed, they are probably the only thing holding the booties on in this picture.

Not the way it stalls and collapses! You try it sometime, I have. I have jumped a Paradactyl. It only stalls and collapses if you are foolish enough to try to flare it!

A Paradactyl is a round. A Velocity is a square. IMO

OK, fair. I don't think it's so black and white. At Lodi, someone pounded in under their Katana and Bill decided he had had enough, and now turns over 90 degrees are not allowed at Lodi. The Lodi jumpers are creative and talented and are doing some pretty impressive stuff with 90s, but essentially one person's error cost a bunch of other people their own choice. What do you think will happen to $5 hop and pops if Bill has to cut and level the airplane because some guy can't roll out low from the door? Thousands upon thousands of these exits are done without incident. It's just not that hard. OK, good, this we can agree on. But maybe the DZO sees this the way I think both you and I would see someone jumping up on a normal jump run and striking the tail. A willful (or dumb enough to be effectively willful) error on the jumper's part.

Say it wasn't. The jumper has all the airspace and landing area to himself. Your line of reasoning indicates that the DZ could have helped to prevent this incident by banning HP landings, and therefore shares some of the blame for the jumper's error. Obviously you can't prevent everything, but just as obviously, DZs where swooping is not allowed are going to have fewer landing incidents. Likewise, you could say that a DZ or pilot could help to prevent freefall collisions by only allowing solos. The argument would be that this is an unreasonable burden and that doing a cut and level on a low pass only costs a couple dollars, but where do you draw the line, and who gets to decide?

Say a jumper comes in for a high performance landing, turns too low, fails to get back under his canopy before impacting the ground, and breaks himself or worse. Should it have been the responsibility of the DZO/S&TA/whoever to disallow high performance landings in order to minimize this risk? Of course, it was the jumper's decision to make that turn, and you can't physically prevent him from doing it, at least the first time he does it. But even with a level and cut, a sufficiently dumb or determined jumper could strike the tail, especially on a low-tail airplane like the 99.

The bulk of my (Wings) BOC pouch is Cordura. The "mouth" is elastic.

I have logged every single jump I've ever done in longhand, with date, DZ, aircraft, altitude, delay, total delay, type of jump and canopy used. Anyone who doesn't believe me is welcome to come round my house and pore through logbook after logbook, from my first static line jump in 1986 to my 10,036th yesterday until they weep with boredom I can confirm this, having seen Gareth's old logbooks. By "this", I mean the weeping boredom, of course.