3mpire

What kind of freeflying? If you're looking for basic stuff there are plenty of people to choose from. If you are looking for head down then there are a smaller number checked off on spotting, so you would need to work with them on their availability and what not. but check out: Michael Biederman Emmet Buchanan Darren Dos Santos Cat Adam Davy Manning

it wouldn't limit your ability to opine. It would just brand you with a scarlet letter plus, in your case to qualify for the icon you would need more than 23,000 comments so you're still good. Basically anyone with a 10:1 or greater comment to jump ratio needs to jump more and bitch less @Remster (below) V Everyone needs to jump more! And be creative. Like editing a post to comment on a follow up without posting a new comment thus keeping my post count from incrementing. heyoo! Ok i'm out

I would like to see the profile expanded to have a jump/comment loading like we have for wing loading. If your comments exceed your jumps by an order of magnitude you should have a little icon next to your username

Vigil AADs have a great cutter, too. If they didn't forget to put it in at the factory!

Everyone else in the thread have made some great points: train your eyes The guess my altitude game should just be a part of your routine on the way up and on the way down. you can have more than one alti I have 3. An audible in my helmet, a neptune on my hand, and an analog galaxy on my mud flap. A failure of any one of the three should not leave you to your eyes alone. if you are in a group stick to the plan One point I'm not sure anyone quite made is that the "if in doubt pull" plan is a really really bad one if you're in a group. plan the dive and dive the plan. If the plan is to break at 4.5 and pull by 3.5 and sometime between exit and before breakoff you see your only alti isn't working, stick with the plan and your dive. when they break, you break, do a short track, and pull. Note: don't get complacent and just assume they're going to do the right thing. Still use your eyes. But if you have 2-3 other people stick close to them and break when they do as long as your eyes aren't telling you that you're too close to the ground. look at clouds make mental notes of cloud altitudes on climb up. feel the temperature if it's summer the ground is going to be warmer and more humid than high altitude. if you are in free fall hauling ass and you feel it get suddenly warmer and wetter that might be a clue that you're burning through 2k or worse. in short: there are tons of sources of information you can use in addition to your altimeter. Use them. Even when your altimeter is working, look for them and use them.

Incorrect the dz you are referring to does not allow Wingsuits.

2,500 feet AGL for B; 2,000 feet AGL for C and D

Hop and pops just above the hard deck and just below the cloud ceiling are awesome. I love those jumps--I did 9 in one day two summers ago, never got out above 4k. Btw the correct name for an otter jump run at that alt is "otter pops" ;)

Goggles on under the visor? That sounds like the opposite of a good time. Like wearing sunglasses over your regular glasses. I'm putting the over/under on a HUD-related incident thread at May 1st (may day..... badum tsss). But seriously. No thanks.

A guy at the tunnel last night had a pair of these and I tried them on. Kinda neat but the goggles are awful. I don't know that I would be able to see handles easily unless I was looking straight at them. Plus I am dubious that they would do well at FF wind speed. However, and this is only anecdotal, the guy told me that he heard of someone mounting it inside their G3 so rumor on the street is someone has figured this out. Or it is just a rumor. Either way, I think it's an expensive toy that would only be marginally useful for a wingsuit pilot who wants immediate feedback on glide ratio or something. I'm not seeing a strong use case for vertical jumps.

that's true I suppose I was basing my statement off of the assumption that a DZ would be hesitant to accept e-logs out of a concern that they would run afowl of USPA policy and thus open themselves up to some kind of risk in that regard. But on the underlying point we are in agreement, in that it is what is commonly accepted that gives the medium value. No DZ would say "we don't accept paper log books here" and until that same statement can be true for e-logs, the whole rationale for e-logs is moot. in either case there isn't much more to be said so I'm bailing out on this one! peace

That is true, you can't prevent forgery in either case. But the issue isn't "how do we solve it" it is "what will the dropzone accept" If the USPA says that electronic log books are kosher if they follow the same requirement, then member drop zones won't have a reason to not accept them. But it is ambiguous at best as far as how a dropzone would interpret the current language. So until such a point that the USPA makes a definitive statement, paper is obviously better because there is no ambiguity around that. Don't get me wrong. I'd be happy to write an app that logs and verifies jumps. But I'm not going to write that app if I don't believe dropzones will accept it, and I wouldn't think a jumper would PAY ME for that app if they didn't think a dropzone would accept it.

Would you be willing to pay a lot more in membership dues to pay for that centralized system to be designed, implemented, maintained, and secured? Maybe allow people and drop zones to opt in. If you want to use the electronic log book, you pay an additional 50 cents for your jump ticket.

So give me your neptune 3 and I'll jump it all weekend and then you go to another drop zone and tell them that you did those jumps because your neptune has logged them.

I spend all day programming, trust me I am no Luddite. It is simple: electronic logbooks can't be verified. Until the USPA supports a standard for verifying electronic logs, drop zones will require paper. If you don't log on paper you will have trouble at some point at some dropzone that you would not have with paper. It's not a technology question it's a business process that has not changed. Until that process is revised, paper is obviously the only "sure thing" So a piece of paper has more value because the USPA says it does.

Naturally a written log book is the only valid option for verification for many of the reasons in this thread. But paper isn't immune to thieves or toilets last I checked.

