billbooth

Congratulations Pat. No one deserves it more.

.....and then he started making Sigma 2 with Vectran lines Two factors changed my mind. First, the long, slow opening characteristics of the Sigma canopy. Second, the increased friction of Vectran lines slows the slider down a lot, resulting in even softer openings. Then, over two years of testing convinced me that this particular combination not only produced soft openings, but also fewer tension knots, lower toggle pressures, and better landings. I reserve the right to be smarter today than I was yesterday. I'm still not a fan of Spectra lines because they are so slippery. However, that characteristic does make Spectra very good for ripcords and closing loops.

Housing failures like this were considered with Spectra ripcord design. It does not appear to be any more of a problem than with metal ripcords. As a matter of fact, there have been several instances where Sigma main ripcord housings (same housing) were snagged on exit and uncoiled in similar fashion with no damage to the Spectra main ripcord.

I actually bought one when they first came out. Put about 10 jumps on it, then sold it to some guy who broke both legs on his first jump with it. Don't know what happened to it then. He probably burned it. I think Pioneer made it in desperation when they realized that Steve Snyder's Para-Plane was destroying PC sales. It flew somewhere between a PC and a Delta 2, with almost no flare. I was in Miami, so I didn't have any problems with the Hydraulic Reefing System, except that it kept leaking oil all over the canopy.

I like that. Truer words have never been spoken.

As has been mentioned elsewhere in this thread, there is No waiver protection for anyone under the legal age of majority in this country. This is unfortunate, but none the less true. Simply put, if just one person under 18 dies tandem jumping in the good old USA, the dropzone, airport owner, aircraft owner, aircraft manufacturer, UPT, PD, Cypres, and even USPA could ALL be sued out of existence. Please try to think of the damage that would cause the sport. Don't believe it? Piper Aircraft once lost a $60 million judgement for a Piper Cub that hit a fuel truck the airport owner parked on the runway to prevent the pilot from taking off without paying his fuel bill. They, at least, had some insurance. The parachute industry has none, and $60 million is more than the entire industry has in the bank. While there is no physical or safety reason why someone under 18 should not make a tandem, the legal argument is overwhelming. So please don't blame the manufactures or USPA for this "rule", blame the legal system.

Is the new UPT building already staffed and fully oprerational (as in sewing rigs)? Yep. Production is up about 25% already...aiming for 50%.

Jerry, there are several transit companies that operate that route. One that comes to mind is DOTS (Daytona-Orlando Transit System). All are a lot cheaper than renting a car for 5 days. But then again,you won't be able to easily visit UPT, or any of the other fine parachute manufacturers in DeLand without a car.

I'm happy. I got my picture taken standing between two of my heroes - D-1 (Lew Sanborn) and D-2 (Jacques Istel). A lot of history there!

Congratulations Gary. What an amazing jump. Only problem is that now I'm worried that I'm out of a job. Bill Booth

Ha ha. Unfortunately, I was 1,000 miles away.

One of the downsides of getting older (I'm 65 now) is that almost nothing is quite as much fun as it used to be. However, getting older sure beats the alternative. And besides, it's fun to sit back and watch your children grow, both my real children and my inventions. So far at least, everyone is healthy and happy, and so am I.

Very nice! Is that with the military rigs? Cheers and all the success Bill! Shc Yes.

QuoteI think the 5-7,000 a year number is about right for harness and container systems. However, a lot more canopies are made. UPT now employes about 100 people. Once our expanded facilities are up and running, we should be able to manufacture about 2,500 rigs a year.

For a point of reference: Skyhooks have been on the market for 10 years now, and are installed on over 15,000 civilian and military rigs worldwide.

The UPT Tandem "Waiver Tape" AND the written "Assumption of Risk Agreement" are MANDITORY, as per the UPT User Agreement, for each and every tandem jump made in the US, and any other country where a lawsuit might result from a tandem injury or fatality. It is utterly stupid to do tandem without the protections both the tape and the written agreement afford. You are also reminded that no one under the legal age to enter contracts, usually 18, but in some states older, are permitted to make a tandem in the US. Without these agreements there would probably be NO tandem jumping in the United States. I can't believe this question is even being asked.

