pchapman

See the attached photo -- a ParaCommander on the floor, in a camouflage colour scheme that features bright yellow and other colours. Another dz.commer thought that that's the "pizza puke" colour scheme, but I don't know for sure. Is it?

Regarding the low supply of PC's: Well, I can't offer any new old stock PCs, but I have found some odds and ends that I can offer for sale. I've just put up an ad for a few PC style canopies (including a 'Russian' PC, Pap, PS-06), either in good but used condition, or well used condition. Colson and I are already discussing the sale of one. (Long after I and another rigger at the DZ raided the old rigging trailer for PC's for ourselves, I found some more and got the DZO to agree to let me sell them.)

Yes, speed increases with the square root of the wing loading change. (and the glide ratio stays the same) That's the basic, ideal calculation, but then, like Martini was talking about, you get into things like canopy distortion, lines and jumpers not changing size, etc. to mess things up. The basic theory is still a good starting point though.

We have a winner. Hmm, Danger, you probably saw that very canopy years ago in the time you were jumping at the same DZ as Steffani did. Still, it wasn't a giveaway. A whole 18 A-lines to contend with at the canopy. Not a canopy to give a newbie to propack! That kevlar (seen reinforcing the cell openings) was a hint towards ParaFlight. (For those unfamiliar with it, there are only A, B, and C lines, with lines cascading spanwise not chordwise, sometimes cascading twice, and three risers per side. At the time, in the early '90s, it seemed like Paraflight was thinking about paragliders when designing the Evolution. The Super Evolution 140 was weird but kind of fun to fly and one could do some tricks with it not possible on almost any other canopy.)

John's point is valid. If you are regularly jumping from higher altitudes in fully class G, it sure would be nice to have some contact with ATC if big planes aren't just going through class E somewhere else. To me near Toronto, Class G is something that exists only below 2200' or even just 700'. Skypuppy and I would be thinking about why the heck one would need to contact ATC for a hop and pop from 3000' (assuming it is class G) on a one-off basis. See and avoid VFR rules should be sufficient. You could fly aerobatics or fly a hang glider or do other things that aren't always easy to spot, in that same airspace. So for some aspects, the proposed class G rules do seem to go too far.

At least you cared enough to read up on things a little. In the beginning it was tough for people to get the word out and get people to understand the implications of the situation. There weren't many involved in the debate earlier, so there were few opinions to rely on. Some arguments carried more weight than others. Remember that nobody knew what TC was going to publish in the Gazette, or how it would vary from their old documents. TC wouldn't even discuss the matter with CSPA! So until about 3 days ago, nobody knew for sure what we'd have to fight. EDIT: I just noticed, the link you posted isn't to the actual NPA as published. That's a completely different NPA, about the 180 day repack cycle that has been in place a long time. (Except for some issues with demo.) So now I'm not sure if you are thinking about something totally different than NPA 99-148, or you just posted the wrong URL.

Wetswooper wrote: Jeez, you almost had me there for a moment! You learned something wrong about how drag works. It's almost a subtle change of wording but makes all the difference: WRONG: Drag is squared when speed doubles. RIGHT: Drag increases with the square of speed. (Technically not perfectly 100.000% true, but still a very very useful aerodynamics rule.) So if you have two objects with drag 4 and 2 (like you described, a 2:1 ratio), if the speed doubles you get: WRONG: square each to get 16 and 4, which is now a 4 to 1 ratio RIGHT: speed doubles, so the drag increases by 2 to the power 2 = 4 So the drags become 4*4= 16, and 2*4= 8, which is still a 2 to 1 ratio. Speed therefore doesn't change the inherent balance between the drag of two objects, so no matter where they are acting as a lever on each other, things won't go out of balance as the speed changes. It all reminds me of Galileo's thought experiment about falling objects connected or not connected by string, for the situation you described would cause some weird effects. Small items would become far less draggy than large items at high speed, and since lift behaves in the same way as drag relative to speed, airplane tails (smaller than wings) would soon lose their effectiveness in countering negative pitching moments of normal airfoils and cause aircraft to nose over and crash. Hope that helps. What I've written should get rid of the idea that a canopy would pitch up with increasing speed because of the ratio of drags from the canopy and jumper. But then as a separate issue doesn't my argument say that the glide ratio will remain the same at any speed, as the ratio of the drags for the canopy and the jumper will remain the same -- which is counter to Yuri's explanation? On its own, yes. There's more to that and I'll try to respond when I get the time. So even if there was an error in the background knowledge for the first part of the Wetswooper's post, the last part of the post still stands as a question to be answered about Yuri's calculation. (That is, the idea of the canopy drag decreasing at low speed just as the jumper's drag does.)

