pchapman

What's the saying? "8 hours, drugs to drogue?"

I'll defer to you on the whole complex issue of health information privacy! But a person (or company?) must be able to do something about information they come across, rather than just being forced to be quiet due to some medical privacy rules. "Hey I know this commercial pilot, I've seen his pill bottles for stuff that isn't allowed on active flight status." or "I saw this tandem instructor smoking pot before jumping today -- can we ground him for the rest of the day?" That's probably all I can contribute to the questions in this thread.

Sounds reasonable.... Unless the USPA specifically has some procedure in place where they say that all FAA records are subject to USPA review and acceptance, or they have some mechanism to charge that a USPA member has falsified the information used to obtain the legal document. (Hey, anyone can challenge the basis of a document. After all, some organization could say, "Mr. X has gained US citizenship, but we evidence suggesting he failed to tell immigration that he had been a member of a military unit in his homeland, that was involved in war crimes. This may invalidate his citizenship application." One can't respond to that simply by saying, "Yeah but his citizenship is correct according to the government." Of course one has to differentiate between disputing the actual certification (citizenship) and whether a particular organization will accept it.) So in my mind things could go either way, depending on whether the USPA properly followed their own procedures. That's where one would want to see if they need to be held accountable.

All the stuff the FAA has jurisdiction over! Plus one of the articles stated, just to rub it in: Pocket change for Red Bull, if they're still on board with the "gee I forgot to tell the team about the FAA denial" thing. Cool stunt though.

That reminds me about trying to sell a Vector II for a friend, maybe 20 years back, that had had a few owners over the years. When I checked the size code listed on the rig, it just didn't exist in the manual. And when I checked the serial number, it said "BOBBY". Hmm. I got the impression it was a rig that some trusted production line guy was allowed to assemble for himself.

Well... it's not like it pulled out of the dive and flew off towards the horizon. It just went into a spin, which is pretty much straight down in the air mass-- Just that with a slower descent rate than skydiver-freefall speed, it would drift a longer time with the wind. So then it is just a matter of how big their safe area was, whether the "going elsewhere" was still well within a safe area or not. I guess we don't really know anything about that?

Yeah we skydivers would certainly expect any responsible stunt organizers to make sure a NOTAM was issued. That should have been arranged in any case - for skydiving & aerobatic flight - but maybe that somehow got lost in the mess of the failed waiver request.

Replying to Yoink (who started another thread but Wendy locked it and directed people to post here): The guy in the video is Paul Bertorelli, a main contributor at the AvWeb aviation news site. Who is also an active skydiver. So he'll understand flying & skydiving stuff better than your average youtube commenter.

A longer video, 11 min, not as crisp, shows a bit more of the dive where the one plane starts to spin. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hiygfKgI0I Andy abandons the attempt pretty quickly. As soon as the plane spins, it decelerates rapidly "up away" from the jumpers. Andy, still head down and far away, doesn't even try to follow. Bit hard to tell where everyone is when the camera is filming from an angle, zoomed in from far away, but that's what I got out of it. We can hash out all the possible causes, talking about trim settings, C of Gs, differences without having the safety pilot present, maybe rushing the pushover, maybe rushing the exit and all that. But in the end it is one of those examples where all the practice they did, wasn't enough when the cameras were rolling for the big event. The real thing just wasn't carried out exactly as it had been in practice. (Looked like Andy was using a pretty high performance parachute (Schumann platform, removable slider). Huh. Who am I to talk, he has a million jumps, he can make his own choices, and choose a compact rig he is familiar with. When I was doing stupid parachute stuff, though, where I might end up low, I tended to go with something super reliable and docile...)

Hey, of course we are interested in new facts and info when they appear. If you have further info from interviews by Luke or whomever, please share instead of wasting time on snark. Note that some of the comments (like mine) were based on an aviation news company's presentation of the original FAA .pdf letter that denied permission for the flights.

Did you miss the video? (The one posted in this thread was a little awkward to watch at least on some devices. Plenty of stuff out on youtube, some all chopped up and edited as part of commentary or newscast videos, but this one is a decent dump of what Red Bull seems to have released: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFFj2hQVQKc) The plane was in an inverted spin. I think it just pitched over slightly too fast, for whatever reason, and with its pitching momentum went past "zero lift". I haven't re-watched videos closely, but it seems they exited the airplanes very quickly to not waste altitude, say at 60 degrees nose down. It wasn't as if they got into a nice sustained vertical dive and then said, "all good, prepare to exit, now!"

