davelepka

It's a long ride up, and nobody is packed in there so tightly that you can't turn around see what's behind you. Let's say the PC came out and hung the main over the tail, do you suggest the jumper with the GoPro continue to face forward and pretend there's nothing behind him? Again, don't sit and wait for things to happen to you. You have enough jumps to rock a GoPro? Good for you, get off your ass and square your gear up early so you have time to scan the rigs around you. We're all responsible for each other to a degree, and especially when it comes to safety in/around the aircraft. Pins, PCs and handles can all effect the safety of an aircraft in flight, and therefore are everyone's problem. The issue isn't about what you have to do, down the 'letter of the law', it's about what you should do, in the spirit of being better than the minimum requirements.

Your friend is low on class. You (the hotel patron) have enough money to be on a trip of some sort and afford a hotel room, they (the maid) are working as a maid in a hotel. Add to that the fact that they are the ones cleaning up your mess, cleaning your dirt out of the shower, and your shit out of the toilet, and I don't think it's out of the question to leave a couple bucks behind. The amount is another story, and like any tipping situation, it depends on the place and the quality of the work. A nicer hotel, and a really nice job will get more, and the opposite will get less. Between $5 and $10 a night is a good number if everything is done right, maybe more if you're in a suite and you really wreck the place every night. Even if you're tight on cash, $5 or $10 total is surely appreciated by the staff. Leaving nothing just sucks.

There are a number of failures in that video. One would be the lack of attention to gear checks of those around you. Never ever put your hands on someone else's gear unless they ask, always do a visual check of other rigs around you in the plane. A visual check would have easily revealed this problem. Side note to the above: It was neat that the jumper sitting immediately next to the jumper with the PC problem was able to focus his attention on his GoPro and having his buddy check that it was on, but was blind to the PC hanging out 6 inches away from him. Moving on, and now under the assumption that the first two jumpers out were students/unlicensed/low timers (based on the rigs/jumpsuits). Given that - When the first group out is a two way, and they're both clearly low timers or new to the DZ, why is nobody checking the spot for them (or just backing them up)? Along those same lines, if these are students or newly licensed jumpers, why haven't they been taught to ask for pin/PC checks in the plane before exit? The video is a great illustration of a bunch of jumpers sitting around with their thumbs up their asses, waiting for the pilot to tell them to jump. It's a sad picture of complacency, and a problem in more than just Deland. If you sit around and 'wait' for things in skydiving, sooner or later, the 'thing' that comes to you is going to be a huge pile of shit hitting a fan right in front of you. Don't sit like a bump on a log a wait for the green light, be on the ball, with gear checks (your and others) in the bag, the spot and traffic checked, and you should be watching the spot slide under the plane and know the light is coming on before the pilot even throws the switch.

I try to avoid freeflying on AFF videos, based on the chance the student is looking at me as an example of what to do. On top of that, an AFF video is a more technincal job than a tandem video, even in the best case scenario. On a 'good' AFF, you still need to get footage of the student's body position, the resulting hand signals, and if you can get the handle during practice touches and the pull, you'll produce a video that becomes a real training tool. Of course, if things go to shit, it becomes that much more technical to stay with it and stay out of the way. You would have to be one hell of a freeflyer to keep proxitmity to a flipping or rolling AFF student/pair, and also keep out of the way of the instructor who's trynig to get back in there. While a tandem has it's own level of 'responsibility' for the camera flyer, it's based more on the trust the passenger places in you to do a good job. In terms of technical flying, if the tandem can get a clean drouge toss, they're fairly 'stuck' in one place and attitude, and can be considered fairly 'stationary'. AFF has the same level of responsibility to shoot a good video for the student, but also to be able to avoid/dodge the group as 'shit happens' during the jump, and not hamper the instructors ability to do their job.

Deland is 20 min from Daytona, right up Intl Speedway Drive.

