pinkfairy

220 student canopy to 150 square ft Sabre was pretty scary, but not as scary as 150 to a 132 after having broken my leg on said 150.

Man, what we go through just for the sake of looking cool.

I was terrified of that canopy the first 50 jumps, then I found out that it was quite docile, and soon downsized to a 124, and then to a 111, which I've jumped now for 400, maybe time for new HMA lines.

I'm not scared of any size canopy now, but I know that the 111 is probably the smallest I should go with my jump numbers (i'm light, so I don't load it heavily), so I'll keep that.

With some more experience, downsized will be less scary, and downsizes on the same model canopy are easier and safer than downsizes to a more aggressive type of canopy. I've owned three different sizes of Pilot, and even though the smaller ones were faster, they all flew and handled in much the same way.

I don't know if it's much help, but I've walked long ways from out landings, and my best tip is still just "suck it up". It also helps to have a smaller canopy, yet another reason to downsize!

You paid for the tunnel, of course you want to use all of it, all the way out to the walls!



No, seriously, your tunnel instructor can give you tips on how to stay the right way up.


My first 45 minutes in the tunnel didn't look very good either.

Fly in the windtunnel.

Jump out of an airplane.

Pull handles.

Land in a safe area.

Flare.

Learn to pack a parachute.

Pack many parachutes.

Listen to your instructors.

Have fun.

Be safe.

Oh, and it's normal to hit the wall and flip over in the tunnel.

How much weights you wear is a very personal thing, and there is no set amount that you should wear based on your weight and height. It depends on how much you arch when flying normally, your jumpsuit, your rig, probably even your fat to muscle ratio. I've been very surprised to hear what other bigway jumpers have been wearing, I could certainly not have guessed.

One or two pounds doesn't make much of a difference to anyone, but you can still start out small and then add more.

I'm really short, so I find that wearing a belt that isn't too bulky is most comfortable. I adjust my belt so it goes around my tummy and doesn't rest on my hips. If I need to wear massive amounts of weight, I wear two belts, as one very full belt becomes very stiff. I wear the belts outside my jumpsuit, figuring that I'd be able to free myself from them in case of a water landing. However, if there's any realistic chance of that, I'd probably go without.

If you are familiar with your canopy and can do consistently soft landings with a good flare, then you can load up quite a lot even on a smaller canopy. If you just aim at the planet and pound in, you will injure yourself even with just a little extra weight.

Weights speed you up and makes it easier for you to concentrate on flying instead of just keeping up, if you're going to get any good on your belly, you need to be able to use gear to control fallrate. Don't listen to the people who say that you can just do it with body position.

I hope this helps!

Actually, it was kinda a spinner for the second, but we didn't make it, we only had that one completion.

Fun jump, and I was on it

Other people have sold their gear and then gotten back in the sport. Other people also have downsized their canopies to a point where their gear wasn't appropriate for them anymore and still been able to get back in the sport. They get back in because they want to.

It's totally up to you.

If you're sure you're not gonna jump the next few years, then sell your gear. Especially if you are fairly "standard sized" and can easily find used gear that fits you. It's no point in having gear that just sits in a closet.

Oh, yeah, who wouldn't want to be an awesome freeflyer (watch me raise my hand!), but I've seen people with pretty limited budgets end up as awesome freeflyers. It just took a lot of hard work and dedication.

Even if you do sell your gear, you can still go in the tunnel, if that's your thing.

Best of luck!

Hip rings gives you more movement and a more comfortable rig, same with cut in laterals.

Chest rings are good if you like to wear your rig tight, but pointless if you like a loose fit.

I think thin chest straps are more comfortable, but opinions vary.

Definitely get a hook knife, and just search RSL here and you'll find an abundance of debates about them, but really, they are an inexpensive way of making a rig safer. The Skyhook is especially good, it's not just a great safety device, it also makes your freebag land along with your main. Bonus!

The Aerodyne Smart is a really good reserve, it's so easy to fly and land that you'll think you're flying a main. But new reserve models are very good, I haven't tried the PD Optimum, but I hear it's good too.

