Cacophony

Its because of posts like this that reinforce why its a very bad idea to listen to people online. How lame..... With 100 jumps you should not even consider stepping up to a wing loading above 1.2 within the next 150 jumps at least. Just demo everything, but stick with the same size of everything, and stick with close to what you are used to. Speed is tempting, but living is much more tempting. Oh, and talk to experienced people at your dropzone to help with flaring new canopies and such, not people who just want attention online and have nothing better to do than bitch about things they have no experience with and don't understand.

They look close enough to each other to be using just leglocks. Very difficult to do. Pretty cool being able to pull it off! Here's a few closeup crops of the same formation done the same way, both before and after downplaning it. I've included a few uncropped shots too. I'm the middle person in all of these. Those pictures are sweet! I'm jealous!

Sounds cool. I remember about 4 years ago when that guy (help me out here) tried carving through the hangar doors and Rantoul and broke both femurs. This one sounds straight through though so, piece of cake right!

Its the most comfortable and light weight helmet I have owned. The padding is more of a cottom material instead of foam like Bonehead uses. Its much softer, however, the padding does dampen audible beeps a little since the audible pouch is just a cottom bag attached to velcro inside. I would definately recommend one though.

Just remember that your brake lines will shrink a lot if you use spectra instead of vectran because of the friction caused by the guide ring. Personally, I think if you get your canopy relined when you are supposed to it shouldn't be much of a concern.

For visual purposes, Neptune is way more comfortable, easier to read under canopy, and much less confusing. I really don't like the increment changes on the face of the Altitrack. However, I have had no good luck with Neptunes (I have around 400 jumps on various versions and units), and I don't have much experience with the Altitrack. But after 4 jumps, it was uncomfortable enough for me to go back to my Alti 3. So what am I trying to say here? Great question! Just giving my opinion. As long as the Viso doesn't get bad reviews, I'm buying one beginning next season.

Its good to hear that there are people out there with the know how to say, "Maybe I need to tone things down a bit." I wish more people could realize that same thing if the situation presents itself instead of blaming it on other factors. Congrats on being a grown up

Ever tried using Sony tapes?

This question is like "Hey. I haven't seen this question asked in 2 weeks. Better ask it again!" Its all based on opinion. Mine says to jump a Velo, hands down. Yes the JVX has been doing well, but not great. Sure there are amatuers doing ok with it, but just look at the CPC Championships. There were amatuers doing way better with Velo's and even VXs, even in practice.

When you flare you are flattening out the glide of your canopy. Depending on wing loading, forward speed...... the canopy will continue to fly level until the amount of lift generated doesn't compensate. Even big student canopies will get a little "surf" out of them if landed properly and in the right wind conditions. Personally, I think most people put their feet down too early and don't use the last bit of their flare. Sounds like you started playing with the bottom end and maximizing your flare. Any good canopy coach should be able to give you great advice after watching you land.

Personally I have had nothing but bad reviews about Neptunes. I'm very interested in buying a VISO because I like the look of the digital display better for swooping. Audible alarms for swooping just get me confused because there are so many different variables to take into account. I like to judge for myself whether I need to slow down or speed up my turn to get to where I need to be in case I couldn't set up perfectly. Hopefully L&B get it right in the first place instead of offering a bunch of updates to make their product work correctly.

Final count. 640!!!!

With about 1 hr 37 min left Jay Stokes hit 600 skydives this morning!!

He is exiting from approx 2100' to keep it legal and safe. He is essentially pulling immediately out the door. He has 1 person (safety) inside the airplane for every jump. The safety helps supply him with water, oxygen, and whatever else is needed as well as. The safety also helps him get in the airplane, get a seatbelt on, and a final gear check before exit.

Jay is closing in on 100 jumps at 11:15am. He is averaging 28 jumps an hour. He will make more than 600 at this rate. Still gotta bring in that Porter and its the slow plane. The 2 PACs running are tearing it up out there!

Velo's still ruled this comp. I had a lot of fun. Great job to all the top competitors!

I would never want someone to psycho pack my velo after seeing what psycho packing is doing for our tandem canopies. Personally, I pack it exactly like my stiletto. Leave the nose open and pull the slider towards the nose a little making sure the slider is open as much as possible. Then I roll the tail 2-3 times. Of course, nothing is perfect! Its a Velocity. They do what they want on opening most of the time. But damn is it worth it on landing!!!

The software has its bugs and the web page is not that user friendly. I have to take at least 3 calls a week about people that don't get their email, while the video is clearly uploaded. All you have to do is search for their name!! The idea sells a lot of video, but the company needs to get its act together with customer service. It seems to take weeks to get an email response from them. Other than that, they need to rotate their ads a little. I can't listen to that stupid Go Fast ad anymore! I can't seem to figure out how to view more than about 25 videos from any DZ, including my own. It only comes up with 1 page of results, while my DZ has uploaded several hundred at the very least. They also seem very slow at updates. On a scale of 1 to 10 I would give it a 6.

All those Neptune functions seem to use up a lot of battery power. It really like having it on my wrist, but I didn't like it in my helmet. The log book stuff is nice I guess, considering that no 2 Neptune's read the same speeds even when in the same helmet side by side. My old Skytronic is way better as an audible, even without the canopy alarms.

The benefit of rears on a lightly loaded large canopy to someone who is just coming straight in is worthless. All its doing is throwing another variable into the mix. Why screw it up?

Well, I ended up hanging by my legs on the bottom of our 206, heh. At least it was only an AFF eval practice! Oh, then the next jump I accidentally left with the wrong group, heh. It was a coach practice vid. Thats what they get for switching up the exit order at the last second and not telling me. Ooops!!

I certainly agree with everything you said, I was merely disagreeing with the "at 56 jumps you are landing with rear riser input?" comment. I assume that his problem was that someone with this level of experience is doing rear to toggle transitions, particularly trying to get advice from an online message board to do it, and not with the fact of possibly using rear risers for landing, because I believe that learning to land on rears is very important, particularly when I see on here how many people mention that they would feel uncomfortable in breaking a brakeline and would probably cut away. It's definitely not as dangerous as someone deciding to start teaching themselves to swoop at 60 jumps, but someone shouldn't think that they have to keep their hands only on their toggles until they have 200 jumps, as that can be very dangerous for them. I think the point is that who cares how you are holding your toggles if its an emergency as long as you are holding them. Yes a person with low jump numbers should be able to handle a situation like a lost toggle or broken brake line, but it doesn't mean that they should be experimenting with it a lot. With 60 jumps on any canopy, let alone, total, you still don't even have your flare perfect WITH toggles yet! Granted if you have thousands of jumps, then the time it takes to learn the controls diminishes, but it still takes time. My point is that you should worry more about flaring well in different wind conditions, avoiding obstacles, avoiding traffic, off DZ landings, accuracy..... before you worry about something trivial like how many fingers or at what angle you hold your toggles with while performing an EMERGENCY landing. Simple...... if you don't know, then you don't have the experience to mess with it, so just hold them!!! Now if this post is about swooping using your rears, then that is totally different. Simple. Don't even try until you have hundreds and hundreds of jumps. End of story!! And I don't mean just 200 jumps either.

What did they promise you? 8-10? Nice looking rig!

While this isn't a canopy resource, it is a flight resource. I highly recommend the book "Understanding Flight" by David Anderson and Scott Eberhardt. ISBN- 0-07-136377-7 It provides great examples of flight without the need to know Calculus 3.

Damn. Just read the injury report on cp.com. Sounds like you got lucky with that one. Who knows what a few extra feet would have produced. It hurts being a pioneer! Glad you guys have great spirits and will pull through. Don't rush the process!