Not a bad idea on a solo. Another thing to think about, as per AFF training, is to keep your altitude checks frequent and on a regular interval. Do a manuver, check your altitude. Do another manuver, check again. The idea here is that when you look at see 9k twice in a row, you're not wondering how long it had been since the first time you saw 9k. If you check every 10 seconds, you see 9k twice, then you know that you're 'about' 10 seconds past 9k, or conservatively around 7k. Another idea when you're doing solos is to combine the alti checks with a visual ground reference check. Alti says 7k, glance down to see what that looks like. It will help you to get an idea of what the ground looks like. That's not an exact science, as different DZs, different times of year, and different levels of visibility will effect what the ground looks like, but it's just more information for you to have and work with, and that's always good. As you move off of solos, you will have other jumpers to reference as well. If your alti appears to be stuck, I would NOT just wait for the other jumper(s) to break off, but you can make an effort to try and see their altimeter (easier during RW, not as much when freeflying). Again, all this will do is add more info for you to make a decision, but it's something. Of course, when jumping with others, you need to rethink the idea of 'just pull'. On a jump where you can see EVERYONE, you have more options, but if you can't see everyone, or are not 100% sure, just pulling is a bad idea (sometimes). In any case with others, you do need to turn and track to some degree, more so if you don't know where everyone is. The catch is that there's a difference in how you lose altitude awareness. If you have a stuck alti, and appear to be mid-jump with others, you do need to consider them when you decide what to do. If you lose awareness to the point that you are all low, and your life is in danger if you don't pull very soon, then some things change. Maybe just turn 180 and dump, and take a chance with regards to the other jumpers, but this is when you're going to die otherwise. I know you like to pull at 3500, but if you find yourself in freefall with grips at 3500, that's not an emergency. It's a mistake, but you still have time to turn and track (not for long) before you dump. The time to go 'quick draw' on your PC is when you smoke through 2k with grips, and you're going to hit the planet hard in 10 or 12 seconds. It's tricky business, and the above are all great reasons to properly equip yourself with the right gear (visual and audible alti) and the right information (have a plan ahead of time, train your eyeballs to help you), and then to work really hard every jump not to make those sorts of mistakes and put yourself into those situations.

There's a big difference between a car that was in a fresh-water flood, and one from salt-water. The other factor is how long the car was in the water. If a car was parked in a low-laying area when a storm drain backed up, and sat in rain water up to the floormats for a couple hours, that's one thing. It would still need a bunch of work (both inside and out) for it to be returned to 'before flood' condition, so an insurance company might just total the car out. In that case, if the electric checks out, and you change the fluids, the car might be OK. It might smell funny, or be moldy/mildew under the carpet, but it should operate fine. A Sandy car, that sat in the ocean water storm surge for days or weeks on end is another story. Critical electrical or structural components that sat in salt water for god knows how long are not good. Somebody upthread mentioned it, and they were right, the modern cars rely too heavily on electronics to take a chance on these sorts of thing. The cars are better and more reliable overall, but there are some new considerations that go along with it, and this is one of them. Any flood damage, unless you are aware of the specific circumstances, such as your relative or neighbors car was in fresh water for a couple hours, steer clear. Another note about Sandy was all the collector cars that were recvovered. There were 100's of classic and exotic cars that were flooded and are all hitting the market. In those cases, it's a boom for the classic car industry. The ones that are sold 'whole' are just going to become project cars and be rebuilt from the ground-up anyway, and the others are going to be parted out for everyone else with projects in their garage. I saw an article to that effect online a couple weeks back, and the pics from the classic car salvage yards were pretty sad. The cars still look OK on the outside, but you know everything else about them is shot, and needs a ton of work.

It's easy. Start with the thinnest lines you can find, and then build a wing that puts nice openings on the back burner, and long dives/swoops ahead of that. When you build a canopy to the 'general public', you have a series of priorities and they are (in order) - it has to open, it has to open 'nice', it has to hold together, it has to fly well. You can see that if you re-arrnage that list, you end up with a product that's not good for business, but the list puts flying well at the bottom of the list. So if you could shuffle that list a bit, and give up 'opening nice', you can make some trade-offs that will make it fly better, and in this case, that means swooping better. In any case, not taking a canopy to terminal will generally result in softer, more manageable openings. In tersm of forces, I'm not sure if you can generate more force in a dive than on opening, but even if you could it would be more of a gradual increase of force, where an opening could introduce a 'shock load'. Beyond that, I would suggest that an opening is far more likely to go 'rouge' and spank the jumper (and the canopy), as compared to a swoop, where the loading will be fairly consistant, and 'smooth'.

Bonehead makes great products. The Optik is only going to work if you plan to side mount one camera, as the top platform is really small. In any case, there's a ton of work to be done to any camera set-up. None of them come 'out of the box' ready to run, there are no mounts or holes drilled on the helmet. You'l need to chose the exact mounting locations, the type of mounts, how/where to run the wires/switches etc. How you set up the helmet will have a lot to do with how well it works for you. Take the time to study other camera helmets at your DZ, and really think about yours before you start drilling. Get all the parts front of you, and mock them up in different configurations to see what seems like it makes the most sense. Think about things like keep the helmet compact, the weight centered, and maintaining access to buttons/switches and card slots.

Don't do that. When you get advice, that's one guy talking directly to you, with regards to your exact (or their exact) situation. Change any one of those variables, and the advice may no longer apply. Even then, the advice may not even be the best idea in the first place, and if you add to that changes in the circumstance, it may become even worse advice. It's a big world out there, with 1000's of 'very experienced' jumpers, and they all do things a little differently. Based on the idea that they are 'very experienced', whatever they do is working for them. It doesn't mean that it will work for others, or is even a remotely good idea for others, but for that one jumper, with their accumulation of experience and knowledge, they make it work for them. Take advice with a grain of salt, and never ever pass it along as being your own or as being 'the truth'.

