timgaines

I assume you are referring to a sit to sit front flip? Think about fast falling before you start the flip, this will help cancel out the lift you catch when you go through your belly. Stay tucked up through the flip. Do you have any videos of you doing any?

I'm not a WT instructor but routinely fly/train and occasionally coach in UK windtunnels, in particular Basingstoke/Bedford and see a LOT of first timers go through their doors. Apart from the occasional 'kicker' or very awkward individual, the staff are very good at getting first time flyers flying unassisted in their two minutes of time. It is obviously not a position for AFF/FS, but it works and is easily adaptable from there. 300 jumps is all well and good, but 10 years out of the sport definitely forms some cobwebs, especially for a relatively low experience before your break - even a few months off I can feel rusty. Without seeing video, anything could have happened, but rather than building yourself back into flying it sounds like you 'remembered' how to fly but struggled, got stressed out and stopped relaxing with only the world to blame. Everyone is guilty of seeing the red mist when flying and it usually results in a good few minutes of unproductive flying before cooling off. When coaching I will absolutely not ask for the speed up if the student is looking stressed out or potentially unstable/unsafe. For reference if you turned up at a dropzone 10 years out of the sport, you would most certainly be doing some jumps with an instructor - would you be telling them how to fly? Your comment that the wind tunnel is not recommended at all to experienced skydivers is pretty incorrect to be honest though. The tunnel is a fantastic, safe place to learn new skills and improve your flying. It is no replacement for the sky of course, but the tunnel does allow for skydivers to rapidly repeat skills, while being assisted/spotted by instructors. You don't need to look very hard to see children who have never skydived in their life completly at home in the wind tunnel without ever jumping out of a plane. Please tell me how this is 'not recommended'? My recommendation to you if you are keen to get back into the sport would be to get hold of a coach, there are loads in the Midlands which I am guessing you are based. Buying time from a coach is almost always cheaper than buying direct through iFly, they are also skydivers which often WT instructors are not so are better at tailoring your flying around you and give you a proper debrief. I am happy to recommend several to you. In terms of your videos, proflyers at iFly UK tunnels can view their videos in team rooms without having to pay for them for reference.

In our team, we fall pretty rocket ship fast when there are head up points but fairly slow in head down. Our camera flyer is pretty short and skinny but wears a baggier suit that he would typically fly when filming us. When we started he was sinking out in his tighter suit and quickly asked about to borrow something baggier on the legs (not crazy baggy, just not skin tight....) You definitely dont want to be having to go super slow fall and risk getting feet/hands in the camera frame.

Biggest storm to ever hit landfall, 4th fastest ever recorded http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typhoon_Haiyan Massive flooding across Europe in May http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_European_floods Bush fires in Australia http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-24599925 Well there's three I found in 5 minutes...oh wait are you talking about global climate change or my backyard climate change?

Very few people seem to know about the adjustment tab (cookie probably need to make it more obvious somehow or maybe there is an instruction sheet but being a man I threw it away immediately). Probably nearly 75% of the people I know with one did not know about it and it seems to come at it's tightest setting and there is quite a lot of range with it.

Hope you find a way to get through this Steve, two of my good friends have battled through cancer and made it out the other side. Whatever treatment you go with success rates are constantly improving. My best wishes to you.

do you pay taxes ? Yes but when you turn up at a hospital with a broken ankle from doing whatever (skydiving/fall off a ladder) they fix you up, you walk out and you don't have a bill for $20,000, you don't have to fight a battle with insurance companies. The taxes paid so I and others get 'free' healthcare don't really make much of an impact on my quality of life, I don't need to worry about renewing them each year, I don't need to worry about invalidating my healthcare. If I lose my job, I don't need to panic I could lose everything if I get injured. Even expensive treatments such as Proton Beam are paid by the NHS. Sure the NHS could be run better (less admin, more doctors) and they arn't perfect but in a 1st world country anyone should be able to get themselves or their family put back together without having to sell their life/home and owe everything they earn for the rest of their life to a hospital.

