Easter

It's the long easter weekend, and I have only today that I can jump. And I have to be at a family dinner by 1 PM, so without further ado: let's jump!

First is Inge, the girl from last week, for her level 2 jump. I team up with Sus. I exit from the inside, and at the exact moment that I give the "OK" on her check-in, Birky taps me on the shoulder (he is also an AFF instructor, but for this jump he is the camera flyer for the tandem that will follow on us). I look at him, and he starts shouting and gesturing at me, but whatever it is, it is too late. We are gone. It is not a good feeling, exiting and at the same time questioning yourself, worrying what might have been so important as to disturb a student exit. (Turns out he wanted to tell me that they were going for a second run, and maybe we wanted to go on that run rather than now - please don't disturb me with stuff like that on exit, Sus already checked the spot before climbing out)

She makes a good exit. A bit too horizontal for the relative wind, but far better than average on a second jump. It is very cold, -25° C at exit altitude, and the air is very humid. The result is that during our jump, I can see a thin layer of ice forming on her chin and nose. But that apparently doesn't distract her. She is very aware, and makes a really good jump.

On the ride up, I checked her altimeter at pull altitude (5500 ft) and it was some 500 feet off. You can clearly see Sus checking his alti and hers when she doesn't lock on at 6000, and me looking at her alti instead of my own, to give her the opportunity to pull (of course I have an audible).



There is still time for a quick solo jump after this one. Exit on my back. Up to sit. back to backflying. A few 360° on my back (confusing!! everything is the wrong way round). Sit. Push to stand-up. F**k, time is up. I love it!

First Jump Course

Since I've been an instructor, I have always started the new season by giving a FJC. Same this year, today. I am at the DZ at 8.30 (yeah, I know, way too early on a Saturday morning), and by 9 o'clock, 6 out of the 7 announced students show up. Because there is still some construction work going on in our hangar, we still have no classroom and no videoroom for the moment, but I can use some of the military facilities next door. (And in a couple of weeks, we will have a beautiful all new and shiny bar :-))

It's a good group to teach. They are all fireman or soldiers, so they all have a basic physical ability, and only one of them never jumped before. All the others have at least a tandem jump and a few static lines. Teaching goes OK, I'm not too rusty on the material, although I completely forget to explain field packing. Instead of tackling it while we are talking about the gear, while the gear is lying in front of us, I have to come back on it at the end of the course, when I am explaining that the jump ends when they are back, not when they touch the ground. Around 3.30 h, we are through, and we can start with the fun bit of the day.

For the jumps I team up with Yves. First to jump is Inge. She is in the military, she just came back from her tour in Afghanistan. She did patrols there that included helicopter flying and she got sick a few times, and now her main concern seems to be that she is afraid of being sick again in the ride up. She is composed and makes a very good jump. Some asymmetry in the legs make for a slow turn during most of the jump, but the important stuff is all there. Yves and I land out (my mistake, I should have called for a second run) but she makes it back easily, flies a clean circuit and makes a good landing.

Next is one of the firemen. He is in his thirties, and I estimate him at some 20 or 25 kilos heavier than me. So it is full weight belt for me, but we have fun. He is good in the air, very aware, obviously enjoying himself tremendously. When Yves signals him to arch harder, he really gives it a go. Our average speed is over 130 mph. We could have released him without any problems. He also flies his canopy very cleanly, and on landing, he makes a beautiful PLF. He announced before the jump that he was going to do it like this, rather than trying a stand-up landing.

Three of the other students made their jumps with other instructors in the meantime, (2 good, 1 nobody-home) but for the last guy, it's too late. Sunset, so no jump for him today. Pity. For him of course, but I also prefer finishing a course on the day. Anyway, how about a beer?

8 and 12

For the last few weeks, we have been using one plane for two dropzones. Since it is slow season, that's normally not a problem since the two fields are only some 40 km apart. So it is an alternating routine: climb, jump and then the plane descends to the other DZ. Normally, we shouldn't loose too much time like this. But. Problem today is that on the other DZ, there is a 16-way training going on. In short, I 've been in all the loads on our DZ (all whole four of them :-( ) and I spent way too much time waiting at the boarding area (cold, wind). But hey, 4 jumps is 4 jumps, right?

First jump (after more than an hour of waiting in the cold) is an 8-way. For the exit, I am the middle diver. The next diver, to my right, gives me a pin check on exit. But that's not why we funnel it: one of the floaters goes belly up, so... Rest of the jump is OK. Under canopy, there is more wind then we expected. A bumpy ride, but a nice one!