When you sit in the passenger seat of a roller coaster, Ferris wheel, or for that matter, in the cabin of an airplane, you are by definition, a "passenger". Your actions have no influence on the outcome of the ride, and you certainly cannot kill or injure the ride operator or pilot. On a tandem jump the situation is entirely different. You're in the front seat. You get the air first. How you act can drastically influence the outcome, as many tandem instructors have learned the hard way. Because you have input, you are a student, some might say, even a co-pilot. How much training you get is up the tandem instructor, and it is certainly a lot less than is necessary for a SL or AFF jump. However, some training is essential for a safe tandem jump, and that makes you a student. If you wish, a tandem jump is the "environmental famiiiarization" section of your initial training to become a skydiver. It is also the only "hands-on" instruction you will ever get in canopy control. Whether you want to make a second jump depends a lot on the attitude of your instructor and the "culture of the drop zone". I do think it is a shame that so many future skydivers a sacrificed to the "tandem mill" culture. A Little History: (I've told these stories before, but they bear repeating.) I developed tandem in answer to a question I asked myself over 40 years ago: "You don't learn to drive or fly by yourself, you go with an instructor. Why can't we learn parachuting to same way?" I was just simply tired of kicking students out of an airplane static line and wondering what they would do in case of an emergency. There just had to be a better way. And it looks like there was. In 2010 there were NO tandem fatalities anywhere in the world. No other aviation sport has ever had a year like that. My first "tandem" jump was in 1972, under a 44 foot cargo chute with another experienced jumper. We both wore piggybacks, faced each other, and tied the risers of the big round to our chest straps and hopped out. Another jumper, still in the airplane, held onto the large rucksack containing the cargo chute, until we fell away and pulled it out... Sort of like a static line without the "line". (Yes, we both had big hook knives.) It worked fine the first time, but on a second attempt, the guy in the airplane who was supposed to hold onto the rucksack, didn't, and we found ourselves in free fall right next to the still bagged canopy. We looked at each other, yelled 'Holy Shit", and put our hook knives to good use, cutting through both our chest straps in the process. Luckily, our Security Piggybacks had belly bands, so we didn't fall out of our harnesses on opening. Needless to say, this put and end to my tandem experiments for quite a while. My second foray into tandem jumping was in 1977, when Mike Barber (one of Relative Workshop's original employees) and I modified my Wonder Hog (with a ParaPlane Cloud in it) with "D" rings and built a harness for "Sky Kirk", an 11 year old wheelchair bound boy, and put him in an 11-way for his birthday, with Mike doing the honors. Bob Favreau also took his 12 year old son Robbie on the same load. As you know, tandem got formally underway 6 years later when Ted Strong and I took our secretaries on tandem jumps in the summer of 1983.

I started hearing the phrase shortly after the documentary about great white sharks called "Blue Water, WHITE Death" came out. The underwater shark cage footage in "Jaws" came from that film. During the 1981 World Meet in Z-hills, the term "Blue Skys, Black Feet" was coined because of all the ash left in the soil after the DZ was cleared by fire for the meet. Everybody there went home with black feet.

Merry Christmas John. I hope you, Nancy, and Johnny have a wonderful holiday season and a prosperous New Year.

