davelepka

Walk in and say, 'Hi, I just got my A license and this is the first time I've jumped at another DZ. Can I get a DZ orientation from one of the staff members?' Beyond that, just listen to what they say. When they're done, think through making a skydive there and make sure there are no 'holes' in the plan. You need to know where/when to load the AC, who to see about loading/exit order, how the seatbelts work, the procedure for the lights/door/exit, group seperation for that day, orientation of the landing pattern for the day, possible outs if you can't make it back, where to land/not land on the DZ, and where you should walk/not walk when heading in from the LZ. More or less, the complete trip from gearing up in the hanger back to dropping your unpacked rig on the hanger floor. There are other non-jumping things you'll need to know as well, like manifesting, paying, eating, drinking, peeing, pooping, etc, but those are easier to figure out on your own and probably won't kill you if you do them wrong.

It's not the ability of the TM (or the pax) that's the problem. It's taking the tandem rig to speeds for which it was never designed. FYI, the procedure on a tandem is supposed to be that you exity stable, and immediately attempt to deploy the drouge. No drouge, straight to reserve. The idea is to prevent a reserve deployment from tandem terminal, and they put that procedure in place with flat-and-stable tandem terminal in mind, not head-down tandem terminal. The rigs were not built for those speeds or orientations. There's a good number of 'moving parts' between the tandem rig and passenger harness, and each one of them is a potential failure point. Beyond that, you have to recognize that the industry as a whole has embraced the idea of 'freefly friendly' rigs for sport jumpers, in order to avoid the problems you could entounter with premature deployments at freefly speeds. I would hardly call a tandem rig 'freefly friendly', and I don't think any of the manufacturers would either.

So how did your reserve deploy? A dozen line twists? With you upside down with a foot tangled in the lines? With a riser wrapped around your neck? My guess is that it opened just fine. Stick with the RSL. Unless you can think of a very good reason not to have one, you should have one. When I say 'very good reason', I mean one where if you told the chief instructor at your DZ, he (she) would agree with you and tell you not to jump an RSL. Short of that, stick with the RSL.

What's wrong with that thought is that if it requires just a little more force than you expect, the deployment is delayed and valuable altitude is wasted trailing the PC while the jumper gets up to speed. How do you account for a larger reserve being used? How do you account for a pack job where the bulk is distributed differently? How about when a larger jumper wears an undersized harness? Or a smaller jumper on a larger harness? All of the above will effect the extraction force, and because of that, you can't attempt to 'tune' is to the PC trails under a good canopy and functions at a slightly higher airspeed. The reserve container is either open, or closed. There should never be any 'in between'.

Protection from what? You're not going to save anyone from going in clean, so anything you build is going to come up short in one instance or another. It's the classic slippery slope, at what point to you decide that enough is enough? Let's face it, sooner or later you run into a level of impact such that the rest of your body is going to be in rough shape even if your head remains intact. What about neck fractures? How much impact do you need protection from beyond the level that will snap your neck? Let's keep it classy, and logical. Aside from minor bumps and impacts from general skydiving, you're looking at two basic problems - impacts with and without a canopy. Without a canopy was mentioned above, nothing is going to help you. With a canopy, look at the injuries from open canopy incidents to include swooping, collisions, and honest mistakes. The vast majority of them involve impact from a more-or-less upright orientation, thus explaining the huge number of leg, pelvis and back injuries. Ever notice that there are few broken arms, shoulders, and yes, heads? It's just not the sort of impact you see from the majority of 'bad' skydiving accidents, and the reason that you don't see many helmet failures being pointed out in post-accident reporting. Jumpers are willing to accpet the level of protection provided by the current offerings. Stronger helmets will not help any other part of your body, and when you find a way to hit hard enough, head first, your helmet is only going to one of many problems you're going to have.