While the rest of our group wait for each other and for a few newcomers, I quickly throw in another jump. Exit in sit, backfly, push to sit again, f**k why do I fall over when I look at my alti? Using my arms too much, not flying with my legs... bwaah :-)

We are 12 now for the next jump. For the exit, I am front floater, and silly as it my sound, that's my favourite position for this kind of dive. I love the wind, I love the power you need to make a good exit from that position. It is a good dive, but no thanks to me. On the third point I take a wrong grip, and for the rest of the jump I don't recover. Each transition, I have to wait and look what the others are doing, before I know what I have to do: it is one big brainlock... (and a few people noticed: beers are in order :-))

Nice 8-way to end the day. Our standard exit works this time. I am in the same position, with someone else diving to my right. He is also too early in the exit, but I manage to fly through the pin check. It's a kind of a boogie-jump. After the exit we make a star, that we then break into two lines of 4. Each line curls up and makes a 180°, and back to the same star. Next is open accordion, followed by closed accordion, and back to one. One of the jumpers is a young hotshot: hours of tunnel time, completely focused on 4-way. He has a wrong grip on exit, brainlocks each time we do the star-star thing (he releases his grip), and he doesn't build the closed acc from the inside, but just goes for his grips. But he is much quicker and more accurate then I am, that's for sure :-).

First round is on me. After that... Well, who cares anyway!

No pull

Only one day of jumping this WE, and lots of things to do before I can go to the DZ. So I get up at 6.30 and I am in Schaffen around 11 am. Weather is cloudy (a thin cloud layer between 3000 and 4000 ft, so no problem there). We are just having a completely crazy winter. It is only February after all!

I start off with another FF jump. I am still not quiet sure when you stop funnelling and start freeflying, but I am definitely getting there. When I am have difficulties sitting, I push into a stand-up. I find it easier to just cut through the air, rather than trying to handle all this air around me and trying to keep track of all my limbs and what they are doing. I often say to my AFF students that I need more "je m'en foutisme" in there jumps. Time to apply one of my own rules, it seems!

Next jump is awkward. A guy with 51 jumps. It took him over 30 jumps and 45 minutes of tunnel time to complete his AFF, so I guess it is safe to say that he's not a natural. But he has the spirit (and the money), that's for sure. Last WE, he went unstable at pull time and that was it. He didn't do anything any more. He pulled no handles. He landed under his reserve after an AAD fire. We talked to him, gave him homework to think about. Stuff like "Can you handle a life expectancy of 4.5 seconds?" (by the way, I love the "point five" bit here. It really contributes to the dramatic affect of the phrase) And now (contrary to what we were expecting) he is back. We left him the option and he took it. There's his determination again. First jump he has to do is an AFF 4, with some additional focus on altitude awareness. During the jump he has to signal me at 11, at 9 and at 7 kft. Wave off and pull is at 5. If he misses one of those by more than 500 feet, this was his last jump at our club.

First I give him the full briefing on altitude awareness and pull priorities. I start by explaining that if he wasn't altitude aware, he is unfit for jumping, and if he was altitude aware and didn't pull, he is crazy and unfit for jumping. I think he got my point :-) Next, when I take him through a refresh of the first jump course, he shows me how he will first open his reserve before releasing his main. He insists this is how he was taught. I don't believe him, but the net result is that the refresh takes a lot more time than I originally planned. When we finally go up, the jump is not bad. He does what is asked of him. But it is a bit of stress for a jumpmaster, when you know that if you fuck up, your student has not-pulled before...

When you look at the video, you can clearly see how he got unstable at pull-time on the previous jump. During his practice pull, as well as with the real pull, he stretches his legs, ups his ass, brings down his head, and his left arm, instead of being over his head, is somewhere under his chin.



Next jump is great. I exit on my back, I feel the speed building up, push myself up into a sit, and for the remainder of the jump, I push myself into a stand-up, back to sit, back to standup, etcetera. Waaahooo!!! My first FF jump where it felt like I controlled it all the way!

Fourth jump is with the no-pull-guy again. This time the jump is about his body position at pull time (and about altitude awareness of course). Just practice pulls, one after the other, throughout the jump. I make a face at him immediately after the exit, and he reacts to it by sticking out his tongue. It is me signalling that I like jumping with him, but at the same time it is a test to check how composed a student is during exit. He passes this test. And his body position is better than the previous jump. He will always be a higher risk jumper, just because of his lack of talent, but my advice to the people who make the decisions is to let him jump again. I sincerely hope I'll never have to regret this decision.




Sunset load to end the day. A simple FF 2-way. Ending the day with a swoop straight into the setting sun. Why, oh why do I love skydiving so much? (well, there is of course the beer afterwards, but that's not the whole story...)