Time to give the usual suspects on this forum some competition. So, what's the canopy being propacked in this pic?

I've never been able to find a TC definition of parachuting , whether an aircraft has to be involved or not. The rules for UNCONTROLLED airspace are completely new. In the past one could jump from a plane in uncontrolled airspace without telling anyone; now one will have to have a 2 way radio and establish communications with ATC and broadcast the jump. TC certainly didn't tell us all this was coming! (Edited for typo.)

c): Good catch! The old 606.36 applied only where there was a Special Flight Operations Certificate (demos basically) - now it will apply to all jumping. EDIT: Also, the old section 623 of the CARs, that explains that Standards (rather than the Regulations) for jumping into controlled airspace with an SFOC, mention "wind drift drop or procedure". That way was flexible -- a "procedure" could be about anything to assess winds. So they changed their own terminology, which was fine as it was! d) Landing off has always been illegal in some sense... just that if it is "accidental" and you don't damage property and leave, you'll be OK. Not sure of the exact legal justification though.

Shropshire: If you do post paragliding stuff, you could at least explain what you are posting, rather than just providing YouTube links.

Although Andrewwhyte and Beatnik have different recollections of events and different interpretations, this has been useful to help recall some of the history of the whole regulation issue. Both CSPA and CAPS attended meetings, and I'm not too worried about exactly how many from each attended which meeting. For example, the Transport Canada Working Group regarding Regulations Respecting Parachuting Activities, met in Feb `98 and Mar `98 in Vacouver and Alberta. Both CAPS and CSPA had multiple people each at the meetings. Now that I`m this far I might as well add a little more history, although it is mainly info from the web, not knowledge gained in person. The TC Working Group was formed to look at the issue of regulations. A couple quotes from the Terms of Reference document: (at http://www.tc.gc.ca/civilaviation/RegServ/Affairs/carac/Technical/GOFR/WG/parachuting.htm) and The Working Group's final report is also online, at http://www.tc.gc.ca/civilaviation/RegServ/Affairs/carac/Technical/GOFR/WG/parachuting-fr.htm Their conclusions covered various matters, including rules that have gone into force, such as about radio coordination with air traffic control and demo jump rules. They concluded that in general, the skydiving industry knows better than Transport Canada about skydiving: Similarly, for students they wrote something which is still good today in the argument against NPA 99-148: Attached to the report is an Outline of Proposed Recommendations. About that they say: In that attached outline there are eight very short recommendations, pretty much all one sentence each. A typical one is "A rule requiring information about a parachute descent to be broadcast in advance." That sort of thing is what was concluded in the working group, has since been put into the regulations, and is accepted as reasonable. At the very bottom of the recommendations there is one on students: This is the one that is at the heart of the NPA 99-148. Notice that in the report itself they basically said, "everyone (whether from TC or skydiving) agrees that no new rules are needed for students". Yet at the same time they are saying that "everyone agrees with the attached list", in which #8 is that students must be trained according to the skydiving organizations' rules. That's the statement that seems so innocuous, supposedly changing nothing (just follow existing rules), but one that would change everything -- for all of us that fear that every single inappropriate rule or recommendation taken totally out of context will now be law. Unfortunately that item #8 does make CSPA & CAPS seemingly complicit in recommending the very thing that NPA 99-148 suggests! That sort of issue is typical of the whole regulation debate since the start of the '90s: The CSPA can say to the gov't that we don't need new rules because ours are good. And if there's an accident where rules weren't followed, the CSPA can say that we have little power to enforce our own rules. But what can the CSPA then say when the gov't replies, "OK, maybe your rules are good. Let's make them law." The implications of that statement #8 may not have been fully appreciated at the time, and led to NPA 99-148. We shouldn't forget that in the time between the Working Group's conclusions, and the present NPA fight, there was the additional meeting where all stakeholders (including CSPA, CAPS, and TC) concluded that the NPA's rules were not necessary. This was the Risk Assessment Committee meeting of May 2005. Their conclusions are being used as a major point against NPA 99-148. After 3 or 4 days the Committee concluded: (The source for is one one of Tim Grech's reports, on the CSPA email chat list, Sept 25, 2007.) When a meeting was held to set up an advisory committee in January 2007, that was when TC informed the CSPA that they were going forward with NPA 99-148.