The difference there is that a camera helmet made to carry those types of loads it very tight and form fitting. If you wanted to ratchet-strap a non-camera helmet to your head, then aerodynamics wouldn't be a factor. It wouldn't move because it was tight as shit. It would, however, be uncomfortable and create excess drag, two things I don't think the average jumper would be ok with. If you want a helmet that you can wear comfortably, with a simple chinstrap, that will stay put and not put undue stress on your neck, then low profile it is (and must be). Compare apples to apples if you want to compare shit. Beyond that, consider the market. Specialty helmets have been around for over a decade now. Helmet manufacturers are free to build them however they think the market wants them. At $250 or $300 a pop, cost doesn't appear to be a limiting factor in the design or contruction, so why do we have the helmets that are available today? It's what the market will bear. If people really wanted somethig built to a published 'standard', they would have asked for it, and gotten it by now. Many generations and models of helmets have come and gone, and if the changes you're crowing about were needed, or even wanted, they would have happened. As it sits, none of them did. The performance of the current helmets is enough to satisfy the market. There have not been a rash of helmet-failures that have caused people to cry out for better lids, so this is where we are now. I'm sorry that your big 'Fuck you' to the skydiving helmet industry didn't quite work out how you thought it would. A little research would have shown a dozen threads with guys asking the same questions you did and getting the same answers.

The shortest distance between two points is a straight line. When dealing with a headwind, and the reduced glide it offers, you have a limited supply of 'distance' to work with. Zig-zagging will only make your trip to the LZ (or wherever you end up short of the LZ) that much longer. On top of the that, the increase in speed you're counting on will come at the expense of altitude. Remember the limited supply of 'distance' mentioned above, your repeated turns will only wear that down even further. It sounds more like one step back, followed by another step back.

If the buyer is dumb, sure. Otherwise, it's a matter of getting a qualifed rigger to inspect the gear and tell you how it looks. My Velo has over 1000 jumps on it, but you couldn't tell by looking at the fabric. It's always been jumped in grassy Ohio and packed indoors. The lines are beat right now, and PD could tell you it's beed relined three times already, but the fabric looks great. Always have used gear inspected by a rigger before purchase. It can save you $100s in repairs or maintenance, or from buying something that's not even airworthy.

The rough math on layoffs is that your 170 jumps is going to equal about 50 jumps after 6 years. What you should be looking at is gear for someone your weight who has 50 jumps. What you need to do is get current using the student gear at the DZ. Choose a conservative canopy, and see how it goes. Take advanatge of the selection the DZ has, and actually jump the different sizes (not guess) and see how you do. Next up, if your weight really does fluctuate 30lbs across the year, you need to pick your gear (main, reserve and harness size) for when you're heavy. Buy gear that you can safely jump in the worst case scenario at the time of purcahse. Not what you think you're going to weigh, or what you sometimes weigh, or how many jumps you think you're going to have. Buy something smart that makes sense for your current experience. 170 jumps - 6 year layoff = about 50 jumps. Let's say you do get back into it, and jump hard and often, and you're an ace with the canopy, sell it and buy a smaller one at that time. If you really want to be smart, buy used canopies and you can buy and sell them all day without spending any additional money.

Because you are 100% guaranteed to hit a solid object (the ground) if you fall off a bike. If it's a road bike, you're likely to hit very solid ground, and may very well be surrounded with very large and very unforgiving objects (cars). Both of those sports involve relatively low airspeeds, so low profile and aerodynamics of the helmets are not as important as in freefall. Additionally, the only area of concern is on landing, when the hangglider pilot is surrounded by some fairly solid framework. There are no airplane frames to hit, or others flyers you can expect to come into contact with. Skydiving has the unique feature of freefall to overcome, where there is significant wind blast that is apt to come from just about any direction. Sure, motorcycle road racers may go faster than freefall speeds, but it's all in one direction. The aerodynaimc of the helmet and rider position can be tailored to provide good protection without trying to rip the riders head off at speed. Try riding a motorcycle with an ill-fitting (too large) helmet, and it will try to lift off your head at speed and choke you with the chinstrap. So you need to have a low profile helmet, that will stay put and not create 'lift' in any presentation to the wind. With that in mind, you encoutner some real limitations to what kind of protection you can provide. What they do, like every other helmet manufacturer, is look at the 'likely' impacts the user might encoutner, and build for that. Why do they have standards for bike, motorcycle, car racing, ski helmets, etc? Because they know the most likely type of impacts they could experience, and they make a helmet that will help in those scenarios. Ever get hit head-on by a truck while riding a bike? Or ski over a 100 ft cliff? Probably not, but guess what, those 'certified' helmets won't do dick in those cases. So yeah, if you go in clean or hook yourself into a fuel truck, your BoneHead helmet isn't going to do much for you. It was never deisgned or built with that in mind. If you want to rush the door on a speed star exit and you bounce your mellon off the floater bar, your skydiving helmet will protect you. Take a foot or knee to the back of the head in a funnel? Yep, your skydiving helmet will take care of that as well. Every helmet has limitations. Just because a helmet has a certification for some other sport doesn't mean it doesn't have limits, or that it's any better for skydiving than a skydiving helmet.

