jrutt

Now its time to make the move to a turbine aircraft when you can do a 14000K turn in under .3hrs, yahoo BSBD brother

AcesHigh

Yea, I'm doing .5 on the regular from 10,500. Might be flying the otter by summers end...Fingers crossed!

averettpilot

Don't forget a hook knife (I had 3 throughout the plane) for the genius who forgets to unbuckle the seat belt before jumping. The DZ I used to work for had a tandem hanging underneath the plane for 6 minutes cause the pilot didn't have the presence of mind to cut him loose. Luckily the tandem instructor was able to shake loose eventually (wasn't actually buckled but just hung up on the buckle somehow). Got on the ground with a shoulder out socket and burst blood vessels in his eyes and nose from hanging upside down under the plane. Found out the pilot was contemplating landing in a lake apparently thinking the water would be softer for him underneath.

Anyway, try to think through as many scenarios as you can possibly think of and have some idea of what you'll do. Flying jumpers is not a normal operation and lots of things can happen that they don't write in the books. Use these forums and diverdriver.com to gain info on this stuff so you can draw on others experiences. Good luck, have fun, and follow regs and you should be all good.

Oh, and DON'T drop them through clouds even if it is "industrial haze." You don't know who is cruising around underneath.

Have fun!

BeardedFlyer

I have a question! I have a friend that was flying jumpers on a broken cloud sort of day. Just some puffy cumulus hanging around the area. So my buddy is flying this tandem jumper with a video diver... my buddy is maneuvering around at 10.5 over the airport trying to get a good spot but there are some clouds just ahead; he thinks he can open door, get the jumpers out and dive out and away before getting to the cloud so he goes for it, but the jumpers take a little longer than they should have to jump out so he ends up punching right into the cloud while they are all hanging outside on the strut. So by the time they jump it is actually solid IMC. The problem is the video; the DZ went ahead and left that part right in the video for him to take home and show his friends and anyone else who might happen to see it.

Should my friend be worried about the possibility of this coming back to bite him in some way?

Wingtips

haha you can find 5000 videos of stuff like this on youtube, so doubt it. You did not fly into a 747 full of people so life goes on kid.

TheSultanofScud

What he said.

Unfortunately, a certain amount of marginal weather is the reality in skydiving. You ultimately have to decide what you are comfortable with. That being said, I wouldn't be too concerned with such videos. As Wingtips stated: there are already an endless amount of questionable loads captured on video.

I look back at my flying for jumpers and remember a number of loads that I wish I had gone ahead and flown, but also a small number of flights that I wish I could have back. Such is the nature of the beast. The best you can do is try to be safe and consistent in your decision making.

I generally judged what I was comfortable with by asking two questions:

1) Is there more open sky than cloud cover, or vice versa?

2) Is the layer broken enough that a jumper of acceptable skill should be able to determine their orientation to the dropzone both at exit and at the time that they deploy their canopy?

If you can satisfy yourself when answering these questions, then I think you have a reasonable means of determining whether a load can really go. Jumpers will hit clouds here and there. When you fly a jump run that can sometimes stretch over two miles, you will find jumpers hitting the fuzz on days with less than 1/4 coverage. It's really just a fact of life in this kind of flying. I always thought that if a fed took issue with a load I flew after satisfying the above two questions, then I'm in the wrong business and will happily leave in such a case. You flat out cannot expect to fly jumpers and be 100% legal every time you touch the plane. You will sit on the ground almost all over the country if that is your MO. There is no all-or-nothing legality—there is reasonable and unreasonable when it comes to clouds.

To me, a jumper hitting a cloud on a partly-cloudy day is the cost of doing business. This occurs on many a good weather day. My goal is to give jumpers a good spot, a stable exit, and a column of air that I know to be free of other traffic. It is counterproductive to complicate that process in the attempt to miss a single cloud the size of a McDonalds.

On the other hand: Jumpers falling through three thousand feet of overcast clouds and deploying their canopies in IMC is not what I call reasonable in light of existing policies. There are busy jump pilots that are just as happy to fly such loads and would disagree with me here. I'm not calling them out, I just avoid flying such loads whenever I can help it.

METARs, TAFs, and annecdotal reports don't necessarily reflect what is actually going on at your dropzone, but beware the dreaded sucker-hole. It is quite lame to take off in what seemed—for the last half hour—to be an immobile patch of blue, only to find yourself circling over a thick, solid layer in a 182 with about as much instrumentation as a go cart.

Bottom line: I'm sure you could get violated by the video you mention if someone really, really wanted to hang you out to dry. But it's just unlikely. Their is a certain amount of regulatory risk in this flying that is out of your hands, so the most you can do is try to be safe and consistent.

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