None of the options that you mention makes the rig unfit for wingsuiting. strictly speaking, you should use a longer PC bridle for wingsuit, and BOC is the best option, but everyone orders BOC these days anyway.

Cool colors is of course a must, you can post here for free expert advice!

Congratulations on new gear!

Visualizing always helps, and if watching videos helps you do that, then maybe it has some effect.

Then again: You might just have talent!

No,

I drive too fast, and I'm not safe around stairs and electric tools.

The first thing I heard about parachuting activities were the news about the early Trollveggen fatalities in the 80s here in Norway, so I thought I'd NEVER start jumping off stuff.

But then, when I was 28 and had just kicked out my BF, I started doing just that.

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One that flies similar to the others on the load.

Moderate planform 7 or 9 cell, wingloaded from 1.26-ish:1 to 1.77-ish:1 Good opening characteristics, good glide characteristics, easy to float in brakes, big enough that you feel good about landing it out wearing whatever weights you require to be in the formation.

I really like my Pilot, but I'd feel good about jumping a spectre, Sabre2, Pulse, Safire, Storm or anything similar. I fly so small canopies anyway that care must be taken to pack an on heading opening, but all of these have good openings.

With the ZPX fabric, you could get a bigger Pilot that fits your rig than you could with other canopies.

Fact: The formation slows down as it gets bigger. Not just because people relax when they dock, more because people don't dock perfectly. Waves slow down formations. If it kept falling as fast when it got bigger I wouldn't have to wear 22 pounds in the base and almost nothing at the outside.

Slow and floaty bases are really hard to dock on, you don't just have to slow down your vertical dive a lot, but they tend to float around as well.

Getting down there is a piece of cake even for us light jumpers: That's done with body position, just like the freeflyers keep up with each other. We become REALLY fast when we get a little bit more vertical. I can easily fly to a formation that I couldn't keep up with once I was docked. I wear weights to fly my slot once docked, not to get there, I could easily get there naked!

Actually, speed isn't the key to base success, keeping up a good fallrate, maintaining heading and absorbing hard docks are just as important. I'd rather have some experienced, skinny guys in the base than big beginners.

I hope this helps!

Yup, I had this come up during a meeting where the managements made some empty threats to fire me. "You're too much of a skydiver, it bothers your co workers!".

I keep a low profile on it mostly now, when I'm asked what I did on my vacation, I tell them about all the sight seeing and shopping I did. If they ask if I still jump, I say, "Oh, and I did some 100-way skydiving too."

Straight, even, clean pro pack with the slider set properly for sub terminal, same for terminal. It works on big, small, fully elliptical and slightly tapered canopies.

That's what I do.

"Just pack it the way it was!" That's really funny, I'll tell my packer the next time I see him!

Hey, Docpop? I distinctly remember telling you to jump more, did you do that?

I don't find the claims in the ads hard to believe, it's a simple, simple piece of computer hardware and software, (how often does your pocket calculator bluescreen, come to think about it?), coupled with a cutter that fires a sharp object at your reserve container closing loop. If it's well designed and in good working order, then it will work in close to 100% of the cases, which experience and statistics tells us it does.

But a cut reserve container closing loop is not enough to save your life.

No, I don't like the ads either, but I don't like the purple color they're using either. I did like the "cow sniffing the freebag" ad they did some years back.

The problem is definitely not too many canopies in the air. All of the 100-ways I've been on have been very, very safe under canopy. I've been on some breakoffs that were a bit scary, but never scary canopy traffic on a 100-way, and that's a LOT of canopies. A skydiver under an open canopy doesn't take up much space, and they can safely land side by side. There's room for everyone as long as people look around and pay attention, and fly a pattern that doesn't come into conflict with what everyone else is doing. Bigway canopy flying is easy enough: You select a safe piece of ground, estimate if you have enough altitude to do an approved pattern to it, and then choose empty chunks of air to get there. Accuracy isn't a priority, not touching anything that moves is. It works on smaller skydivers as well, just like bigway tracking works on 2-ways.