Yea, this is when it starts to get worrying beyond a 'harmless' website, a little bit of searching brings up this guy, Paul Broun who sits on your "House Science, Space and Technology Committee" but claims it is all 'lies from the pit of hell'. Now this strikes me as a bit concerning. Presumably this committee is responsible for where funding goes or something similar, but when the guy in charge flat out denies it, maybe there are other motives behind him? This can't be a individual case? First link I found, there are many others http://articles.latimes.com/2012/oct/07/nation/la-na-nn-paul-broun-evolution-hell-20121007 Another thing I hear a lot from the far 'right wing' america, trying to defend itself by banning things like evolution, big bang, gay rights, in an attempt to protect 'democracy/the american way/freedom/whatever' but these seem to be the exact same policies brought in by very UN-American countries such as Uganda, Russia...?

....that's why I posted it in the speakers corner...??

Is this some kind of practical joke on the world or is this actually information that many people in the USA take for real? The USA used to be a great nation....and now... just wow... http://conservapedia.com/Main_Page 'homosexual agenda' 'attempts to derive E=mc2 have failed' '[Creationism]...may explain why Europe is such a mess at this time; however, this does not explain why Middle Eastern countries are in such poor conditions. Perhaps Christian creationism has a positive effect while Islamic creationism has a negative one.' Everything great the USA has done has been destroyed in this one website.

Depending where you jump, the rental rigs you have been using may well be F-111. Do you know what canopies you have jumped?

In most places in the UK, if you rent kit, you are not liable for replacing it if you have to chop it and it gets lost/paying for the repack etc. There is rental agreement I have ever seen a UK DZ show about this (although I can't speak for all DZ's). I imagine if someone chopped for no reason or just didn't care about helping find a main they had to chop, the DZ may not be so happy about that... In the same way, if you rent a house and it collapses, you don't need to pay to have it rebuilt.. Why should a jumper who paid to hire a rig, have to pay for a repack and replacement canopy if the person who last packed it packed a line over into it and the canopy got lost?

Why does being able to build a pilot chute, or repair a canopy/harness etc stop me from packing a main parachute for someone else? When I pack my main, there is no sowing/tools involved. When I pack for someone else why would I suddenly become incapable of packing? In the UK if you want to pack for someone else, you have to demonstrate to a rigger or instructor that you can assemble the main parts of a rig (re-connect the 3 rings etc) untangle it and pack it. Once this has been demonstrated and signed off your good to go. So why the need to have a rigger constantly do this. I'm a big believer in people packing their own kit, but this isn't always possible such as a team doing back to back lifts, camera guys jumping and speaking to customers or some people who simply do not want to or are unable to pack. If you don't have a rigger on your dropzone well tough shit go somewhere else so someone can go pack your parachute for you despite the fact people who are fully capable of doing it are around...

Good to have info on this. What is your source? How much is Spectra weakened by heat shrinkage? How much further weakening is caused by stretching the shrunken line? Physics/Material Sciences/Engineering 101 The exact tensile strengths, I am struggling to find, mostly because a lot of this information isn't freely distributed. There is a paper here but you cant view it unless you are a subscriber or you buy it but some of the figures are visible. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0142941802001277 Look down to figure 12 which is the closest scenario to this. Increasing temperature reduces it's Youngs Modulus and Tensile Stregnth. No material is 100% elastic in it's properties (it won't go back to exactly how it was when you started) so constantly heating the lines 100's of times will weaken this. No weak analogies required. Once you then start stretching your now weakened fibres, that remaining tensile strength has to be distributed over it's new length ie If it was 10 metres long and had a tensile strength of 100MPa but you now make it 20 metres long it only has a tensile strength of 50MPa.

Not a rigger, but Spectra is basically a form of polyethylene. To make it into a line it gets drawn out into long thin fibres. During this process the long polymer chains that make it up essentially get 'untangled' and get arrange neatly in order (think more like uncooked spaghetti compared to cooked spaghetti). When it gets heated (due to friction of the slider running down the lines) this gives these polymer chains energy to start tangling themselves back up. These tangled polymers take up less space than untangled polymers making your line shrink. Once this has happened the quoted tensile strengths for the spectra has dropped along with its limits for elastic and plastic deformation. Will stretching this new material will make the line substantially weaker than the original line? Yes. Will this new, stretched line be within the tolerances of skydiving? Well it seems like people have done it and it works... there are comments that people in the PG community have done it but the big stresses for a parachute (opening shock) don't really happen much for a PG...