Bill: She does say it is CAPS. That's in her profile. It's just that in the mini profile next to our posts, not everything is shown. So no need to get bent out of shape. Profiles aren't perfect. They don't, for example, show how many times one has been banned from an organization.

The loop does seem to 'snug down' better when it is looped onto itself (as is proper) rather than onto the slippery metal ring. I found the same problem as you, but with Aerodyne soft links on a RESERVE. I had thought the 'slacking off with no load' problem to be only theoretical -- but your example shows it can happen. In the case I found, assembly had been done by a quite experienced rigger but he hadn't seen the Aerodyne links before, didn't have the manual around, and forgot to double check the manual later on as he planned. It's a subtle error, one that takes a close look to notice. I only saw the error as the soft links had NOT been tacked down. Had they been tacked down they would have been quite difficult to inspect, and it might have sent the signal that they were supposed to be out of sight and thus not really inspectable. I personally like the ability to better inspect the links. (The Aerodyne Icon manual says to tack the links, but the Smart manual does not.) I think I posted pics of the case I found, in some thread in '06. Tacking the links might prevent finding an error, although it would also greatly reduce the chance of the loop slackening and coming off the ring. (A tack through the ring would technically prevent the loop from moving past and coming off the ring, but if the loop came past the widest part of the ring, on a shock loading one would be relying on the tacking only to hold it all together.) EDIT to my edit: Tdog -- So I get the impression the jumps were made before anyone got to check the reserve. When he did use the reserve, all was OK with it? (Either no Aerodyne links; or the links were done right?)

Edited from good old wikipedia: Part II ('the second publishing') puts regulations into law. Part III is the same for the bigger stuff, actual acts of parliament. The government Gazette page states: So for us in Canada, when dealing with aviation, it is generally like US pilots & skydivers dealing with an FAA Notice of Proposed Rulemaking. You get a very limited period in which to make comments on the proposed rules.

Was there any well known employee at the Relative Workshop known as Bobby, in about 1991? A friend owns a Vector II, built in '91 that has a serial number of "Bobby". Yes, that's the serial number. It is also labelled as an EST-4 rig, a size that RWS / UPT say they never made and isn't on their sizing charts. Although the name could apply to the rig and not the owner, I'm curious whether it was built by or for someone at the company, who was on particularly good terms with 'the great bearded one'.

Link to previous discussion on NPA 99-148: http://www.dropzone.com/cgi-bin/forum/gforum.cgi?post=3123567;sb=post_latest_reply;so=ASC;forum_view=forum_view_collapsed;;page=unread#unread

It makes one wonder what the canopy later smelled of...

I'd suggest "Slightly" is somewhat subjective. Not sure which way you are arguing this. Slightly above? Yes. And that's what the PD photo shows, although it is 'a good one', more than just a typical quick toggle turn. At first, the camera angle makes it look "a lot" above. You know how the whuffos on the ground look up to see people spiralling under canopy and ask how the jumpers are looping the loop...

- Packed in puddles on a tarp in the rain. Tough to pack when the fabric sticks to your hands. (I wasn't actually skydiving that pack job... Just taking it off the bridge at Bridge Day '04.) - Packed the round reserve in my first rig across tables in a free university classroom. Those who wandered by tended to not ask any questions. - DZ.commer "980" packed his crossbraced canopy in the 3rd seating row of a van while we were driving back from a stadium demo. The opening was a bit line twisty I heard, but it all worked out in the end. Doesn't count if there's no video? Well for that one I've got a photo.

