Baksteen

I guess you left your brain on the nighstand, right next to your false teeth?

Wow.. that's an amazing insight! You must have an IQ of at least Room Temperature..

You're a brain drain all by yourself! If you'd move to ( insert city name), the average IQ of the place would go down by at least ten points.

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Yo mama

Another one from Yo Mama:

Hey, man.. I wanted to be your father but the dog beat me to it.

My fourth jump:

Because of economy reasons I was going to 5000 ft. with my SL, and it was the very first time I was going to jump from a C182.
I don't know if you're familiar with that plane, but it requires you to climb out on the step on the wheel strut before making the actual exit.
On top of that, the C182 climbs a lot slower than our normal C206 turbine, so I had a lot of time on the way up.
Add to this that it was the very first time I was jumping a (broken) cloudbase lower than my exit altitude, AND the first time in "high winds" (student limit - 10 kts) and I don't mind telling you I was scared to the point of seriously considering riding the plane down.
This feeling lasted right until the moment when the door opened. Then I told myself not to be such a wuss, I wanted to skydive, so I was going to skydive.
I climbed out on the step, clutching the wing strut for dear life, and with stiffly closed eyes because of the fear that was , I turned my head in the direction of the door.
Then I felt my right cheek flapping in the relative wind, and the fear just vanished! Surprised, I opened my eyes, laughed, and made eye-contact with my JM.
READY?
YES!
GO!
So "go" I did. And the extra long canopy ride down was awesome!

Every now and then I still get a mild version of that fear again, that during the ride up I close my eyes and think "why the HELL do I enjoy this?"


But once I am out of the door I remember.

Seeing a good friend jump the very first 7-cell I'd ever packed was much worse (than just jumping my very first packjob myself)

Edited for clarity -or so i hope .

How do you feel once you're out of the door? Tell us about that too

Yes, I didn't put that very well.
It's kinda hard to explain what I mean but don't worry, I usually have very soft landings.

Let me try again.
As I understood, in a flare, like Phoenix says, you minimise descent and horizontal speed just before touching down - initially by going from 0% brakes to 100% brakes.

A stall (please: at high altitude!) can be induced by "flaring" your canopy, and keeping your toggles all the way down. like when flaring normally you minimise horizontal speed and, initially, descent, but as the wing is held in the "misshapen" form you have pulled it in the descent rate picks up again, and can/will become much higher than the normal descent rate.
(stall for too long and you may get a mal)

I haven't explored the stall very much yet, as I am not jumping my current canopy for that long yet, and I am just curious.
But maybe this belongs in a different topic, to avoid confusion.

My reality and yours are pretty much the same

Thank you for explaining my post so well.

No, sorry, that's not what i meant.

I meant that theelongated steering lines make sure that a canopy becomes hard(er) to stall in the air.
I wasn't talking about landings.

When I first got off the Manta (size oil tanker) I transferred to a Falcon 215 which didn't have elongated steering lines.
After opening I had (stupidly) trained myself to "pump brakes..release..pump brakes..hold..where is everybody/where am I".

With the Manta that was no problem, but when I did this with the Falcon I started "shaking" in my harness after a few seconds.
Hang on..that's not right..
Then I looked up, and saw that the canopy had stalled. Oops.
Lesson learned: Nothing wrong with floating in deep brakes to orient yourself after opening, but with this canopy you have to release the brakes some to keep from stalling.

If I had not held the brakes up high, maybe I might have stalled the canopy way lower, say when turning in for final (which i prefer to do by a flat turn) unexpectedly increasing my vertical speed, and risking serious injury.

---

But tell me something, isn't a flare basically a kind of "stall" executed at the right height/time?
Very crudely speaking, during the first few jumps you slam the brakes from 0% to100% a few feet before landing, and hold them there until you're back on terra firma and your wing has collapsed beside you.
for those who do not read the entire thread, this is not advice on how to flare, this is a question

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I've done stall before with back risers as part of my training but I never succeeded with toggles on our navigators.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but don't student canopies usually have elongated steering lines?

IIRC the purpose of that is to make them harder to stall, but on the downside it means some of the flaring power of the canopy is lost.
However, given the ample size and low WL on your average student canopy, it seems a good trade.

Maybe that's why you have difficulty stalling the Nav but not the PD? It may be worth asking the local rigger about it, if you're really interested.

" You're falling at 200 kph? Wow! Aren't you afraid that it will knock you out?"
Took me a while to realise they were thinking of (fighter) aircraft, and the g's they can pull.

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You just need a big rig, accuracy tuffet (air-bag), and the skill to consistently hit it.

