ecnuob

I've had one on every jump from AFF1. For the first 50 or so it was set 500' below deployment altitude, with the goal of never hearing it before i had deployed. Only failed once. I am lucky enough to be at a dropzone that has loaner helmets with audibles that anyone that choses to can use. After 50ish I went to the standard breakoff, deploy, oh shit settings. Heard the Oh shit tones for the first time the other day on a long sniveler, certainly gets your attention real quick!!! I don't rely entirely on it, but at the same time I rarely look at my wrist mount below 6000, between my eyes and the audible I don't feel the need.

I love how everyone preaches about the one idiot that forgot his leg straps as an example every time this comes up. Frankly this is a hell of a lot more understandable (but obviously just as unacceptable) then the countless morons that have got into and out of the plane with undone or miss-routed chest straps, EXPERIENCED dead jumpers no less. Distraction can happen at anytime regardless of your level of experience or adding new things to the sport. just be vigilant and never get complacent, check and double check the basic things that your life depends on. There are so many other things under-experienced jumpers should worry about wing-suiting, the biggest being a lack of heading/flight-plan control and taking out tandems/other jumpers or something similar. Flat spins, exit issues, reaching pilot chute/handles with extra fabric. BUT all of these things can be taught, just as we were all taught to deal with all the concerns of "basic" skydiving from ground zero and unleashed upon the world with as little as seven supervised jumps. Just as some AFF students take 30 jumps to graduate others could self supervise in less then seven. Some are wingsuit ready at 50, some may never be. Is the advice the OP got bad? Of course it is, lying and going without instruction is a horrible idea at ANY number of jumps. But once a jumper has shown awareness and skills in a skydiving enviroment needed for safe wingsuiting that jumper should be able to get evaluated and obtain the proper instruction to be taken on a first jump by wingsuit instructor or equivelent regardless of any arbitrary number. Until the community realizes and accepts this as fact, jumpers (of all jumps numbers/skill levels) who think they have mad skills but are told no will continue to work around the system that they feel is holding them back and be hazards to us all. Prohibition does not work, providing a way for those with "mad skillz" to work within a non-arbitrary system would. 100 jump wonder to instructor: "hey i want to go wingsuiting, I have mad skillz and can already do this and this..." Experianced wingsuiter: Cool, we'd love to have more people to fly with, lets go for a jump and evaluate some of your skills and we will see what you need to work on before wingsuiting... 100 j wonder: thanks man, when can we go for a jump so i can show off my mad skillz much better then... wingsuiter: I dont care how skilled you are or think you are, you MUST have 200 jumps before I'll talk to you about it! 100 J wonder: !@#$ that guy he doesn't know me and my skillz I'm just gonna get a suit and go for it... What's the criteria for taking a first flight course? For releasing a new wingsuiter to jump without supervision? How the hell would i know? I'm just another 100 jump wonder. Why don't all you old timers who seem to know it all get together and formulate an actual system of instruction and evaluation rather than continue to beat your heads against the same old wall? In the end it's just another jumpsuit specifically designed for skydiving. I encourage those who want to to seek out someone qualified to teach them and get after as soon as they are ready, not when some board of people who know nothing about them have decided they are.

Crystal Mountain in Washington has been fine with it for the past few years and has even hosted a couple of demo events... However the preferred run, known as exterminator, will have a gondola going right up the middle of it starting this year. Not sure how that's going to affect things, if they will allow it elsewhere on the mountain or ban it outright...

I meant to ask this in another thread but forgot, Here's just as good... Has anyone ever jumped with water for weight? Then release it shortly after opening to get around the issue of higher wing-loadings with weights?

Canada... Large party, underage "entertainment" (we didnt know they were pros or underage, hell we were barely of age ourselves) Was all fun and games until RCMP showed up in our whistler hotel room after a snowboard broke through a 3rd story window and landed in the village. We were railsliding the balcony and stair railings. Good times. We were asked nicely to return to the US the following day.

I'm sure this has been asked before, but search yielded nothing. 10 year old cypress 1, no previous maintenance, only needs an 8 year checkup and a battery to be airworthy right... in other words you dont get dinged for both the 4 and 8 year when send it in?