Here's a thought, instead of trying to do something dumb like grab your chinstrap during a deployment, how about you pay attention to your body position and increase your chances for a good opening so you don't have to worry about cutting away your helmet. You're free to jump whatever you want, but be weary about telling others what they should be jumping. Every skydiving helmet on the market today has 1000's (at least) of trouble free jumps performed by different jumpers all over the world. This is called 'proof' that they work well for jumping. Your 'creation' has no such service history, and is an 'unknown'. More to the point, show me the string of incidents where a helmet with no camera was the cause of an entanglement? What you're doing is pointing to the design of the helmets as being suspect, but the way they come out of the box, skydiving helmets are generally low-profile and do not present a snag hazzard. If you want to call the camera mounting a problem, that's on the jumper who mounted the camera, not the helmet manufacturer. Truth be told, your 'safe' helmet would be just as prone to a snag once a jumper mounts a camera the same way they would with another helmet.

Once you have some more jumps under your belt, like about 15 or 20, you can look into borrowing rigs from experienced jumpers to try out different containers and canopies. Of coruse, you need to make sure they're appropriate for your experience, and have the proper equipment (AAD, RSL) if you're not licensed. If your dad is a jumper and you're a packer, you should have no problem arranging for some 'test jumps' from fellow jumpers. You see what you like and what you don't like. Racers are a unique animal. They're really good in some ways, and not so good in others. Most of the ways they're really good, however, you can make other rigs just as good with proper care and use.

It's incredible that the same guy from 4 posts up who ghad no idea what was going on with his rig, now seems to have a comprehensive opinion of the situation. How it looks to me, and as it common with Racers, your PC cap is not seperating from the spring, the excess quick look is simply hanging out of the PC. This excess loop is either simply tucked under the PC cap, or some riggers might also run a single turn of seal thread through the end of the loop and the edge of the PC cap to hold it in place. Neither of which requires removal of anything, or breaking the seal on the pack job. If there's more to the story, or the pic does not show the extent of the problem, that's one thing. If the problem is what I think it is, then you wasted a day of jumping looking at a rig that had a very minor problem that any rigger (and most long-time Racer owners) could have fixed in less than 5 minutes. Just for reference, my first and second rigs were Racers and I have about 3500 jumps between the two of them.

It's not a matter of opinion, that's a standard part of a Racer. Those loops are used to snug the reserve PC cap down to the reserve container. There's one on the top and bottom of the PC cap, and pulling on one will snug the opposite side of the cap. Pull the top, and the lower edge of the cap will snug down, and vice versa. When not in use, they are simply tucked up under the PC cap for 'storage'. That said, don't screw with them. Don't attempt to pull or stow them on your own. Get a rigger to help out with that. Where do you jump that nobody on the DZ could tell you this, or even just stow them for you and get you back in the air?

I have jumped with both gymnasts and divers before, and it does seem to help just with the basis of body awareness and being comforatable with rotational movements. However, in skydiving the manuvers are more a function of playing the relative wind as opposed to the 'self-propelled' movements you make in those other sports. For example, you do tuck your knees to your chest to do a back loop, but the motivational force is when the wind hits your calves/feet, and blows you over backwards. When you go to stop, it's not a matter of timing the relaese so you run out of 'loop' when you're back on heading, it's a matter of coming around and returning to the arch and letting the wind stop you and hold you back in place on your belly. Yes, the visual is a part of the manuver, and it does help with things like head position and holding a heading in the beginning of the learning process, but that goes away eventaully. Since the wind is both the 'home' position and the motivating force in the manuvers, it's possible to do them blindfolded and just use the feel of the wind to guide you. Think about when you leave the plane and are on 'the hill'. You're stable and facing your belly into the relative wind, but your body is not paralell to the ground, it's up at a 45-ish degree angle due to the forward movement of the plane. Anyway, you can easliy do flips, rolls, and turns on the hill, with the horizon being on a different 'plane' than you are. Again, it's because you're working with the wind, not gravity and your own motivation (as in gymnastics or diving).

