riggerrob

Scary how the hard-core right-wing of any religion travels full-circle until it resembles the hard-core left-wing of another religion. They both become rigid dictatorships/autocracies that brutally suppress any deviation from their narrow world-view. Their narrow world-view alienates many possible sympathizers. Remember how the United States of America was founded in the wake of the Protestant Reformation, Thirty Years War, Catholic Reformation, etc. that laid waste to large swaths of Germany and sparked a bloody Civil War in England. That is why the Constitution of the USA specifically forbids Congress from making any rules related to religion. I respect the American constitution because it tries to pre-empt any religious war in the USA by separating church and state.

Yes, Javelin was originally TSOed to accept round or square reserves. Javelin was originally TSOed back durign the mid-1980s when round reserves (e.g. Strong 26' LoPo) were the norm. It was not until the late 1980s that round reserves fell out of fashion due to acid-mesh. The only limitation is that round reserves need Type 3 or Type 4 diapers - with all suspension lines stowed on the diaper. Also keep in mind that medium or large volume round reserves will not fit into the smaller Javelins that are currently fashionable. Check the PIA Canopy Volume Chart before attempting to install any round reserve. Then compare that with the Javelin canopy volume compatibility chart. I have packed dozens of round reserves (mostly Strong 26 foot LoPos, but also a few ^%$#@! Phantoms) into Javelins. Please only pack round reserves for skydivers who have already made a few dozen jumps on rounds. Younger jumpers do not know what they do not know about landing round canopies. Rounds require specific landing techniques that cannot be taught in one hour. I have packed even more Javelins with square reserves: PD, Raven, Smart, Swift, Tempo, etc. Finally, I have installed most types of automatic activation devices (Argus, Astra, FXC12000, Maars, Vigil, etc.) into Javelins.

Lots of arm muscle. May I suggest training in the gymnasium 3 or 4 times per week to include chin-ups, curls, push-ups, parallel-bar dips, etc. Technique also helps a lot. Personally, I like to pull toggles to shoulder level, then rotate my elbows up so that I am using more muscles (pectorals, latimus dorsi, trapesius, etc. to finish the bottom half of the flare.

I share your curiosity about double-keel Paradactyls. Please let me know when yours is airworthy. I have 4 jumps on a Delta II and one on a Paradactyl. I also have a PZ-81 and a Russian-made Telka (sp?) gathering dust in my closet.

As an update - with a Canadian perspective - I recently attended Operation Pegasus Jump 2023 at Campbell River, B.C. Canada. Most of the attendees were retired military types. Back when we served, marijuana was strictly illegal. If the military police ever caught you smoking marijuana, hashish, crack, etc. they would arrest you and send you to jail. After release from jail, you would get a dishonorable discharge which would make it impossible to get any gov't job after that. Fast forward to 2023 and Op. Pegasus sponsors included several cannibbus dispensaries. Veterans' Affairs will cheerfully mail THC to you if your medical doctor prescribes it for PTSD, insomnia, depression, etc. Most nights, I chew on a CBN gummy to help me fall asleep. During Op Pegasus, organizers announced that consumption of alcohol or other recreational drugs had to wait until the last jump-plane took off in the evening. Participants were mature enough to respect that rule. After the last airplane took off, several cracked a beer or lit a (marijuana) joint on airport property. I only drank near-beer, because that is all that I can handle these days. One of the reasons that I left the Canadian Armed Forces was that I was struggling with all the legal recreational drugs: caffeine, nicotene and alcohol, but smoking a bit of marijuana or hashish on weekends. It took me a few more years to quit drinking alcohol, but I am still addicted to caffeine. In the end, I have nothing but contempt for most rules written about recreational drugs. I just don't drink or smoke within smelling range of police. I just know that some us can handle recreational drugs, while others of us cannot handle recreational drugs. Some of us are wise enough to quit recreational drugs before they kill us. I have ven less respect for the politicians - mostly lawyers - who write drug laws.

Nurses and doctors work hard enough already. The last thing they need is frivolous accusations of mal-practice. Please note that the majority of mal-practice law-suits are launched by people who have no intention or means to pay their medical bills. The leading cause of bankruptsy - in the USA - is a major accident or major illness. Welcome to the only country in the First-World without federal health care insurance. Make no mistake, Canadians, Swedes, etc. pay heavily for medical insurance, but we also enjoy tiny medical bills after even the worst train-wreck.

My first guess would be dehydration. Remember to sip plenty of water throughout the day.