No, I am in favour of public safety. But I'll argue the FARs and the waivers to them are dumb. One can legitimately argue about the FAA ruling in this case, but in general I argue the FAA has rules that are ridiculously restrictive to 'fun' stuff that is allowed, not just in more anarchic countries, but also well regulated ones like in Europe (eg BASE rig jumps from paragliders). Or allow make allowance for differences in rules from other countries where the risk to public safety is small. (eg, visiting foreign skydivers using their own riggers unless gear is TSOd, or lack of similar allowance for visiting glider & aerobatic pilots. I won't go on with more examples.) The FAA's argument about needing the backup pilots in case of airspace intrusion is pretty silly -- how about all those skydivers in freefall and aerobatic pilots in the middle of a routine, who aren't likely to notice someone who hasn't read their NOTAMs who is getting close to 'their' airspace? Then the FAA might as well decree that all jumps should be tandems so one person can keep a lookout. Still Red Bull isn't blameless either. One wonders if they started the process soon enough, since they were faced with a last minute denial, instead of being able to revise procedures and ask again a month later. And they claimed that the stunt had some extra validity because it could be inspirational to STEM kids or whatever. The FAA's denial, as seen embedded in the AvWeb article (once again, https://www.avweb.com/aviation-news/plane-swap-stunt-fails-no-injuries-repoted/ ) did note that the FAA would have allowed it to happen if they had backup pilots just in case. Who could either then demonstrate their inverted spin recovery skills, or add to the skydivers in the air....

Oh they are supposed to work in any attitude, using the rocket deployment, pulling the canopy out. Still a chance of the bridle getting caught up in something, but a good 'angle of fire' should minimize that. It's more about airspeed limits for the deployment. Seemed like a good idea to reduce the crash speed in case "an airplane got away". But it was a bit more of a snivel than there was time for with that activation altitude, however they rigged up an AAD to the pull system. Edit: Probably designed to snivel a bit with its slider, to keep the loads down during higher speed deployments. Not easy to build a parachute that is light weight and can work with the kinetic energy of a regular sized Cessna or Cirrus etc. I don't think there's a hard standard on how fast aircraft recovery parachutes are supposed to open under different conditions. One is expected to not pull them too low, whatever that is. Some FAQs for the BRS for Cessnas, if that's the system that was used: https://brsaerospace.com/questions/ I think the FAA is pretty dumb, they just don't seem to cater their system to 'fun' things like jumping BASE rigs from ultralights, or stunts like this. Even when public safety is taken care of. (Unlike the dumbass Trevor Jacob.) That being said, it really isn't a good idea to blow off the FAA either.

My simplistic gut reaction is that the FAA thinks it is in charge of airspace, and all others, hey, those dummies should check the NOTAMs. Sort of, "If they want info, they phone us; we don't have to phone them." Obviously the communications failures and security agreements around Washington will be more complex in reality.

The AFF hop and pop is a good time to get the student to review their ability to make freefall time calculations. They can calculate how long it takes from 5000' or whatever down to the minimum student opening height, which is still higher than the experienced jumper height, which is still higher than the experienced jumper height used to be in earlier years. The student will discover that they really have a LONG time to sort things out and pull, despite their instinctive fear that they "are low and have to pull soon." (Edit: Though I don't know at what point those calculations are taught in the US system. I'm more familiar with Canada, where a student might be already working their way through the apppropriate PIM, basically our SIM. In any case one can always do the calculation for the student...)

... Hell, ALL of the rings are a who's who...

I have seen a DZ (here in Canada) start out as "no full face" until say jump 50. After all, nothing wrong with having a cheap "standard" open face to start with before buying expensive equipment. But in recent years they relaxed that rule once people started coming to the DZ from the tunnel who already had had bought super pricy full face helmets. Added into the thinking is that modern full faces with big visors don't obscure vision of handles like some of the old designs. Searching the USPA SIM (the current '21-'22 one) I see no mention of "full face" or similar, other than that it can be more awkward to communicate in the case of canopy collisions. Similarly searching the SIM, I see no mention of any particular sort of visual altimeter suggested for any students or novices. No restrictions there at all that I can see. (Section 5-3 is the one that goes into details about altis.) They do recommend avoiding audible altimeters until a student already has altitude awareness. So if there are any recommendations by the USPA, they would have to be somewhere else, that I don't know about not being a USPA instructor. I'd be interested to hear other DZ's experiences.

Nice find. Did MARS do any similar testing vids with other rigs for comparison by any chance, to see what vertical distance the PC's get? Riggers or jumpers often pop reserves to see how it goes, but as you know, not usually in some standardized configuration with the rig nearly horizontal.

It sure was fun and a bit scary to be around students in the static line days! I'm surprised more DZO's didn't have heart attacks. As a young jumper at the time, watching static line students was great entertainment and sure made skydiving seem cool & dangerous. (Doing radio or dispatching them did get a little more stressful of course.) Most students of course did fine, but there were always a few problem students. All sorts of tales and horror stories to be told, as they scattered themselves across the landscape when having trouble hearing or processing the radio instructions (or even turned the radio off because they didn't like the instructor's "attitude"), moved their hands in accordance with the steering instructions....but didn't actually grab the toggles first, lied on their forms and jumped with undisclosed medical conditions ("Don't worry about that eye," said the student to the paramedic checking his pupils for proper neurological functioning after a crash landing, "I can't see out of that eye anyway."), spiralled down into the ground with one toggle still stowed (and getting lucky and surviving with minor injuries), occasionally just went unconscious, chopped for minimal reason ('the parachute was the wrong colour', 'the slider didn't go back up again', whatever), got edgy and chopped because another student had chopped on the previous load, delayed chopping for way too long, started to chop then decided not to and left the cutaway handle partially pulled and dangling, thumped down under round reserves, lost gear in fields of crop after taking gear off before walking out of the field, backlooped into their risers on exit to cause malfunctions and near main-reserve entanglements, suddenly decided to put in a full toggle turn too close to the ground, didn't flare, flared too early but then let it up, and so on. Not that tandems are perfect, but having someone experienced along for the ride really helped make things safer for the STOOOPID ones out there.