On the other hand, I've been on some pretty scary 20-way traffic because everyone had to take off their booties and take the slider down. Not to mention the fatality on the 30-way, and that was a big landing area too.

It takes two people to make a canopy collision.

And you newer jumpers, I'm very surprised that I find myself repeating this at my home DZ all the time: t's possible to fly on half brakes just after opening and look and see what's happening instead of spiralling down and then be surprised when you enter the landing pattern.

THINKING before you speak is like wiping your ass before you take a dump.

No, she does things to my hair that I might like a week later, but never when it's just done.

And she's too young for me.

Thanks for the warning!


I wear ear plugs not only to protect my ears, but it makes me a lot more comfortable and relaxed in the plane. I'll look into the custom ones too.

I really hope you get better, I thought there were some treatment options for tinnitus so you can get more comfortable.

If it's not on video it didn't happen!



Seriously, everyone I know who have tried it say "WTF was I thinking?". Scary stories about PCs going between legs, injury to jumpers and gear. Not really a great idea.

Welcome to the Ankle fracture club! Fib or tib or both?

I broke my ankle as a low timer jumper too, at jump #80, missed out on most of the short norwegian skydiving season.

Just my thoughts on it:

1. Get your ankle working so you can walk and run with confidence. Good thing about fractures is that once they are healed you can start using them normally, as opposed to soft tissue that heals gradually over a long time. So work out as normal, or follow recommendation by your friendly physical therapist.

2. Do NOT blame equipment or terrain for your accident. Think about what you are doing when you think that way: You make yourself a victim, and if you're a victim, it means that the situation is hopeless and you can do nothing about it.

Why would the canopy stall out because of short brake lines? because you pulled them too far down. Why would you land on a "weird spot in the field"? Because your accuracy was poor and you didn't hit a nice, safe landing area. Sorry about being so direct, but don't misunderstand me, I'm not saying that you're not any good, I'm just saying that these things will improve with experience. What can you do to avoid pulling the toggles too far down when you land? Practice flares higher up so you get a feeling for where the flare "takes" so you can time the flare better when you land. To avoid landing where you don't want to? Decide early where you want to land and learn to fly a proper pattern to get there. Talk to your favourite instructor about this.

My mistake when I broke my ankle was just as bad as yours, but I learned from it.

Now that you know what will happen if you mess up, even just a little, it can make you a safer skydiver. You know that there are certain things you have to do right, otherwise you'll get injured, and you don't like that. I got a lot better at judging wind conditions after I got injured, and there is still weather I won't fly in, even if I have a quite small canopy and some experience.

Even if you don't become a world champion 4-way skydiver or freeflyer, there's one thing that's gonna improve if you keep jumping, and that's your canopy skills. If you keep landing your canopy, you are gonna get better.

How I got back in the sport after my ankle fracture? I just signed up for a 4-way training camp and just got jumping again. It was scary, but fun.

You are gonna be hit by gusts of wind, equipment will not always be the way you want it, and the ground will keep being uneven, but you can handle it, you're a big, tough skydiver, remember?

Good luck, and I hope you get a lot of great skydives this season!

I tried a Safire2 after having flown a Pilot for a couple of hundred jumps. It was so much like the Pilot that I didn't bother to switch models, I just got a smaller Pilot instead.



And I'm gonna fly it till the fabric disintegrates!

A dozen red roses is very romantic. I'd certainly appreciate that.

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I just find it interesting that no one has mentioned "Going In" or "Bouncing" yet, considering where we are posting.

Yeah, that is interesting. But I think that there is no evolutionary advantage in understanding that we're going to die. We haven't experienced it, so we can't wrap our minds around it, and thinking too much about it only leads to over cauciousness and risk aversiveness. Risk has always been necessary in order to get food, territory, mates, etc.

But notice how worried people are about something bad happening to their children. That's pretty well programmed into us, because it is a very big evolutionary advantage to protect our offspring.