Agreed! The most dangerous turn is a low altitude, 90 degree toggle-whip. The canopy does a steep dive towards the dirt as it tries to regain equilibrium/stable flight. That recovery arc is long and difficult to predict. It takes hundreds of turns to fine-tune toggle-whip turns. The canopy may or may not recover before impact. Toggle-hooks were fashionable among the "Stiletto pilots" frequenting Perris Valley 30 years ago. Too many of them left the DZ in ambulances. Later we learned that front-riser turns result in less altitude loss and provide more opportunities to "bail out" of a poor approach. That is why modern swoopers use a combination of toggles, front risers, rear risers, steering toggles and leg-strap inputs to fine-tune their speed-increasing turns.

A few years back, an accompanied freefall student showed up with a newly-purchased full-face helmet. We asked him if he could see both his release and reserve handles and demonstrate grabbing them. Once he demonstrated being able to see and grab both handles, we took him up for a jump wearing his new helmet. He performed well on the rest of his accompanied freefall jumps and graduated. The key is being able to watch your fingers wrap around the release and reserve handles.

Remind your rigger to keep a bit of tension on your reserve lines. A bit of tension will help keep suspension lines neat and reduce the risk of tension knots.

Well ... if you want to be a theological nit-picker ... most Muslims are technically Jews since they include the Jewish Old Testaments in their Holy Koran. The Koranic stories about Adam, Eve, Moses, Noah, Abraham, etc. were originally written by Jews. Similarly, Muslims can be counted as Christians since they recognize Jesus Christ and important prophet-of-god, just not the most important or last prophet-of-god.

Agreed! Too much of woke culture is really censor ship by the lower class. Odd that the lower class would advocate censorship when one of the the few they still have is their voice. ??????? Whenever a politician stoops to "muck-raking" about their competitors, I immediately drop them to priority-last on the list of people that I am willing to vote for. Then I ignore all their speeches for the rest of the election.

The first step to making most canopies open softer is to roll the nose. If you want to roll-pack the entire canopy, then look at the Strong Dual Hawk packing manual. I have seen a few civilians roll-pack an entire canopy by laying the canopy on its side and rolling the nose past the B lines. Then they grab all the steering lines and roll them forward past the C lines.

Both my grand-fathers were Protestants. One was an Orangeman, making him a Protestant with a capital "P." He attended the Anglican church on Sunday mornings, then devoted the afternoon to telling us everything that was wrong with the Roman Catholics in Quebec. I was tired of his rants before I became a teenager. I never liked Catholic crucifixes. They always scared me. More recently I have come to the conclusion that Catholic crucifixes were invented by Romans after they stopped throwing early Christians to the lions (Colliseum) and adopted Christianity as the state religion. Crucifixion was invented by the Romans to publicly punish and humiliate non-conformists (see gladiator revolt). Crucifixion was a slow and painful and miserable way to die. Crucifixion was right up there with public castration, disembowelment, drawing-and-quartering, etc. Criminals were publicly crucified to "encourage the others" to conform to gov't laws.

No worries. I freely admit that while I might understand the basics of Newtonian Physics, later quantum theory goes completely over my head.

Biblical food prohibitions are based upon scientific fact ... the only problem is that they were written many centuries before humans understood germ theory, etc. Pigs sometimes carry trichinella ring worms and other diseases that can be passed to humans. Shell-fish are periodically infected with red-tide, which is poisonous to humans. If you do not understand the cycle of red-tide, the simple answer is to not eat shell-fish. Similarly, keeping separate sets of kitchen tools for meat and fish reduces the risk of cross-contamination. IOW Ancient rabbis were the food inspectors of their day. They kept the most dangerous foods off the market.

Flat-pack is probably specified in the old military manual. If I remember correctly, MC4 was introduced before PRO-packing became the norm among civilian skydivers (mid 1980s). I have PRO-packed hundreds of tandem canopies that are similar in size to MC4 canopies. They all opened fine.