The second alarm on mine occasionally goes of under canopy. Never heard it when I was on student gear, almost always hear it under higher wing loadings. Freaked me the !@#$ out the first time I heard it under canopy, thought there must have been something wrong with my canopy. Now I set it to break-off and pull altitudes instead, works much better, hope to never hear the third alarm. when on the blue ready light blinks occasionally, if it beeps at you at 1000' it's ready to go.

Parachute Center, Lodi California

Nitro Circus. Season 2 Episode 4. Scott Palmer and Pastrana. They also open a rig in the tunnel.

[reply ===================== Take 3 on the canopy-loading issue. Take them out of the BSR's and put them in the license restriction part of the SIM. These are essentially recommendations; the S+TA decides which have to be enforced. The limits are: A license - 1 psf max B license - 1.1 psf max C license - 1.3 psf max D license - no limit Also institute a canopy control syllabus, initally to be taught by any USPA instructional rating holder (from coach to I/E) then eventually taught by a canopy coach, once the canopy coach certification system is in place. Anyone who takes (and passes) the course is exempt from the requirements. Most of the complaints about a BSR has been concerning the egregious loss of personal freedoms by any BSR. So we take it out of the BSR's, make it a recommendation, and put it on the shoulders of the S+TA's and DZO's. They now have something in the SIM to back them up if they do have to go head to head with a jumper who is absoultely, positively sure they can jump a Stiletto 97 at 39 jumps. That way the SIM serves to support the DZO's/S+TA's who are trying to do the right thing, but leaves it up to them (and the individual jumper.) This, of course, will do the least of all the proposals to prevent canopy fatalities, since it's optional. But as far as I can tell removes the primary objection which is that it restricts people's freedoms. It also gets education to people who need it, which is the really critical part of the the proposal. This one sounds the best, so long as it has some way of addressing the difference between showing up with a 1.3 triathlon and a 1.3 stiletto. As well as the difference between a 130# exit weight on a 100sqft canopy and a 230# exit on a 180. Both 1.3 but from my understanding radically different in how they are going to fly.

I'll assume you said this tongue in cheek. But to a small extent isn't some of it true? Gopros have lessened the snag and hard opening/neck injury hazards of early camera flying, and jumping one has become almost solely about handling the possible distractions. Instruction certainly is better, equipment is safer and more reliable. 20 years ago, something similar to today's Sabre2 170 at 1:1 would have been considered radical and crazy for even a jumper with 200 jumps. Now it appears to be not that uncommon to see as a student setup (though still outside of germains recommendations) Wing-suits, I have no experience with but i would venture to say they have gotten marginally easier to fly and here too, instruction has gotten better through experiance. But as we've seen the lack of regulation on instructing (and number of questionable instructors) really leaves many of the prospective wing-suitors in the lurch on who to trust. Causing a need to have that level of experience to be able to make there own decisions. I have no doubt there are a handful of people out there that given the right instruction can and do safely fly wing-suits well under 200 jumps. The sport has advanced considerably, and while some will continue to make the mistakes of old and you'll hear about every on of them. Many more will advance quicker then commonly thought possible, but you'll never hear about most of them. This is such a small sport, every thing that goes wrong get amplified, while 100's of thousands of jumps happen without incident. Every day novice cyclist's great creamed by cars, intermediate skiers smash their heads on trees and motorcyclists crash. Let us not forget that for a sport with such an obvious potential for death and injury we've done a remarkably good job of dodging it. BSR's have there place and have done well, but should stand for Basic Safety recommendation, not requirement.

I would start by talking to Joe. Maybe Joe knows something I don't or I know something Joe don't. I certainly know people like Joe the freeflyer that I look up to and may value his opinion over someone I don't know. Just like I value the instructors at my DZ over your opinion (doesnt mean Im not listening to you though) If you fail to get either a satisfactory answer on why or to get Joe to talk to the jumper and the jumper truly is unsafe then by all means ground him and call the neighbors. If that fails, then buy a square, some people cant be helped.

You're right they do highlight complacency and i should have said any real relevance to the topic at hand. I still fail to see the relevance to the 100 jump wonder that's contemplating a 1.2 wingload, I'd bet they are being anything but complacent. I never said I was good, but I've had good instruction and mentoring that has approved my choices every step of the way. I know the school of fast downsizing one but whats TBTB?

