pchapman

Don't you like a really secure reserve handle?

Even photos of a reconstruction of the event would help, especially if the original seal is used. (And we also have the situation of a first time poster with no profile, which may or may not mean anything.) Just wanted to clarify a couple issues people brought up where I think the original post may have been misread: "For the lead seal to get pulled into the loop" --> The O.P. wrote that the seal jammed in the grommet, and didn't mention anything about it actually going into the actual loop in the closing loop in any way. Presumably the seal went into the grommet, jamming the loop against the grommet? "the end of the cable housing 5-6 inches from the flap grommet, so this is impossible" --> The seal got stuck in the top grommet, not the ripcord housing.

I'll try to stay out of this to some degree because there is no single right answer. To be able to discuss the safety of the Aussie rules one had better know the Aussie rules in detail... which I don't. There are risks of skydiver / aircraft collisions. The risks are low but accidents can happen. In the world of light plane VFR flying by see and avoid, mid-air collisions happen, and not just in the circuit of airfields. Aussie regs are at: http://docs.apf.asn.au/index.php/Cloud_Jumping_Procedures On that page there's a link to the government regs. Also, there's a spreadsheet with the calculations that you're interested in. Seems like any DZ wishing to get approval for cloud jumping would have to do the calculations. A quick skim of the regs suggest that extensive cloud can't be around opening altitude; openings are supposed to be well clear of cloud. Drops may for example be prohibited if there's a large clear area between cloud layers, because then a VFR aircraft could be in the gap, not visible to the spotter on the aircraft or the mandatory ground spotter. The Aussie rules have a lot of detail, beyond just "well, you probably won't die."

Mccurley: Yes, Steve Sutton married Kathy Cox.

Nanook's links to usdoj.gov/dea pages (among others) was certainly interesting and those pages listed many useful bits of evidence. Still, the overall logic in those gov't pages is pretty sloppy. They tend to mix marijuana in with heroin, not really distinguishing between the two in societal harm. (They might as well talk about legalizing marijuana, heroin, and torturing puppies, if they want to lump enough things together so that everyone would be against their legalization.) Or on a page about how Europe's laws aren't the answer for the US, they have one paragraph about how one study showed increased in violent crime in industrialized nations other than the US. That was presumably in support of the notion that European laws are laxer on drugs. But in the next paragraph, they state how European laws vary -- some countries have very liberal laws, others have strict laws. Given that second paragraph, the first paragraph shows no effect of drug laws on violent crime. It's just an ad hominem attack -- Europeans are bad, so we shouldn't do what (some of them) do.

I met the designer last year, Mr. S., demonstrating one of his kites based on the same principles. He no longer jumps. He married a former Canadian accuracy champ, they live in the Toronto area, fly a C-150 and are building a Glastar homebuilt. A couple years back I posted a copy of an old article here, that I had found about the design, at a time when I had no clue about the canopy. The meeting was at a informal Canadian skydiving pioneers reunion that's on again this year, organized by Beatnik. He knows more about the design...

There have been at least a couple studies that have made it into journals, looking at heart rates among other things, especially how it varies before / during / after a jump and between novices and experts. As a university student you probably have access to electronic versions of journals online so you can easily search for them.

I have from time to time had Paragear ship things by a cheaper method than they show on their website. For example, to Canada they will only show something like a 1-3 day Global Express rate, and a 5 day Express Mail rate. But in the additional comments field one can instead ask for the the slower and cheaper 6-10 day Priority Mail. That has worked for me. (Except the last time -- they sent it the slower way but charged me the faster way. Still trying to sort that out...)

My perspective with plenty of skydiving experience and some paragliding experience: Skydiving is good for quick thrills. Paragliding can be more about longer term tactical decisions. (But both sports naturally benefit from careful thinking and planning.) Skydiving is less weather dependent. Drive to the DZ when it isn't actually raining or overcast, pay up, and one gets altitude. Depending on where one lives, it may be a lot longer drive to good paragliding launches in the mountains. One will sit on the ground waiting for good weather more in paragliding, waiting for strong enough thermals or winds to stay up, but not strong enough to be dangerous. Skydiving is a quicker fix. Skydiving is more a group thing, although there are aspects one can work on oneself and one has to work one's way up to skydiving in groups. In paragliding one may be in a club and flying from a site with others, and sharing thermals with others, but it is a more solitary challenge. Paragliding can certainly be plenty exciting if one is, say, flying in strong conditions or flying low along ridges, where one had better not make any mistakes to avoid sinking into the trees or hitting the ground on a high speed downwind pass. It isn't all just floating around gracefully. Still, paragliding is more about getting out and enjoying nature and enjoying the view for a longer time.

The rigger may or may not have known. By the bulletin, those crappy plastic lined cutters don't have to be removed if the cutter is below the pilot chute, and undamaged. One scenario is that the cutter appeared fine in June and broken now. (Or there were differences in interpretation of bulletin #3 which could easily be misinterpreted when it came to what damage was acceptable vs. not acceptable.)

