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Skydiving

Discussion in 'General' started by Norton 357, Jan 16, 2022.

  1. CharlieY

    CharlieY Well-Known Member

    Bravo James!....looks like you are having a good time. You will have to tell me about it.

    Geesh, you read some of the BS people post here, and I guess never doing ANY of it is better than a tandem????? :crackup: WTF are some people thinking?

    I'd bet some of the naysayers are "Trackday Guys".:)

    Anyhow, way to go man!:beer:
     
    jrsamples likes this.
  2. 27

    27 Well-Known Member

    noob
     
    ChemGuy likes this.
  3. Norton 357

    Norton 357 Well-Known Member

    Thanks CharlieY. We will talk about it over a beer or two.
    I guess you are a pussy if you don't jump out of a plane for the first time solo. I mean what could happen? Right. And by that rationalization, your first time on a racetrack should be on a Moto GP bike, or you are a big puss. :beer:
     
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  4. CharlieY

    CharlieY Well-Known Member

    Exactly!!!:crackup:
     
    Norton 357 likes this.
  5. 27

    27 Well-Known Member

    I meant...

    noob:D


    So the climbing thread brought all of the real climbers out...

    you must be our resident authority on skydiving! Cool.

    so free fall and tumbling in the air and all the point break stuff... do you use flight suits? Is it just a way to cut through the air during your fall like a kid with our hand out the car window?

    all the flight suit jumps hve close proximity routes to be exciting it seems and terminal velocity of the fall actually slowed by the direction change by the suits.

    I think the flight suits are cool, but don’t see the risk/reward for close proximity as we have motorcycles for that and the time and money spent to get to that point are substantial it seems.

    jokes aside, please educate us, or at least me on your chosen sport of expertise.

    thanks
     
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  6. ChemGuy

    ChemGuy Harden The F%@# Up!

    How we did it in the old days....round chutes...very little control. Now they use these square commie lookin' things with toggles and shit. damn millenials. :D
    [​IMG]

    [​IMG]

    [​IMG]

    [​IMG]
     
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  7. Rehh

    Rehh Well-Known Member

    Lol....I fully expected the backlash. My comment was towards the guy I quoted who said tandem is boring or dull.

    Yes my first jump was by myself with no instructor strapped to me as was also the case for all my students. SL and AFF you jump with your own rig and land by yourself from the very first jump.

    Tandem is good for some people to try, but it's just going for a ride on the slowest canopy made with a guy strapped to your back controlling everything. So my analogies are correct.
     
    Triple X likes this.
  8. Rehh

    Rehh Well-Known Member

    Running rails on a C130 Hercules.....nice!

    Tailgates are nice, like the Cadillac of jumpers but I also enjoyed climbing out on top the fuselage of a Beech 18.
     

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  9. ChemGuy

    ChemGuy Harden The F%@# Up!

    Nice.

    I did get a couple CH47 jumps. You go fof the ramp on those. For us they quit doing C130 ramp jumps before I got in. My last jump the BN jump guy got me onto a jump with the green beenies. They were practicing out of a C47...a real DC3/C47 just like WWII. So I have that in my jump log. It was awesome. You went so close to the tail you could count the rivets in the horizontal stabilizer...:eek:
     
    Rehh likes this.
  10. 27

    27 Well-Known Member

    well that was no fun! I called you a noob! :Poke:

    I do appreciate proper first hand knowledge so glad you can take a joke. Please continue.

    In our climbing thread I was confused about the rigs that Dean Potter and Steph Davis used/use for freebasing...

    Are there not any rigs used for emergency falls when free soloing? In Freesolo it mentions low altitude chutes opening and saving fallen climbers...

    I thought there were smaller less cumbersome rigs designed for that... others informed me that they were full on base rigs.

    you mentioned testing rigs and I’ve spent time in the New and Gauley rivers and know exactly where you were BASE jumping from. Very cool, sucks about your medical, hopefully you still have a good quality of life.
     
  11. Rehh

    Rehh Well-Known Member

    I am a noob....100%, to tracks, but not a squid...haha.

    Got my first motorcycle at 8yrs old, a Honda trail 50 and my first street bike at 15 a Honda Rebel 250. Other than running my Camaro at Moroso Motorsports Park my first trackday was just 6 months ago so yes very much a noob.
    I'm 52 with lots of injuries, broken bones and diagnosed with a devastating disease so now I'm just trying to have a little more fun in life with adrenaline sports while I still can as a last hoorah.
     