4 more jumps

Not much time to blog. 4 jumps today: 1 FS, a 6 or 7 way, I can't remember, 2 tries at sitting and a tracking jump with two former students of mine.

4-way

It's 4-way time again today. This is good, because I love it, and this is bad because as a belly flyer team, you have to sit in the back of the plane, and it is cold today. -15° at 13.000 ft. Minus windchill, brrrr. There are few skydivers. It is almost eleven o'clock before we have enough people to fill the plane.

First jump we go for a Unipod exit, followed by stairstep diamond, murphy flake, yuan and meeker. Anybody seeing a pattern here? Yeah, right, that's just A, B, C, D and E. Not the most imaginative briefing, but it makes for a nice jump. We start off by funnelling the exit. Sus (centerfloat) and I (backfloat) are on our backs immediately, and we are all tumbling happily through the sky for a few seconds. Once we recover, it is indeed a nice jump. For the yuan - meeker transition Door is the only one who moves, but he turns too much on his chest, rather than around his knee, so while I should just have to flash and retake the same grip, it always opens up.

We decide to do the same jump again. We ask a proper 4-way team how to do this unipod exit, we do a quick re-brief of the transitions, and up we go. This time the jump is really good. The exit works, the jump is clean and quick. As soon as we are back on the ground, we discuss the possibility of ending on a high and starting on the beer, but since it is only 12 o'clock, that would be an even more high-risk activity than skydiving itself, so we just manifest for the next load.

Next is Open accordion, cataccord, bow, donut, hook. You guessed it: that's F, G, H, J, K! Nice jump for Jean, our front diver: his biggest move of the dive (actually his only move) is the few inches he has to come forwards from the open accordion to the compressed accordion. Apparently we are having difficulties with our exits today. Even the (very easy) open acc almost goes wrong. It takes two or three seconds before we can start working, but from there on it is OK. Somewhere in the third round, Jean looses track of the jump. He stops moving at all, and just takes up grips when they are thrown at him :-). Good enough!

We decide not to do this one again, since apart from the exit there were no big issues to correct (well, there is Jean's over-20-seconds-brainlock, but he's beyond hope anyway). Next, we don't go for L, M, N, O, P. We want a nice little block in our jump, so we decide on a sidebody exit, phalanx, cat+accordion - cat+accordion, star. On exit we are in the door for way too long, and when we finally jump, I still don't have any grips at all. You gotta ask Door (inside centre) how he manages to find a way to position himself so that I can not reach either his arm or his leg grip. But the exit is good: I just pick up two grips instead of one :-) The jump is not so good. Randoms are OK, but instead of just turning to do the block, we fly circles around each other. Shame on us!

I have too leave earlier than normal, so this is all we have time for. We decide to start of our next session with a repeat of this last jump and we assign Door to remember this, which means chances are slim...

Playtime

A lazy day. It's almost noon when I arrive at the DZ. The weather is still unbelievably beautiful, sunny and warm. Yesterday was the hottest Feb 9 since they (whoever they are) started measuring those things.

I join a group of bellyfliers for a 6-way. I am front float and i totally f**k up my exit. The rest of the jump is also not good (in Luk's words: "this was definitely a sub-optimal performance"), but that's no more because of me: we all seem to have an off day (or an off jump at least). There's absolutely no wind, so landing is fun!

Next I make a complete-fun-jump: I exit tracking on my back, wobble a bit, make speed, salto-ing to normal track, going steeper and steeper to an almost vertical dive, even steeper, falling over and coming out of this in a back-track once again, and so on. Drop was much too far: I exited last, 1.6 mile past the DZ centre point, and I did my tracking perpendicular on the jumprun. I open a bit higher, I am under canopy at 4kft. I love floating around up there.

Third jump today is a sit. I can't help feeling a bit ridiculous. Everytime I check altitude, I turn at least 180° :-))

There's time for one more jump. Two guys who are training to become AFF instructors, ask me to film their practice jump. So that's my first "real" camera jump: I mean where I am filming other people, rather than just filming the jump I am doing. My exit works out fine: my timing and position are OK (well of course it could be better, but I have seen far worse than this my first attempt). And for the jump, well, what can I say... They handle the exit very well. The guy in black who comes from inside, I have more than a few jumps with. I know he's good, much better at FS4 than I am, and still... The fake student is not doing very much, but a bit of stress, an unusual situation, and in a few seconds the jump goes from OK to complete mess. That's what training jumps are for, and they sure learned a lot from this. They both gave permission to show the video, so here it is:



We all deserve beer after this :-)