For reference, pics of the Italian Lisi chute have been up here for some time: http://www.parachutehistory.com/round/lisi.html Edit: A search on Lisi does show a US patent by him and other patents that reference it. # 02371898 is by him, which shows the Lisi parachute not simply having a pull down apex, but having an inner ring of suspension lines too, which are not just apex lines. That I didn't know. Patent at: http://patimg2.uspto.gov/.piw?docid=US002371898&PageNum=1&&IDKey=CB001D30F252&HomeUrl=http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2%2526Sect2=HITOFF%2526p=1%2526u=%25252Fnetahtml%25252FPTO%25252Fsearch-bool.html%2526r=7%2526f=G%2526l=50%2526co1=AND%2526d=PALL%2526s1=2371898%2526OS=2371898%2526RS=2371898 (Sometimes a browser add-in like AlternaTIFF is needed to view the patent office data.) That patent from 1940 was "vested in the Alien Property Custodian"!

Thanks. That Pop Top manual is extremely vague on what to do with the pilot chute?! It mentions pulling the locking loops (presumably the ones on the pilot chute) through the grommets and inserting temporary locking pins. The pilot chute is not mentioned, nor is installing the ripcord... This sounds a bit like those old manuals that state, "Fold canopy in the conventional manner." I'm curious whether the Baser's instructions are more up to date. So the the Pop Top of the day would have been made with a fixed length closing loop?

Ditto. This is just my impression: Even if one can land no problem in normal wind conditions, as the headwind decreases (or tailwind builds up) there's going to be a point where the next few mph change starts to get a lot trickier that dealing with the previous few mph. It may be particularly tricky if the jumper is at the boundary of needing to use a different touchdown technique, which they aren't yet used to -- dropping in to land with a couple steps vs. having to run it out (with no vertical speed at all) vs. sliding it out on one's feet if too fast to run it out. Some days the DZ may have "very little wind", and then in the evening there is "absolutely no wind". While it seems like almost a trivial difference in wind speed, I personally find that that difference is quite a bit bigger than one would expect if not giving it much thought. This next part isn't as important but shows an interesting result if one works through the physics of downwinders: It appears that for a given change in flight speed, the overall effect on touchdown speed will be greater for a downwinder than for a downsize. Say someone downsized to a canopy 5 mph faster. In zero wind conditions, they won't be touching down 5 mph faster. First off, with the higher energy flight, the canopy may be better able to pitch up and hold the flare. (Just like doing an accelerated landing approach.) Also, changes in speeds (full flight and stall speed) will at the first level of approximation vary in a fixed ratio, not by fixed quantities. If full speed increases by 5 mph, stall speed will be up by a similar ratio of speeds, which may only be say 3 mph down at stall speed. So despite downsizing to a 5 mph faster canopy, in zero winds, the landing may only be say 2 mph faster. Contrast that to staying on the original canopy and doing a 5 mph downwinder. Cool, you get that same rush of the extra 5 mph speed when coming at the ground and starting the flare, just like if you downsized. But when the flare is done, that tailwind is still there, leaving you with that full extra 5 mph over the ground. That's another reason why a few extra mph downwind can increase the difficulty quickly. Downwinders, whatever their fun and educational value, should therefore be approached in small increments.

The idea is that there is a level in between: For example, parking in a no parking zone or simple speeding are against the law and you get sanctioned for it, but you don't get a criminal record. There was a short while in Canada a few years ago, before a change to a more conservative government, where pot was effectively decriminalized. Anyone found smoking or in possession of small amounts would be fined, but they wouldn't get a criminal record. (... and have problems crossing the border to go to boogies in the USA...)

Interesting. Another place to look at is the Netherlands, where it sounds like they did have some problems with decriminalization. But I don't know how the arguments balance out so I can't comment further. We also have to be careful to distinguish between legalizing and decriminalizing.

Yeah! Everyone has a different idea of what a reunion should be like. I'd be bored too if it was just old guys drinking beer, although if that's what they want to do that's up to them. If I go to a pioneers' reunion I'd like to hear some stories and learn more about the old days.

I didn't think that happens at all. It is when inflation starts, that fabric on one side of the skirt happens to get pushed between the lines somewhere else just under the skirt and blows through that opening. Then it catches more air and tries to drag through there. That gives partial inversions or temporary partial inversions, which may involve nylon burning against nylon which isn't good. I never saw Poynter's round canopy statistics as very useful for the round vs. square debate. While he talks a little about diapers, his stats only applied to diaper-less rounds. (And much of that is even about hand deployed paratroop reserves!) While the data is useful for understanding fundamental round canopy behaviour, it has little relevance to rounds with any sort of staging, like diapers. I'm still agnostic on the issue, to what degree diapers improve round canopy reliability. It helps a lot, but whether it gets to square canopy reliability, I've never been convinced, and have never seen numbers! Does anyone have any numbers on diapered round reserve reliability? A diaper does provide staging until the lines and canopy are tensioned, but still at the moment of diaper release, it seems one can still get an uneven skirt, such as from a shoulder low deployment. It would be interesting to see USPA incident and accident reports from the 1980s, where one could look at issues with diapered rounds.