The answer is both simple and complicated. The bridle length, both above and below the Skyhook, were chosen for timing reasons. In a breakaway from a partial malfunction, the pilot chute needs to jump clear of the container to get out of the way of the bag, but not so far that it will disconnect the Skyhook, as it would in a total malfunction. In a partial malfunction the Skyhook must receive load from the bag BEFORE it receives load from the pilot chute or it will release before it has a chance to do its job. Also remember that, in the case of a partial malfunction, the Skyhook eventually loads BOTH the bag and the pilot chute, forming an inverted "V". To insure that the pilot chute cannot entangle with the bag or reserve canopy or lines, the upper bridle must be at least two feet shorter than the lower bridle. The 5 feet from the Skyhook to the pilot chute base was chosen because it is the minimum bridle length to get the pilot chute out of the burble in a total malfunction before it has to do any work (break the 5 lb. red thread). (The 5 lb. red thread's purpose is to prevent turbulent loads on the bridle from releasing the Skyhook before the bag loads it.) The 7 feet from the Skyhook to the bag was chosen to allow the pilot chute to travel at least 2 feet from the container before the bag was loaded, so that the bag will not hit the pilot chute as when pulled out of the container by the partial malfunction, but less than 5 feet, so that the Skyhook would not release prematurely. As stated above, it also keeps the pilot chute "above" the freebag. In testing, an 8 foot or longer bridle allowed enough time for the pilot chute to travel far enough to load the Skyhook before the bag in certain high speed spinning malfunctions. As you can see, it is a delicate balance of competing forces. I chose to weight the Skyhook slightly toward premature release in the case of a partial malfunction, so as to prevent any chance of a hang-up in the case of a total malfunction. This is why you occasionally see one. It took me nearly twenty years of tests to understand the dynamics, and design a system that took all this into consideration. There is much more to the Skyhook design, but I don't want to give those attempting to reverse engineer a competing system any more information. With over 15,000 Skyhooks out there on several different brands of gear, I would say that my calculations are working remarkably well.

You don't need a "broken" riser to have a problem. A miss-rigged riser or flipped-down riser will cause an accidental release of one riser too. I have at least three videos of flipped-down risers where the Collins' Lanyard saved the day, and report of many other cases, in just the last few years. By the way, the split lanyard update of several years ago on the Skyhook makes a North Carolina type accident even less likely.

Wrong. It depends if your RSL is "single sided" or not. If you have an RSL that will pull your reserve pin without making sure that BOTH risers have released first, then you could have major "complication". Personally, I wouldn't jump with a single-sided RSL.

When I came out with the hand deployed pilot chute, a lot of people argued that is was more complex than a ripcord, and this complexity wasn't worth the couple of hundred feet it saved on deployment. The same argument was made for the 3 ring release, believe it or not. For a long time people opposed AAD's because they might open your reserve when you didn't want or need it. Each of these safety improvements were opposed by people who thought skydiving gear was good enough, so why try to make it better. I think history has shown the critics wrong on all of the above counts, and I believe it will also find them wrong about the Skyhook. The Skyhook has been installed on over 15,000 rigs now, with millions of jumps logged, and quite frankly, it has had far fewer problems than any of the above mentioned safety advances. I guess you could even argue that ram air parachutes are a bad idea because hardly anyone ever died under a fully open and functioning round, while fully half of the last few years fatalities have been under fully open and functioning squares.

For as long as I can remember, Ted has always been there. I bought my first "real" rig from Ted. When I made my first very own rig, I bought the para-pack, webbing and hardware from Ted. Anytime I had a question about gear or jumping, Ted was always ready to help, although he must have hated selling me everything one yard at a time. Because has has always been there for me, I thought he always would. This is a truly sad day. We were competitors, but we were friends first. My favorite memory of Ted is from the early days of tandem when Ted and I were practically the only people in the world doing tandem. We knew we had something special, but we didn't yet know if it would be a safe and practical. Up till this point we had been working separately, but on this day we decided to work together. So we exited a 182 over DeLand with two experience female jumpers, and did the world's first tandem RW..a two-by-four if you wish. There were no drogues yet, and those first tandem parachutes tended to destroy themselves (and the jumpers) every other jump or so if you took them to terminal, even with a light passenger. So I guess were were both lucky that day as everything went perfectly. We landing laughing out loud, shared a round of beer with girls, and the rest is history. I think we can all agree that tandem jumping has worked out very well indeed. THANK YOU TED!

Shlomo: Congratulations. I am impressed. Bill Booth