All good answers so far. Perhaps a minor additional factor is that I'm guessing that there are fewer dropzones overall, and they tend to be bigger. I still see new small DZ's open up, but what with land costs or availability of airports, the desire to have turbine aircraft, and a generally greater age of dropzones, those that are around tend to be larger. When there are more assets involved, drop zones become more conservative, more risk adverse, and more interested in having more rules. (Although that's also a function of cramming more skydivers at one time into the same patch of sky, as others have noted.) More and more DZ's these days like to shift the cost of safety onto skydivers, mandating AAD's, to minimize liability to themselves. Even though almost every skydiver prefers to have an AAD these days anyway, for most types of jumping. All that's combined with an increase in safety culture in society in general. (Although extreme sports are popular, and there are plenty of skydiving disciplines that have more hazards than just doing a belly 4-way.)

Government report has been released: http://www.bst-tsb.gc.ca/eng/rapports-reports/aviation/2021/A21Q0052/A21Q0052.html?utm_source=BenchmarkEmail&utm_campaign=Aviator_Newsletter_-_411_-_Mar19&utm_medium=email Basically a communications breakdown and lack of clarity over safe procedures. The person on the grass mower may have started moving next to the runway just after the Twin Otter landed, not realizing that another plane was about to land. The field is basically used only for skydiving, but occasionally a small plane will fly into the PPR (Prior Permission Required) airport. The person flying in there in his personal aircraft was one of the skydiving company's pilots, and when I jumped there years back I have seen one of the owners of the company fly in with their own little Cessna. The person cutting the grass wasn't one of the usual grass cutters, and had done the task only a few times. The grass cutters had been informed they could cut grass when the Twin Otter was on the ground. The report didn't get into what else the person knew -- Whether they thought that ONLY the Twin Otter would be flying, or whether they knew that 'very occasionally there are other airplanes around -- it is a live runway -- so always keep your eyes peeled'. The report I thought unfairly criticized the pilot for not getting prior permission to land. Yet he had gotten in communication with the Twin Otter to sequence their arrivals, so he had some permission from the current DZ traffic to land. The report seems to imply that PPR is something that one needs to get for every arrival, but isn't clear about it. However, the pilot had flown his own plane in and out of the strip a number of times, and I expect he thought he had standing permission to drop in. (I have also operated that way elsewhere, if the airport owner gave me standing permission to drop by.) There is no mention in the report whether anyone was monitoring or usually monitors the air frequency on the ground. The grass cutter did not have a radio. Which of course would increase situational awareness. My impression is that the grass cutters weren't well briefed or practiced on the airfield's procedures -- especially that there might occasionally be aircraft other than the Twin Otter. Lack of a radio (and one usable while running a noisy mower) certainly makes any ground activity next to a runway more dangerous.

The skydiving part seems 'simple enough', for skilled, practiced skydivers. (Not trying to diminish the achievement though!) An interesting bit is the autopilots for the airplanes, so they aren't just unguided missiles randomly drifting away or towards each other, maybe falling faster or slower due to small aerodynamic differences, making the jumpers do extra chasing around the sky. The original article stated: Will be interesting some day to read more about that bit of engineering.

And of course every idea can be debated. The toggle method has an advantage of toggles already being in hand, especially with hands already lower from flaring. Rears may be harder to reach especially if the canopy is already angling back, dragging you back, after touchdown instead of being right overhead. (Yeah I know in paragliding one doesn't want to slam the very zero-p canopy nose down into the ground, but it isn't as big an issue with skydiving canopies.) Using rears might use a little practice otherwise one may not get quickly to the stall point, but just add a lot of drag and lift, pulling one off one's feet. I have recommended both methods in the past, but haven't had to practice them lately so can't be sure of what should ideally be taught. Maybe rears is 'better technically' but toggles is 'more practical' especially for the less practiced jumper. (P.S. - Active flying - Yes I have long liked and taught that concept. Surely someone else in skydiving teaches it too? But if it is missing from the SIM that's something to consider.) Debates about what techniques are best to teach can be messy!

Whether this problem "is a real one or not", it is in that category we have seen over the years where "pulling slowly while on the ground" seems to cause a problem, not overcoming friction, while a faster yank while in the air doesn't cause a problem... usually, maybe. That's the tricky bit to figure out...

Never heard of that method. Anyone want to clarify? Of course, one does generally want to at some point move back to the DZ after opening, so that one ends up at the pattern entry area by pattern altitude. So if your spot wasn't screwed up to begin with, if you've descended half way to pattern altitude from your opening, you may want to be half way back to the pattern area. Nothing mandatory but sort of a common sense, "Gee I should start getting back towards the DZ a little more as I descend." Is that the idea?