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  12. Rehh

    Rehh Well-Known Member

    Oh sorry didn't answer. Rigs can have 1,2 and even 3 chutes. Base rigs and safety rigs generally only have 1 canopy for the simple reason that in most cases you only have time for 1 deployment and not enough time to cut away your main and deploy a reserve. All skydive rigs have 2 canopies a main and reserve. Canopy testing rigs can have 3, the main and 2 reserves. The reason for that is because test canopies are often cut away because they're unsafe or too unstable to attempt a landing so you know your gonna land under your 1st reserve, the 2nd reserve is a backup to the 1st if that makes sense.
     
    27 likes this.
  13. 27

    27 Well-Known Member

    well, we’re here to help with all motorsports fixes. Your start seems similar to most.... nice of your gf to loan you her rebel too... j/k you know you need a turbo busa for a first street bike...

    what is your track bike now? You have all the good safety gear? Any Q’s?

    Not to pry but what would keep you from skydiving but make it ok to track ride? Most bikes go faster than terminal velocity of a free falling man so... and it’s only you on a jump but many others depending on you not to hurt them on the track.
     
  14. 27

    27 Well-Known Member

    thanks!! That’s the info we need... now about the FreeBasing rigs... you surely know who Dean Potter “the wizard” was and his ex Steph Davis still jumps down after ascents. She just posted some Moab ones the other day... are those rigs standard base rigs? Do any of the companies make smaller ones? Are the ones used with wing suits smaller? Like JeB Corliss uses?

    Our convo was mainly about rigs used for emergencies like a fall from a granite wall... they mention really low deployments... any knowledge on that?
     
  15. Rehh

    Rehh Well-Known Member

    I did some world record and state record attempts out of DC3's retro fitted with turbo props so we could go over 20,000ft breathing oxygen.

    Also jumped out of the Mr Douglas DC3 with the original radials, that was fun. The swoop line would run all the way back to the pilot.

    Here a pic. You had to be good to go out last!!
     

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  16. Rehh

    Rehh Well-Known Member

    Yeah when you get more technical the rig which is what holds the parachutes is different in some ways between skydiving, base jumping and emergency like what pilots use. Some base rigs and emergency rigs have no bag and line containment systems like skydive rigs. Also the pilot-chute which pulls out the main chutes are much bigger in base rigs because they deploy at sub-terminal velocity which is well below the average 120mph of skydivers. Tandems use a pilot chute which in this case they call a Drouge because it is used to slow down the terminal velocity of the tandem pair. Without the drouge tandem parachutes often "explode" or tear apart upon opening because the deployment was initiated at too high a velocity. This can happen to solo skydivers as well who try to deploy from a head down dive. FYI you can achieve speeds up to 300mph in a head down dive but if you deploy a chute at that speed you could literally break your neck from the G force on opening as well as destroy your canopy and even the rig.

    There is also things like an RSL reserve static line which is tethered to your main canopy risers so that in the event of a cut away it will automatically deploy the reserve.

    There are also computer controlled devices called AAD's automatic activation devices that are programmable and will open your reserve automatically if it senses you are going too fast at a critical altitude, usually set to about 750ft. This would be comparable to a tech air race vest in that it uses an explosive charge to deploy the reserve
     
    Last edited: Jan 17, 2022
    27 likes this.
  17. motion

    motion Nihilistic Member

    About 15 years ago I was doing a head down at Perris... going for high speed. Lost track of my altitude for a few seconds and deployed before hugging the ball to bleed speed. I had a zero P canopy. It was notorious for hard openings under normal circumstances, so this one was brutal. I was purple from my knees to my arm pits for a couple months.
     
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  18. Mongo

    Mongo Administrator

    Well I'm way the hell out of that one :crackup:
     
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  19. Rehh

    Rehh Well-Known Member

    And I want to say this to which some of you can relate I'm sure.

    At a recent track day I asked a coach how much money he made doing this, he laughed and said nothing, he only gets track time. That's kinda what happened in skydiving. Most DZ's or drop zones used to be run as clubs not as a business. Instructors would run their own concession and pay little or nothing to the club to operate and would collect all the money they took in. Well that all changed to where DZ's where paying the instructors less and less and less over time. Most all the good instructors I knew all quit because of this. What was left was guys who were skydive bums who live at the DZ out of vans and just skydive to make enough money to perpetuate their skydiving and that is all they did 24/7. Similar to surf bums or ski bums. Often times these are foreigners who hardly speak English, young guys and uneducated with no other job.

    So today Most DZs are nothing like the old days, now they are just whats called "tandem factories" where their main concern is just pump as many tandems thru the system as they can to make money.
     
    Last edited: Jan 17, 2022
    jrsamples likes this.
  20. 27

    27 Well-Known Member

    Very cool! Great info! Thank you so very much for sharing your knowledge. So I wonder how many climbers there are in the world... developing an automated safety chute that deploys like an air bag suit would be fairly simple with the current available tech. Wonder if the market would support the expenditure.
     

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