Provided that you are a regular jumper there, your skills match up with whatever it is you're trying to do, and you're willing to pay for the rig rental and for someone to do the swap, I'd say there's a good chance it would happen.

What was the context of your statement? You made the reference to swoopers using rears, and that it must be more efficient or they wouldn't be doing it, but I think you're only dealing with half of the story. Rears can be an asset, but only to a point. When you pull down on the rears, there is a portion of the travel that will flatten out the trim without distoring the canopy. Essentially, the inflated wing pivots downward off the A line attachment points, which effectively flattens out the glide. However, this only works (well) for a very small portion of the travel. What happens if you pull too hard, is that the B lines will being to slack, and a crease will form in the canopy. At this point, you're no longer simply re-trimming the canopy, now your bending it half and pulling the rear half down into the wind, aka creating drag. When swooping, that first little bit of travel actually gets bigger becasue of airspeed. When the pressurization is up, like at the tail end of a big turn, your canopy will hold it's shape longer than when pulling the rears in slow flight. On top of that, you have the concept of control effectiveness going up with airspeed, so again, at the bottom of a big turn, a little goes a long way. So when it comes to ultra-high speed flight, and for minor trim changes to level your canopy for a swoop, the rears are the ticket. Once you're into them for the swoop, it makes the most sense to fly them out to a degree, but as it's commonly known, you don't fly them out to 100% just before the stall before you transition, you need to dump them and go to toggles at about 80% of what they have to give. When it comes to steady-state flight at slow speeds, the brakes are far more reliable in terms of efficiency, and more forgiving in terms of the jumpers need for accurate inputs (both being good things when trying to cover long distances over 'long' periods of time).

What about the student rigs at the DZ? Those are generally sized for large canopies and average sized people.

This is the reason to use a landing pattern when landing off. It provides two major functions for off-field landings, the first one is that the downwind leg gives a great chance to 'sweep' the field at a low-ish altitude for obstacles. As you fly the downwind leg, you're going right past your intended touchdown point at something less than 1000ft. This gives you an excellent vatage point to spot some obstacles which may have not been obvious from higher up. Gopher holes, fences, logs, etc, whatever it is, you stand the best chance of spotting it when down low. The second advantage comes into play if you do spot an obstacle. You can use your accuracy skills to alter your turn points for your base and final legs to make sure that you end up clear of said obstacle. The other obvious advantage of using a pattern is that it will reduce the possibility of making a low turn. If you use a pattern when landing at the DZ, and don't make low turns there, repeat that skill when landing off and it will increase your chances for success. The thing about landing patterns and accuracy is that they seem fairly mundane and 'common-place' after so many jumps at the DZ. When everything is going well, it starts to feel like driving through an empty parking lot but still staying in between the lines. Pointless and time-consuming. However, there is a point to those skills and developing them to a sharp point. Landing off is one of them, sudden changes in wind speed or direction is another, and traffic or other incursions would be a thrid. All fairly rare events, but when they do happen, you're going to be gald you have the skills to remain in control of the situation and make the right moves.

I was actually taught that by another old timer, who called it the 'halfway-down halfway-back' rule. It's not an exact science, just an idea for how to come up with a 'best guess' if you're going to make it.