Sure the ground is harder... but the snow can be soft! It is great fun to swoop into snow. It won't save you from a real dive into the ground, but you can screw around a little more than usual on landing. It has allowed a bunch of jumpers at my DZ to do belly sliding "superman" landings that one would be much more hesitant to try for the first time on grass. Of course, like with swooping a pond, the safety it brings can be lost when people push harder than normal.

I'm still in the "educate them" camp, rather than "mandatory rules" camp, even if it is hard to get through to some people. However, even if a DZ (the DZO, S&TA, whomever) is uncomfortable with preventing a person from jumping gear they bought, people will be more comfortable with the DZ using their power regarding landing areas. So the hotshot might be told that based on what people have seen of their landings, they are not approved to land at the pond, or may not swoop at the gates, or things like that. Restrictions could even go two very different ways: To force the person to land away from the normal non-swoop area if they are judged not to be heads up enough yet, or to force the person to land in the normal non-swoop area if the intent is force them to fly a normal pattern and not yet get distracted by trying to swoop hard. The preference for education over rules is "small town thinking", but also one based on observation in a smaller market: -- Nobody ever has canopy collisions. (Last one I recall hearing about in my region in Canada of at least half a dozen DZ's is about 5 years ago. Being at a C-182 DZ reduces but does not eliminate landing issues.) -- Rarely does anyone actually break themselves swooping (It's been years at the DZ I'm at that anyone broke anything, although earlier there were a couple femurs, an ankle, a wrist, etc. However, it is true that every year one hears of a couple people at other area DZ's breaking themselves up.) -- I consider myself fortunate to have been allowed to fly small elliptical very early, and don't want to dump on newbies now and deny them opportunities I had. (No canopy nazis back then. But I didn't jump the small canopies regularly, nor was there any thought of accelerated swoop landings. That makes a huge difference.) -- People keep talking about "take a canopy course". But that doesn't really exist unless one gets on a jet plane and flies a couple thousand miles. (Although one DZ in the province has started bringing in Brian Germain once a year. So far, that's an exception to what has long been normal.) Obviously this all clashes dramatically with what "big DZ" people are thinking and have experienced! It doesn't eliminate the desire for a more structured learning environment for flying a canopy, but reduces the need to start forcing people to do things a certain way. The funny thing (for those who disagree with all this) is that this year I got picked / volunteered to be in charge of canopy piloting education at the DZ. That kind of forces one to start making some decisions rather than playing the hands-off live-and-let-live (or live-and-let-die) strategy. It'll be interesting to see whether I actually get through to anybody or just end up with a dusty binder full of useful educational information….

What is being used these days for brake lines on canopies, especially on higher performance ones? Between it being winter and not having newer canopies around, I must admit I'm not sure what current practice is. Are companies pretty much sticking with the same type of line the whole canopy is done with, but obviously heavier? Eg, HMA for HMA lined canopies, Vectran for Vectran lined canopies? I recall one company trying Dacron brake lines on their HMA lined canopies. I've made Spectra brake lines for my Vectran lined canopy -- since it was convenient, and I know Spectra wear characteristics better, although I have to deal with the shrinkage issue (i.e., build everything an inch or two longer and let it wear down towards the ideal setting.)

1. The cutaway process is generally believed to be straightforward enough that simple ground simulation is acceptable. (We're not test flying a complex aircraft.) 2. It can be significantly more difficult to set up an in-air than an on-ground simulation of an emergency cutaway. 3. Certain parts (but not all parts) of the in-air simulation may not be that valid for training purposes, if handles are in different places. 4. In-air simulation of an emergency can create its own emergency. (An old topic in aviation - don't make the simulation of an engine failure turn into a real crash.) Despite all that, your final question ("Is more training needed to prepare you for the worst case scenario??") is sometimes answered with a YES. The on-ground simulation that people do is not always representative enough to make the task simple to do in the air.

For what it's worth, Rigging Innovations told me that the Flexon had 5 1/2" stows, which was typical for their rigs. However it sounded like there could be some even smaller stows, or larger 7 1/2" stows on some rigs -- but it wasn't made clear just what rigs would have that, or how rare those were. Factory advice of course is to contact them with the rig information if one wants to know for sure, and to buy pre-made stows from them.