Disagreeing with Albert Berthold, but agreeing with gowlerk BECAUSE I was injured during the crash of a poorly-maintained, American-registered Beechcraft King Air back in 2008. The problem started with an American AME neglecting a Special Inspection published by Pratt & Whitney. The SI required inspecting fuel pumps for a known problem with shafts gauling and rusting. The inspection schedule was TIGHT on single-engined airplanes (Cessna 208 Caravan, PAC750XL, Pilatus Porter and Quest Kodiak) powered by PT6A engines, but a looser inspection schedule on twin-engined airplanes (Beechcraft King Air, DHC-6 Twin Otter and Embraer Bandierante) ... pretty much half of the American fleet of jump planes. In my case, the AME inspected one fuel pump, but not the other. At 4500 feet, we heard 2 weird "bangs" from an engine. The weird noises were blamed on a surging fuel pump. The pilot shoved the nose down to maintain airspeed, but accidentally shut of the good engine. He was smart enough to keep wings level and maintained enough airspeed to maintain control and set us down in a farmer's field a kilometer from a runway at Pitt Meadows, B.C., Canada. A contributing factor was the pilot neglecting annual refresher training in a simulator. Canada's Transportation Safety Board concluded that the crash was caused by BOTH maintainer neglect and pilot neglect. A contributing factor was that the engine was operated "on condition" well past Beechcraft's schedule. Both Beechcraft and P&WC have announced that jump planes cannot be operated "on condition" because jump-plane operations are so radically different than the mission that the airplanes were originally designed for. A typical jump-plane does 3 or 4 up-and-down cycles per hour while business planes might do 2 or 3 flights per day. I never completely recovered from my physical injuries (e.g. my right shoulder aches today), but the long-term financial and psychological damages were worse. While Canadian Air Regulations and American Federal Air Regulations are almost identical, they differ in enforcement. Just last week, a pair of Transport Canada inspectors showed up at Campbell River at the start of a boogie (Operation Pegasus Jump). They looked over the paper-work and airplanes and found no glaring errors. The only thing that Skydive Campbell River staff had to do was remind jumpers to wear seat-belts. A few friends have tried to import American-registered airplanes to Canada, but found tens of thousands of dollars worth of maintenance neglected. While the better-managed jump-planes (Perris Valley, California and Kapowsin, Washington) are treated like investments and retirement funds and are well-maintained, not all DZOs can think that far ahead. Poorly-managed DZs need to bring their airplane maintenance and pilot refresher training up to the same standards as commuter airlines. The only suggestion that I disagree with is about installing flight data recorders. Modern GPS trackers are smaller and simpler and more helpful when trying to understand crashes.

Probably still airworthy as long as you keep the wing-loading well below 1 pound per square foot. Like most canopies made of F-111 fabric (pre-zero porosity). Back then no-one regularly loaded canopies much more than 0.7 pounds-per-square foot. WARNING: exceeding more than 0.7 pounds-per-square-foot will result in injuries on most F-111 canopies. IOW F-111 canopies can only be jumped at 1 pound-per-square-foot when new. They soon lose/gain porosity so after 50 jumps, it would be unwise to load them too heavily.

Gear sales typically require a rigger to do a full inspection. This protects both the buyer and the seller physically and financially. First an full inspection confirms that all of the gear is fully airworthy ... keeping the buyer alive. Secondly, riggers often act as neutral third parties in financial transactions. When I worked for Square One (Perris Valley, California) I was the middle=man in dozens of used gear sales. Basically, the seller left it with Square One - on consignment. SQ1 riggers inspected and repacked the reserve, AAD and harness/container. We also did a full inspection on the main. We also completed any minor repairs or Service bulletins. That was about $120 in labour. Then the rigger wrote a report and handed the report to sales staff, who shared the report with both buyer and seller. Once money changed hands, SQ1's sales department shipped the gear to the buyer. Since then I have acted as middle-man in dozens of other gear sales. People know better than to try to sell ratty old gear through me because I have a reputation as a narrow-minded, control-freak of a fascist when it comes to parachute repairs. I have also refused to be involved in a few deals that would have seen a tiny parachute sold to a junior jumper. Riggers have to look out for the health of their junior customers if they want repeat business next year.

We banned tobacco from Rigging Innovations because we did not want new-production Talons to smell of stale cigarette smoke.

My personal record is 14 tandem jumps in a single day. Mind you, some of my tandem colleagues brag about doing more than 20 tandems in a day. When I worked at Victoria Skydivers, the norm was 6 per day. At Skydive Kangaroo, Hinckley, Hemet, and Pitt Meadows, we routinely did 8 tandems per day. At Snohomish, the routine was a dozen tandems per day. With tandems it is like doing the same jump a dozen times in a row because the dive plan is always the same. The only thing that changes is the size of the student. On good days I can even remember the names of my students. It REALLY helps when someone else is packing.

His mother speaks the truth!

I modified my Vector I with magnetic riser covers and made hundreds of jumps in that configuration. The only problem was them opening when I was sideways to the wind while dispatching IAD students. Magnetic riser covers always reclosed themselves when the side wind was eliminated. If I had to modify the rig again, I would install three layers of magnets, like more modern Vector 3. # layers meaning one layer on the rise cover and double layers on the yoke.