For me, the Paradactyl wins hands down. Put a few jumps on the regular single keel version last year. (Double keels, I'm told, flew much better.) The thing has no flare. Even the manual admits that the flare really just slows down the forwards speed without doing much for the descent rate. Descent rate isn't horrible, but in light winds with no flare, that's not a big consolation. But the worst thing is how sensitive it is to turbulence, how easily it stalls, and how badly it recovers. The manual advises not to fly behind any other canopy below 1500 ft. The canopy always felt like it was close to a stall. The stall point on the toggles is somewhere around one's shoulders, which doesn't inspire confidence. (At least on the one I jumped, which seems to have the original dacron lines, so should be reasonably in trim.) Then the single surface canopy has no real pressurization to help it resist deformation and collapses either. I've tried to do a mild stall twice, toggles down just enough to stall it, and then let it recover. Both times it took literally 10 seconds (on video) to get it to recover. It's not like I'm a wuss when it comes to stalls; I've stalled or trashed all sorts of canopies. But with the 'Dactyl I'm still not sure if I actually helped it recover, or if it just recovered when it felt like it. In the stall the canopy would oscillate forward, backwards, and side to side, seemingly randomly, with the pilot chute and bridle appearing off in every direction, and the Dactyl just not wanting to dive forward and resume normal flight. Definitely the scariest canopy that I planned to land! (While it isn't as impressive on video as in person, the couple stalls are at: http://blip.tv/file/1193719?filename=Pcxstuff-ParadactylStalls377.flv)

I share the concern. Yet how is it really any different than on a Racer? On the Racer, the loop is open over the whole depth of the container. (OK, there are those little tabs in the Racer bag, but I doubt they always stay in place or that every rigger uses the 'hemostat through the grommets' method to try to do so.) (Another whole issue is how Racer manuals showed the technique of hand tacking the loop shut, and Kevlar vs. Cypres line. Tacking argues that an open loop is dangerous, but who ever tacked in the last 25 years.)(The Reflex on the other hand has a molar bag.) On this Vector at least, one doesn't need to start with a huge loop and then snug it down by many inches while packing. Set it and leave it, except when needing to fine tune -- eg, set it up with 1" of open loop, and if needed, shorten by up to 1/2". However, perhaps the original photo shows the way the loop was without opening it up, in which case it will attract comments about how much contact it would have with the canopy. Not arguing for the way it was done in the original post; just discussing it.

Agreed, ANT-6 / TB-3. You beat me Ryoder! It is interesting how the early Soviet paratroops used freefall gear. (It could have been Irvin gear or derived from it, as one Russian web source suggests the Soviets actually bought 1800 Irvin freefall rigs, when their own development efforts were still small.) For some jumps, photos show the paratroops would open the reserve canopy as well.

So, what's the story on the Bluetones? Just curious, as I've got a tape of their jazz music dated 1990, called "Let it rain". While various groups have had the same name, the band in this case was a small group of skydivers, possibly well known as RW competitors: Jim Captain, Jeff Barbani, John Robbins. When I first got the album I thought "boring!", but later I really liked the slow melodies as background study music.

You know, I could see it "just happening": Say the bag went in neatly and the closing loop is pulled up through the bag. If there's some movement of the bag while the bag is being worked into corners or whatever, slack could be created in the closing loop (before any flaps are temp pinned) and, bending off to one side, it catches on the end of the cutter on the backpad. Yes the significant shortening should be noticed when trying to close the rig, but it is possible the loop was long to begin with and the rig was open when given to the rigger. Technically the rigger may have followed every step in the manual, and the rig's design can be faulted for allowing a snag point. But in practice a rigger must of course confirm that everything is staying in the place it is intended to be.

High altitude glider flights have been authorized above FL 180 into class A. This has happened on a regular basis over parts of the Rockies where wave soaring is possible. But I know nothing about the procedures and difficulty involved either authorizing individual flights, or (as has been done) temporarily reserving a block of airspace for gliders.

What was the altitude, and was it a clear & pull or 5 second jump? The student clearly messed up relative to the plan, but I'm wondering what the original plan was. I've tried to make my 5 sec. students aware of how much extra altitude is built in, so they aren't afraid to take a full 5 seconds, even if the count naturally tends to go fast. And as already asked, how were his static line exits? Even if he started on the Caravan last summer, he must have done a good static line jump the same day as the freefall, so this winter it would have been on the 206. The static line exit is done identically? The Caravan exit would also have been identical but in mirror image? That would be a complicating factor. If he was able to progress to freefall he must have had decent static line exits, in which case his apparent desire to focus on making his exit push off even stronger and better was somewhat misplaced in the list of priorities. But even if the exit was bad the student didn't then arch, nor take the full 5 seconds (if that was the plan in the first place).

Shades of the Cold War: The dreaded stem cell research gap!