This is a complicated subject, so I'll just post a few thoughts - -First off, most modern canopies have very shallow brake settings. These help with those nice, slow openings, but they don't keep you up there very long with the brakes stowed, so pretty much plan on unstowing your brakes in any case. -If you are upwind of the DZ (with the wind at your back), the idea becomes staying in the air as long as possible. The tailwind is helping to move you back to the DZ, so the longer you are airborne, the further the wind will push you. For this reason, deep brakes are typically the best option as they provide the lowest descent rate, and the longer it takes to get to the ground, the further the wind will push you. So get yourself turned toward the DZ, and get on the brakes ASAP to give yourself the best chance to make it home. -If you are downwind of the DZ (with the wind blowing in your face), now you have another problem. What you're trying to do now is penetrate as far into the wind as possible, so what you're looking for is higher airspeed, so the best option is generally full flight. To aid that, you can tuck your legs up by bending at the knee and getting your lower legs behind your upper leg, thus reducing drag. Keep your arms in tight to your body, and maybe even behind your body, again to reduce drag. All of these little steps will boost your forward speed by a couple %, and help get you that much further into the wind. HOWEVER - with all that said, here's the important info - 'getting back' to the DZ does not mean coming 2 feet over the trees to take a downwinder on the edge of the field. Getting back means making it to the DZ with enough altitude to spare to still allow you to fly a normal landing pattern and land with the regular flow of traffic. All of the tricks and tips above should be used in an attempt to get yourself back to the pattern enrty point above the DZ, not just back to the DZ. If you cannot make the pattern entry point, then you need to divert to an alternate LZ where you can fly a landing pattern, and just take the off field landing. The way you do that is to take your current altitude, let's say 3000ft, then subtract the pattern entry altitude, let's say that's 800ft. So you have 2200ft of altitude to make it back to the landing pattern. Now that you know that number, cut it in half and see how far you get after flying halfway down. So you'll float along for 1100ft, and if you're not halfway back to the landing pattern, you're probably not going to make the other half. Of course, during this first half you should be scoping out alternate LZs along the way, so if you do find that you didn't make it halfway back, now you're at 1900ft and you have a good working knowledge of all the places you just overflew. Pick one and land there using a standard landing pattern.

No, you can't. You have no way of knowing the airspeed or body position the jumper will be in. You don't know the size of the reserve, or how the bulk will be distributed. All of these things can have an effect on the time/altitude it will take to go from pulling the handle to the reserve slider coming down. You did highlight some of the factors that you can measure, and manufacturers should measure these and use that info to design the 'best' rig they can, but it still doesn't add up to a reliable 'hard deck' for a reserve deployment in the real world.

Again, because factors outside of the manufacturers control will effect the performance of the rig. Of course, becasue you can test for those things. You can push a weighed dummy out the back of a plane flying at a specific speed, and see the results. Harness manufacturers can give you specs on the strength of the harness because that's easy to test. Strap a harness into a hydraulic pull tester, and see what it takes to rip it apart. There are just too many variables to a reserve deployment to assign a hard number to it. Generally accepted practices in most of the word are that main deployment should be initiated by 2k ft at a minimum, and then EPs should follow immediately if need be. If a jumper wants to push things to limit, they can dump at 2k and take their chances. If they want to add in some 'wiggle room', they'll initiate main deployment higher than 2k, and EPs immediately after if needed. In terms of an AAD, they can all be adjusted to fire higher than the 750 ft default setting. The problem then is that you increase the risk of a two-out if your main snivels into your AAD firing altitude. If you did adjust your AAD, you would want to also 'adjust' your main deployment altitude up to match.

You won't get an answer in the US, or really anywhere I would guess. The problem is (and most likely what a manufacturer will tell you) is that the 'hard deck' is dependant on the body position, airspeed, reserve canopy, and pack job, and there's no way for them to quote you a number. Those practical reasons aside, in the US you can add the problem of legal liability if you quote a hard number and the rig fails to meet that standard and it leads to an incident.

Were you in on this? Here's a tip for next time, aside from don't try that again, the camera guy should stay on the plane and watch the deployment. If Mr Bill hangs on, then he can do a clear-and-pull, and fly down to film the pair and Mr Bill leaving the other jumper. If it doesn't work, the camera guy isn't in freefall under the tumbling Mr Bill (as many others pointed out, is not a good thing). As in any skydive, you should plan out the entire jump, from exit to landing, before you board the plane. In this case, planning would have revealed that if the exit/deployment was succesful, the camera guy would have very little footage followed by a long, solo freefall. Of course, if you include the 'worst case scenario' in your planning, that would have revealed the problem with the camera guy being under the failed Mr Bill, with My Bill in freefall above him. A little forethought could have put the idea of tracking out from under the guy on the table, and eliminated the camera guy's (shit) decision to dump right away under Mr Bill. As an example, when we do wingsuit rodeo tracking dives, it's a bunch of non-wingsuiters following the wingsuit rodeo as the leader. I exit right next to the rodeo just in case the rider falls off on exit. In that case, I'll transition to a back track, and lead a regular tracking dive. If you put all your 'eggs in one basket', and that basket relies on a jumper(s) pulling off some sort of 'trick', you need to have a solid plan B in place if the 'trick' goes to shit to prevent everyone else on the jump from having to come up with a plan B in freefall because the chances are that not everyone will be on the same page.