Wingsuiting is dangerous. Opening is a critical time in a wingsuit jump, and that's one of the reasons that a first-flight course spends so much time on practice pulls and deployments. Now if someone wanted to spend time in a classroom, and do dedicated jumps toward the goal of pulling in a track, it would be much less of a risk. However, if you just want to learn on your own, in the course of regular jumps, it's best left until you can guarantee your own performance in both the track and deployment before combining the two.

Best you can do is call the DZ the morning you want to jump, and see what they say. They'll know the current conditions and probably have the latest forecast for the day. They'll know best, and you really need to hear it from them. Who knows, it might look 'iffy' all day, and the pilot has family shit to take care of, and the plane needs a widget replaced anyway, so the management might just call the whole day of early. Even if the weather online looks good enough to jump, none of that will matter if the pilot is gone and the plane is in pieces.

Nice try. If you can't remain stable and check your alti at the same time, you shouldn't be freeflying with 'people around you'. At best you should be on a two-way, and even then it should be with an accomplished flyer who can avoid you if need be. As uncool as it may be, you have to have priorities. Altitude awareness is near the top of your list, right up there with 'pull'.

Good luck trying to do anything if you lose altitude awareness and whistle-in under a partially inflated canopy. So you can't remain stable and check your alti? Ok, then go unstable, check your alti, and get back in there. Soon enough you'll learn that you can stay with anything and look where ever you want, all you have to do is practice.

I'll just reply to myself because I'm going to quote myself anyway - In short, when done properly you can open in a track with good results. However, if not done properly, it can and will have a negative effect on your openings. Modern rigs and canopies are designed to open soft while falling flat and stable. If you can't get a good opening while falling flat and stable, trying to open in a track is not your solution. Figuring out what's wrong with your gear or your packing is the solution.

Prices vary from place to place. Contact your local DZs and see what they say. In terms of hwo fast you get your A license, is that really a concern at this point? With no jumps and seemingly very little knowledge about the sport, what's the rush to get your hands on your actual license?

I wonder what sort of 'mis-use' is possible? Either way, Chuting Star rigging loft offers a free escrow service for private gear deals. The seller ships them the rig, and you send them the money. They will inspect the rig (you do have to pay for the inspection) and report the findings to the buyer. If the buyer approves, they will ship them the rig, and forward the payment to the seller. They are a reputable business who has been around for several years and they currently have several business locations. They are the definition of a 'third party' as they have no association with either the seller or buyer. If she won't provide serial numbers, legitimate contact info, contact your rigger or DZ, or work through Chuting Star, just give up.

There are a couple reasons. One of them is that rubber bands have a proven track-record of being simple, cheap and easy to use. I would challenge any packer to stow their lines in a stowless bag faster than I can stow mine with rubber bands. In the eyes of packers, speed is everything, so they're going to want the fastest option. The other relates to what I said above about speed, with no rubber bands or other devices to organize the lines, it's going to be harder to be neat. Being neat is a big plus in packing, and if you make it harder to be neat, you're moving the wrong direction. As fas as their widespread use, that's another story. Unless the bags were an option at the time the container was purchased, it's not that simple to retro-fit a bag to a container. Each bag is individually sized to fit the container it's built for, so you would have to be ready to build bags in literally about 100 different sizes. Each manufacturer has a dozen different sized containers, then some of them add short/long/wide options, and even then some of them have re-tooled their patterns at some point, so a certain model is one size before a given build-date, and then another size after the re-tool.

Keep in mind that the wind tunnel only helps you with freefall skills. Currency has nothing (very little) to do with freefall skills. Nobody is worried about how many points you can turn, as long as you can arch and pull, the freefall portion is cool. The currency is more about your safety and the safety of others. Proper gear checks, proper behavior in/around the airplane, exit seperation, traffic management under canopy, landing patterns and a safe landing are what the real concern is, and the tunnel is not going to help you with those things. Yes, being a better freefaller might give you more of an opportunity to focus on the safety related aspects, but that's a stretch, and I wouldn't count on it. Even if you're razor-sharp in the tunnel, if you become an un-current skydiver make sure you think of yourself as an un-current skydiver until you do the work to get current.

This is not true, and you should never do this. On every jump, you have the ability to check your visual altimeter and look at the ground, and you should do both of them. You should also listen to your audible, and your 'gut' if it's telling you that the skydive has been going on 'too long' and that you might be low. There is no situation where you simply have to wait for the beep. One of the problems with that is you don't know when your audible is going to fail. It might be on the ride up, or just after exit, and in either case you'll be waiting for a beep that will never come. The advantage to a visual alti is that you can watch it work, and see the 'trend'. In the plane, the trend is upwards, and you can also cross-check it with other altimeters. In freefall, regular checks will show you a downward trend, and if it seems to be right, it probably is. Even then, still use your eyes and if your beeper beeps, take that into consideration as well.