I could be wrong here, but it looks to me that most of the fatal and near fatal mistakes aren't the 100 and 200 jump wonders that are jumping cameras, wing-suiting and flying sabres at 1.3 and asking/talking about it here on Dorkzone. It's those in the, i call them "storm years" that are past that stage and beginning to try advance canopy flight and bigger wing-suits, probably without the benefit of instruction. Because they feel they don't need it anymore. I see it all the time in skiing, where as a ski patroller I've seen more then my fair share of broken bodies and fatal mistakes by people trying to take it to far to early without instruction. It;s these jumpers that we really need to look out for and remind that just because they've hit that magic number doesn't mean they can do whatever they want. I liken it to drinking in Europe vs. the USA. Europeans grow up with it, they learn to handle it as they progress and as a result have far fewer issues with it in their early 20's (the storm years) then American kids who sneak it, aren't taught how to handle it and then thrown the keys to the liquor cabinet at 21. Hard and fast numbers do not work. [soapbox] I for one am tired of being a lowest common denominator society, just because Bob couldn't handle it doesn't mean Jill cant. Let's trust our instructors and progress people at a pace commensurate with their own abilities. It's our job to tell them they should seek professional advice from someone who knows their skill level, not to berate them on the internet and tell them they are going to die, you might be right, but who are you to say? [/soapbox]

What makes you think his outcome would have been any different on a 170? Sounds like he shouldn't have been jumping in those winds and clearly made a flight pattern mistake that he could just as easily made under a different canopy. The 170 may have lessened his injuries i suppose, but the accident most likely would have still happened. Germain's chart puts that jumper between a 158 and a 190, so if he had been flying a 160 would you still blame his canopy choice, or the fact they he clearly fucked up while flying it and by being in the air in winds high enough that you yourself chose not to jump?

The experience of the older generation goes both ways. I think your going to see this even more, even if you start yelling at the tops of your lungs. Today's jumpers have the years of experience in what did and did not work for those that came before us. Which includes the benefit of better, more experienced instructors then you had. I don't think it is unreasonable at all to think that we could progress safely, at a faster rate then our instructors did. Previous generation had to learn through trial and error, now we already know what works and can teach that much quicker then in the past. I would go as far as to argue that the evolution we have seen in other sports higher, faster, farther and so on, carries over into the athletes of our generation doing the same in skydiving. More jumpers are going to start wing-suiting, flying cameras and jumping smaller canopies earlier. Hopefully not all three at once, but all three seem to circle around that magical 200 jump number. Are a few gonna get hurt and or die? Possibly, but the same thing happens in skiing, mountain biking, motocross and all the other adrenalin sports... Even some of those that follow the BSRs to a t and check off every step along the way are. As pointed out in another thread, it's not just the new that get hurt and an equal if not greater number of those with the "magical experience numbers" will too, even if they aren't pushing the limits. Before you jump on me and say I haven't been around long enough to see the damages, injuries and deaths that will change my mind. I have, and sadly I am fully aware that I will probably lose more friends to early along the way, possible even ones that do everything right. It's a dangerous game we all play, but we are going to have fun, and enjoy it to the maximum while we are here together and help one another to progress at a pace that fits our personal abilities.

As a jumper currently "pushing the limits" as you say. Neither of your story's have ANY real relevance to me. Comparing me flying conservatively on a Tri-150 or Saber2 loaded at 1.26, and someone with a ton of experience flying a highly loaded, fully elliptical canopy to it's limit are completely different fruits. Tell us the story about the guy who downsized from 1:1 to 1:3 at 100 jumps and wasn't a retard trying to learn to swoop. I.e. flying a normal rectangle pattern onto final at 200 feet and had an accident that could have been prevented by being on a larger canopy and it might mean something. I have actually found it much easier to plane out and smoothly land a saber2 150, then the 170. And as far as the twitchiness or responsiveness of the 150 over the 170, yeah the 150 spirals faster, but the turn-in/initiation rate has very little difference. The only situation that comes to mind (you don't know what you don't know, so feel free to enlighten me) is the panic induced turn to avoid something in the landing or flight path and hooking it in. I've probably proved my ignorance in here somewhere already, and I invite you to fill me in. I started AFF on a sabre2 190 with an exit weight of 190, 2 through 17 on a Tri-175, 17-22 on a Sabre2 170, 22-55 on a tri-150, 56-59 on a sabre2 150. And will likely make the next few on a nitron 150 (undecided on that one). I was certainly nervous the first 10 or so on the triathlon-150 and flew and landed a considerable distance from the main landing area, and certainly had to plf a good percentage of those landings. But with a bit of coaching I feel quite safe on the tri and Sabre 150's and can land consistently within 10m of target. Quite frankly that sabre2 150 lands like a dream and feels far more stable then the rest!!!