A skill I sadly lack, but am working on to improve

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No less than three of my friends have asked if i can tandem jump with them "But I'd feel so much safer jumping with you!"

Are you RETARDED??!?!?! Safer with me than with a certified TM with 500-6000 jumps under his belt?

Retarded.. Now, that's not very nice. They just don't know anything about the sport, that's all. What they are looking for is not actual safety, but moral support. Just offer to be on the same load as they are, and make sure they can see you during the ride up. Smile a lot, thump their shoulder and whatever.
But make sure to discuss things with the TM first, no matter your current experience level.
They'll tell you how to behave in freefall, and probably also to stay the F away from the tandem in freefall. But that doesn't really matter, your friends do not need the support anymore once they are out of the door, now do they?

I've got 76 jumps.
There is a lot of stuff that I don't know I don't know, so maybe I'm putting an individual on a dangerous course when giving uninformed well meant advice.

So what i usually do is relate anecdotal stuff which worked for me on that single occasion in those specific circumstances, or just not react at all.
However I agree with Sraja that DZ.com is a tool to be used within it's context, and that a lot of useful advice is hidden among the debris.

But I'd like to add another standard response to the discussion, if I may.

[rant]
"Talk to your instructors" is always worth repeating/emphasising, for the reasons AFFI stated, However, sometimes you see people responding with "do a search, that question has been asked many times before."
What good does that answer do the person who asked the question?

How are you, being a Noob, going to be able to find the useful advice among the spam? Sort the sound advice from the possibly fatal advice? It's different when someone references a specific thread/post which answers the question, but just telling someone to do a search is a waste of bandwith, and more so than re-asking any question.
[/rant]

Why?

Just like all the other people say - due to a lack of understanding.

"What could happen?
You fall out of an airplane, do some crazy shit, like your told, and if necessary there is an instructor who'll correct anything that can go wrong."

ETA: FWIW, I was much the same.
Before actually making my first jump I thought I'd spread out the 5 SL jumps I bought with my FJC over as long a time as possible.
Maybe one a month, or one a week if I had enough time on Saturdays.
I kept thinking that right up until the moment I was out of the door...

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ok, so, when you calculate your wingloading, do you include the total weight of your rig on top of your body weight or don't you?

Yes, you do.

I weigh 220 lbs. out of the door, and I am currently jumping a Navigator 240 (rental)

ETA oh yeah, I got 76 jumps so far.

Look at it this way:
As a wise man once said, if skydivers had a death wish, they'd probably only make one jump.

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Yeah I've been reading that but I don't wanna go and look like im ahead of myself, not even legal to jump just yet. Keep thinkin their gonna be like "Wtf, this kid doesn't even know what he's in for and he's trying to learn to pack?"

You know, I actually met someone who can unravel the worst knots out of a parachute *and* do a spendid pack job all within ten minutes - who actually doesn't jump himself "because he isn't sick of living".

At the Flanders boogie a couple of weeks ago we made a cross country skydive.
45 jumpers made the hop&pop from 3 cessna caravans at 13.000 ft.
Due to circumstances unknown the expected 40 kt winds at that alti were more close to 4 kts.

I was jumping a Navigator 240, and stayed in half brakes for what fet like forever.
Below me, I saw more and more jumpers turn into the wind and land.
When at 4000 ft. I still didn't recognise anything that resembled the area around the DZ, I just gave up, picked a field and landed - about 10 meters away from a man walking his dog and watching me land. As I landed in a field next to the last street of what turned out to be the Belgian town of Moorslede, some people came out of their houses to watch me land from their backyard.
After talking with the dog-owner, it turned out that I was right on course, but had landed about 9 km short of the DZ.
I fieldpacked my chute, and walked to the intersection planning to phone the DZ, but was picked up by some total stanger who had already pulled to skydivers out of some field, and who had just enough room left in his jeep for me.

It turned out that noone had made the DZ, most people landing 9-12 km out.
The most distance was covered by the only static liner on the load, who exited right before me and who was flying a Manta 290 at what looked like 80% brakes all the time from exit to beyond when I turned in to the wind.

Other out landings on this jump were way more spectacular than mine, but those are not my story to tell

We Dutch people have the cutest names for our offspring, such as:

Floor, Moos, Joke, Puck, Dick, Job, Beer, Damian, Freek, Harm, Jet, Mart, and Dirk.

No, 'cause when i stared at her, she turned away all embarrassed and said: "Well, I am not familiar with those techniques.."

Nice try though

I had a botched landing, after which i found myself at the Doctor's.