Some of the best VFS fliers at my tunnel spent a year or two on competitive 4-way FS teams. Just tossin' that out there ;)

I totally agree its pretty ridiculous to still suck at that point

Master is a strong word. In order to progress in the tunnel you have to demonstrate safety not mastery. Nobody only interested in FF "masters" belly in the tunnel. When you're in the tunnel at 80% nobody is going to be on their belly. ever. They will bail to their back and pop back up into a sit. Unless you are specifically looking to belly fly in the tunnel, the wind speeds alone mean that nobody is going to be on their belly unless they want a quick trip to the top of the tube. It is fairly easy to get an instructor to "sign you off" on something after doing it just once or twice so you can move on to the next thing. To "master" it, you would be able to fly the advanced RW dive pool. All the blocks, all the slots. That's a mastery. I think people assume that just because belly flying is the "student position" (as one free flyer at my DZ calls it) there isn't much to it. There are plenty of tunnel rats who did some center point turns on their belly, did some back to belly transitions, got signed off on the "basics" after a total of an hour or three of tunnel time, and then never get in the tunnel under 75%. I would argue that A) they never mastered belly because that isn't the requirement for tunnel progression and B) even if they were ok at it at some point in time, if you spend 95% of your time FF your belly skills are going to be rusty anyway.

I've been on some hybrid jumps that prove otherwise. It is surprising to know someone can fly HD and yet struggle to dock on the base.

"Just because we're bereaved doesn't make us saps!" "It is our most modestly priced recepticle." /lebowski

I don't buy that argument. Seattle's tunnel is making money hand over fist and our metropolitan area is the 15th largest in the US with roughly 3.5 million people. As skydivers our ego tends to overvalue ourselves. We think we fly better than we do, and we think the businesses that we patronize worship the ground we walk on. We think we're more important to a DZ's bottom line than we really are, and we think a wind tunnel waits with bated breath for us to show up and fly. Fact is DZs and wind tunnels make most of their money from wuffos, and unless the owner has a bleeding heart for the "community" any business man or woman would lock skydivers out if they thought they could fill every single slot or every single minute of tunnel time with a whuffo paying full price. From the business point of view, skydivers are only good for filling space that wouldn't be filled by a full paying customer. A little money is better than no money, even though we're incredibly needy and demanding compared to the whuffo that is happy to fork over top dollar to make the cattle call. Their 225 dollar tandem trumps your 25 dollar jump and their 30 dollar a minute tunnel flight trumps your 15 dollar a minute flight. You can do a back of the napkin analysis of any metropolitan area and consider that any location with a large enough population will provide enough repeat customers to not only make the business viable but profitable with or without skydivers. We like to think of the tunnel as this awesome thing that is a Very Serious tool for stretching the boundaries of "human flight". But it's not. It's an amusement park ride that people will pay to ride just like they pay to ride roller coasters. That the tunnel also is kinda handy for skydivers is incidental. If you consider that Seattle easily supports one tunnel at 3.5 million people, then you could argue that Chicago could support two, LA could support three, and NYC could support five. So in addition to Seattle, there are 10 NEW tunnels (-1 for existing SF Bay) that could probably be successful in the #14 Phoenix to #4 Dallas markets, plus 2 in Chicago, one more in LA to make three, and 5 in NYC/NJ. That is 19 right there. If you lower the bar to 2 million metro population, you add 14 more markets (#29 Kansas City through #16 Minneapolis) for a total of 33. Is 50 a big number? Yes. To get there you would need to believe that roughly 1.5 million people could support a tunnel (I'm looking at you Nashville, TN). Doesn't sound that far fetched to me. Just because something is possible doesn't mean it will happen. However all that is missing there is motivated businessmen with funding to make it happen. It won't be 50 but I would bet it is going to be more than 5.

I'd like to get in on that. I bet it's AWESOME because it's PRIVATE! Exclusive! or not. it probably sucks hard.

Just curious. For jumpers that end up in the third pile do they get a refund or is that a total sunk cost if they get kicked off of jumps due to performance?

One thing to think about is that many of the people who will give you advice were skydiving before they became parents. In some cases, they were performing at an "expert" level (1000+ jumps) before trying to find a balance. This is my third year in the sport and I only have a little over 300 jumps. I also have a six month old. The thing about getting into the sport is that it tends to be consuming. You are going through a level of progression and learning that is the fastest it will ever be in the sport. Your jump/reward ratio is huge. It seems like every ten or twenty jumps you are passing a major milestone and that makes you want to just keep jumping jumping jumping. With no kids, you can easily blow off all your old friends, spend all your time and money jumping, and get deep into the sport quick. For some people after that first bit they drop off and you never see them again. For others, they keep that pace. But for you, none of that is an option. Unless you have an inconceivably cool spouse and you don't mind spending zero time with your kids. If that isn't in the deck, then I would caution you that you will probably become very frustrated at certain points. I know I did. You will want to jump from sun up to sun down and you won't be able to. The people you got licensed with will surpass you in skills, leaving you behind. You will have to accept that something someone else picks up in two or three months will take you the entire year. For people who have been jumping a lot already, it's easier to slow down. But the rush of being a new jumper is something entirely different. So in addition to thinking about risk and money, think about how your own head works. If you can deal with limitations and are ok with slow plodding progression, then by all means go for it. I got in 40 jumps this summer, and i'm fine with it. But if you are the type of person that gets into the groove of something and you can't put it down without sucking the life out of it, then it might be a frustrating experience. just my two cents. everyone is different and you have to make that decision for yourself. i would encourage you to keep investigating and if it were me i'd do it. but don't be under any illusions that it won't be hard. but then again, you are a parent with a toddler. this has nothing on surviving fatherhood.