Seriously? If I Cock my PC before shaking it out, or any other time before laying it on the ground it tends to uncock somewhat or all the way... I understand setting the brakes and for your own piece of mind/safety uncollapsing the slider, but expecting the PC to be cocked is flat out lazy packing

Don't know about it being Stephane or Loic... But the suits are definitely s-flys.

Stop looking at/for the ground, and try to ignore your inner ear. Also relax and trust that youra good arch will always bring you belly to earth. Least that's what i was told and it worked. That being said, I'm a little over 50 jumps and still find it easier to just front flip out the door and be stable after the first rotation rather then deal with the relative wind from the prop and airspeed of the plane. It wasn't until about 30 jumps that I was able to consistently launch belly to wind and remain totally stable until belly to earth, now i can exit facing the front of the plane and go directly into a jumpline track (when exiting last of course). Going unstable is a part of learning, you will constantly be trying new things as you learn and finding what does and does not work. The important thing is being able to GET STABLE quickly from any orientation and remain stable while not manuvering. Remember perfection only comes with time and practice, no one is perfect the first time they do something.

Almost to the point that the BFL should be split up into two lists, just to keep it in perspective. Just as the sport was getting safer, we've gone and changed the rules. Unfortunately it may only be the beginning.

Sometime before putting it in the BOC... Seriously, just cock the thing at the same time every time you pack, and after you stuff in in the boc check for color... If none, pull it out and give it a tug. I swear people complicate this sport way to much, it's pretty damn simple in the grand scheme of things!

Sorry to be so blunt but sounds like she chopped and your the reserve... Cut her loose and give her time to sort out her shit at a minimum. Just guessing here, but is there any chance she knew on some level that you would be there to "pick up the pieces" so to speak after the divorce? Also the fact that you didn't really defend her at all in your post makes it look as though you are just looking to the forum for reassurance of a decision you've already made. Either way good luck, but I think it's time you take a break and focus on your business for a little while.

I cannot in good conscience recommend you do learn to skydive there. To many risks associated with poorly maintained and operated aircraft. A weak safety culture. An owner who has a history of very poor decision making. That said there are some GREAT people who jump there. If you HAD to learn there, I would highly recommend Ed Pawlowski. His web address is elsewhere on this thread. He operates independently, and simply uses the aircraft there. Ed will show you not only how to skydive, but show you how to be a safe skydiver. The number of deaths isn't really a good indicator of the risk of Lodi. The were mostly experience jumpers either making a mistake or running into uncontrollable situations (i.e. medical issues). What is an indicator are the near misses that many people hush up. The aircraft accidents that are never reported. The low time jumpers that show poor judgement because they were never taught differently as students. Non rated skydivers doing AFF jumps. The shame of it is that notable people in this sport will overlook, ignore, or simply hush up violations all to save a buck or two. I'll be blasted for this post, mostly by the worst offenders. It doesn't bother me. When I can hear, without asking, of the violations and incidents at Lodi from more than 2000 to 3000 miles away...... well that says something to me. So where would YOU suggest he go?

What you describe is not a pilot chute hesitation. You describe a pilot chute in tow. Big difference. Please refer to the SIM or an instructor for emergency procedures for the two. What makes you say that? Pilot chute in tow was a possibly occurance but i would have to say this was far from, extraction was slow then normal but still occurred quickly. I'd be willing to be that no one would have gone to PC in tow EP's within the amount of time between pull and canopy opening.