She diagnosed a partially torn ankle ligament, and told me that I would probably be allright with two weeks of tape, and taking it easy for a while.

I carefully brought up the matter of jumping again.

Her answer: "Since you do not need your ankle while in the air, I do not see a problem with you continuing to jump, provided that you can make sure that you can make sure that you do not have to dampen the shock of touching down yourself."

I could only stare at her, while having a mental picture of the fire department running after me with one of those catching whatchamacallits..

Co-worker: You skydive? Wow! and I thought my weekend was exciting, cause I have been playing Warhammer all weekend!

Girl after talking about tandems and asking questions about them for nearly a full hour: What! Just because I want to make only a single jump, I have to pay WAY more than you regular jumpers!? That is SO unfair!

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Would you jump with a rig that maybe was packed by a student with 8 jumps to his credit? Because in our dropzone, students also repack school rigs and hang it there, ready to use.

Yes. I have been packing from jump three onwards, and at least over here it's customary that people check the parachute at varying stages during packing.
So if these stages have been checked off on the card that goes with the parachute, and the instructor tells me it's safe to jump the rig, jump it I will.

On a side note, would getting out of the door be any easier if you lowered the mental pressure?
Go static line, enough DZs in italy still offer that course.
That way you may be perceived as "less cool" by the local skygods, but then again, paying attention to what those have to say only gets you killed.

An advantage of SL is that you'll have a lot less to worry about per jump, even if it does take way longer to get to the same stage as with AFF.
(For me 55 jumps so far, still no A-licence).
The major benifit though, is that the cost per jump is lower, as you do not need two AFFIs, just a single jumpmaster.
However, you should expect to have paid as much for your A as an average AFF-student by the time you get there.

Lastly, it's perfectly fine to be afraid. Here's my first jump:
Up until the moment I was looking outside I was fine. Slightly nervous, but fine.
I went to sit in the door (C206), looked at my JM, and got the go signal.
When I actually jumped from the plane I felt my stomach clench, and I tensed, jerking my arms and legs some. Retrospectively I am sure that I would have hada severe brainlock if I had to make a freefall after that exit.
If you look closely at the video, you can even see me shut my eyes briefly.

Except then I was sudenly distracted by the parachute opening, (forget about counting)which felt as if I abruptly came to a full stop and did a summersault.. Surprised, I looked up and thought oh yeah... that large hanky above me..I need to perform some checks... I then saw I had a few line twists, and I actually laughed!
I kicked out the twists, and from that moment on, skydiving mainly has been loads of fun.

Good luck!

>>1)have a total of 100 jumps before September 30, as that was the date of my first jump.

>>2)get A.

1) forget it. Bad weather, social obligations to whuffos and a sprained ankle are conspiring against me. I'm stuck at 55 until at least the end of July.

2) I just might...

'ere, I wonders what will happen when I pulls this here little yoke with that shiny handle thingy...

My scariest off landing wasn't even that far away from the DZ.

It was the first time I'd been to 12k, and I found myself in a flat spin I could not correct, even in delta.
(issue resolved on the very next jump)
I pulled and ended up with some line twists, which I managed to get out with plenty of altitue remaining.
However, I was a bit shaken from the "scary freefall", so I bollixed up my left hand pattern.

I found myself over a farmhouse at 500 feet, made a small correction, and realised I was going to end up in a ditch.
I made another small correction, and did a stand up landing on a small freshly sown lawn. One of my feet was on solid ground, the other dangling above the ditch.
Fortunately the wind caught my canopy and blew me back onto the little field.

It's Scottish.

http://www.websters-online-dictionary.org/definition/fluffer

In the Netherlands it varies greatly.
There is no "tipping culture" as far as i'm aware.

Restaurants, bars etc. all have their individual policy.
Some let each individual waiter/waitress keep whatever they collect in tips.
Some pool all tips, and divide it among all waiters/waitresses, either equally or depending on how much every individual has worked that month.
Some pool all tips, but divide it among all staff, including cooks and dishwashers.
Some claim to have included the tip in the bill.

And some just take away the tips, and pocket them.
Those are the joints I'll never return to.

As to the tips I give, sometimes I just round up the bill to the nearest convenient price, even if it's only 30 cents.
Sometimes, on a large bill, I tip as much as a fiver.
But Dutch restaurants are not allowed to cut the staff's pay.

But minimum wage or not, you'll take whatever I feel like giving you and like it (and I have been a waiter myself).

Where do you go when your dying for Beloney?

"Samurai Pizza Cats"!