Just replace the entire legpad. They're not very expensive, and Sunpath can make you a set that will fit your thighs and match your rig. On top of that, it will make your rig more comfortable, as the padding in the legstraps breaks down after a few years, and the fresh pads will have fresh padding. Off the top of my head, I would guess they're less than $100, and figure $20/$30 for a rigger to install.

Gear rental is included in the cost of training, and I doubt that any DZ is going to discount the training based on you bringing your own rig. As others have mentioned, they wouldn't let you use a personal rig for student jumps anyway. Most student rigs are set up just for student use, and are designed to be safe and easy for the instructors to work with. You will go through the most rapid changes in euqipment through your first 20 or 25 jumps. In that time, you'll go from jumping something in the 280 sq ft range, down to something closer to 200 sq ft. This is one of the reasons to use the DZ gear, they have a variety of sizes available and you can jump their stuff as you learn how to jump. Once you have 20 or 25 jumps, you should be in a place where you can buy a used rig that you can get a good 50 to 100 jumps on before you're ready for anything smaller. After a couple of downsizes, the interval between downsizes will extend. You might go 200 or 300 jumps on a 150 before you jump a 135. At that time, maybe you could buy a new rig, as you'll be able to get some extended use out of it. But really, slow your roll and just go to the DZ and take the first jump course. Forget about buying stuff, or planning ahead beyond your next jump or two. It's a long road to an A license, and you should really only worry about that journey until you're almost at the end. Get most of the way to your A license, and then revisit the gear issue then. You'll know way more about gear and yourself, and you'll be in a much better position to make a purchase.

Forget absurd, how about to reality? As mentioned, when the 97/107 sized Stilettos first came out, you needed a 'solid' reccomendation and you had sigtn a 'small canopy' waiver. The community wasn't ready for that much performance with no restrictions. Likewise with the Comp Velo, they weren't that easy to get your hands on in the first place. Truth be told, the PD Team jumped versions of the Comp Velo for years before they were let loose on the general public. Even then, they were deemed to be just one step up from a Velo, and that 'people' could handle that without restriction. Now we have the Peregrine (well, we don't have it, but some people do). Isn't there a chance that it's more canopy that everyone is thinking it is, and that it's probably not a good idea just to cut it loose to the general public? Again, look at cars and motorcylces, the factories all have racing teams with hardware that nobody else can get their hands on, and levels of performance that require a 'pro' to handle with any degree of safety.

You're assuming that those pilots can all fly their current wings to 100% of their capability. Let's say the new canopy is 10% better then the Comp Velo. That might not seem like alot, but when you're out at the far end of the performance spectrum, the gains are harder to come by, so 10% would be a good step up. So you have a canopy that's 10% better, so unless you can get 90% or better out of the new canopy, you might as well just fly a Comp Velo, and keep working toward that 100%. Unless you're already maxed on the Comp Velo, a faster canopy is just a waste of fabric. The other side of the coin is that once you distill the market down so far, like they did by building an 'ultra-ultra-high-performance canopy', the idea of 'marketing' goes right out the window. You're never, flat out never, going to sell enough of these to make putting them into production a profitable venture. Think about it, the Perregrine requires the same number of patterns, same line-set specs and diagrams, same operator training to build, same mountain of paperwork behind it as any other canopy they build. Sure, a Sabre 2 might be half the price of what they would charge for a Peregrine, but they're going to sell 10x or 20x (or more) S2's than Peregrines. So why not keep a lid on it? Think that's different than any other competitive arena? Race cars, golf clubs, skiis, running shoes, etc. all feature 'pro' gear that only the sponsored althletes can get their hands on. At least in this instancce, they're willing to consider sending some of the canopies 'outside the family', which is better than we've ever got out of them in the past. How many different versions of the Velo do you think we never got our hands on, while the PD Team guys were using them to win big?

In that case, your 'guarantee' is who you're working for, not a contract or expense reimbursement. The OP in this thread was talking about 'new' situations, where an unknown (to you) DZO is in need, and you're thinking about moving yourself across the country to work there. In those cases, I would see it as more of a 'business' deal, where a contract and some additional considerations were required. Hell, even in the course of non-jumping business, I know people who I'll do deals with and spend money on with no contracts in place because I know them and fell like they are a safe bet that they won't hang me out to dry. In the end, it all comes down to the same thing that was discussed in the thread about AFF pay. You can't have a union or be too organized when there are people out there willing to do without those things. Sure, you could ask for moving expenses to come work someplace, but there's a fair chance that there are 10 other guys willing to to do it without.