Gravity Check!
Just hanging out with a few of my friends.
Gravity Check
In the sprit of trying to make up for my six month hiatus from blogging I’m bringing back my practice of posting photos from my iphoto library. Flying, skydiving, hunting, skiing, and anything else I can find to try and entertain you guys without all the work of actually writing. Bread and circuses you know.
Just another day at the office
Super Girl In A Tube
Sorry to interrupt my ramblings on the subject of survival but tis the season for thankfulness and I really can’t relate to you all how blessed I am this year until I bring you all up to speed on what’s been happening in the McCauley family for the last 6 months or so. This would’ve been easier if I hadn’t taken a 6 month break in posting huh?
Super girl left college in Minnesota and moved out west to go to a school that had a better program but seeing that the price for out of state tuition is a little expensive she’s decided to work for a year to establish residency. So why is this even remotely interesting? Because to support herself she got a job at the local wind tunnel. Now I know most of you have no clue what the hell that is so I’ll try and explain. A wind tunnel is where skydivers go to practice their free fall skills in a controlled environment without the worry of getting by a planet. The great thing about a wind tunnel is that you can fly for minutes at a time instead of seconds and that makes for faster learning and LOTS OF FUN! (sorry, but I get excited) And why, you still might ask, is this interesting? Because dear reader she get’s to fly in the wind tunnel for free and develop skills in mere months that normally would’ve taken years. And not only that, her family get’s to fly in the tunnel for free as well! (not that I care about such things)
Fast forward to early this month and Cathy and I make the big trip out west to see how our first born is handling living in the big city all alone. We did all the normal stuff parents do when visiting their daughter. Cathy spent three days cleaning SG’s apartment while I spent the same amount of time getting her Land Rover back into some sort of safe driving condition. Did you know that you have to take the grill off to change the turn signal bulbs? Yah, me neither. But the trip wasn’t just helping SG with the little things she’d neglected we did manage to make two trips to see where she works and try out the wind tunnel. I was up first and despite the fact that I’ve been jumping for 30 years and have over 15,000 skydives I still stunk. Indoor skydiving is WAY different than the real thing. In my defense the instructors said that I did better than most skydivers in the wind tunnel for the first time because it’s not the same thing as free fall. Still, I’d hoped I would’ve been a little better than that. But the big story of the day was the show my wife put on. Because despite owning a drop zone, and being married to one of the most amazing skydivers in the the world, (that would be me) she has never jumper out of a perfectly good airplane, or even one of ours. Cathy started out like any other first timer in the wind tunnel but she was doing so good the instructor let go of her and she killed it! No wobbling about, no smashing into the walls, nothing, rock steady. You typically do 2 minutes at a time and by the end of her second round she was doing complete turns and moving back and forth like an expert. SG and I were astonished. Oh and speaking of Super Girl, she’s amazing in the tunnel. I knew her skydiving and dance background would translate perfectly into flying in the tunnel but I had no idea just how good she’d gotten. And yes, this is hard to say, she is better than me in the tunnel, WAY better! Of course she works at the tunnel and gets to fly everyday, but still. Super proud of my girls I am.
Where’s Cathy? Someone has to take pictures.
If you don’t know what indoor skydiving looks like here’s a little taste. I’m almost as good as these guys. And by almost I mean not at all.
That’s My Boy
As you all know I’ve things slide for a few months so I’m going to try and catch up.this spring number one son’s skydiving career really took off. (sorry) He came out to the drop zone almost every day and quickly built up a reputation as a good skydiver and better yet a great kid to hang out with. After getting his A license his next challenge was to get his coach rating. A coach rating allows you to just mp with and teach students that have been cleared to jump solo by the free fall instructors but do not yet have their license. The problem was Connor needed 100 jumps to be eligible to take the rating course and by the time the annual course started he only had…well, let’s just say less. That’s where being the drop zone owner came in handy. I was sure that the boy would make a fantastic coach so I pulled the evaluator aside and told him to give my son the rating or I’d fire him. OK, I didn’t quite do that but I did get him in the course early and he rocked it. Connor spent the rest of the summer teaching students and jumping for fun. Well, it was mostly fun, except for his first malfunction.
It happened while I was on the same airplane taking a tandem student for his first jump. The free fall was over and the two of us were flying the parachute back to the landing area. I happened to look down and saw an all yellow reserve canopy so I knew someone had had a malfunction. I located the rest of the skydivers and came up on son short so I was pretty sure that it had been Connor who’d had the cutaway. I pointed the emergency canopy to my student and told him what it was. He was dually impressed, even more so when I told him that the jumper with the malfunction was my son. What had happened was when Connor opened his parachute it developed line twists, that’s what we call it when the lines get all twisted up, hence the name. Unable to kick himself out of the twists and spiraling towards the ground Connor had no choice but to pull his cut away handle and pull his reserve. Now Connor is a fast learner and has been around skydiving his whole life o he knew how hard it is to find a parachute after you cut it away, particularly if it landed in the corn, where his brand new canopy was heading, so he did what any heads up skydiver would do, he followed it down and landed in the corn next to it. At least that was his plan.
There are a few mistakes a skydiver can make when cutting away from a malfunction.
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Panic: or should I say. PANIC!!!!!
You should be opening your main parachute by at least 2500 feet( if you have a “D” or “Master” license) this should give you at least 10 seconds to deal with anything unusual or problematic. That is plenty of time to cutaway your malfunctioning main and open your reserver canopy with plenty of extra feet to spare. Remember any extra altitude below an open reserve is just wasted!
Connor was open under his spinning main canopy by 3000 feet. He tried to fix it for a few seconds (with a few choice words thrown in for good measure) before pulling his handles, just like I taught him.
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Pulling your reserve handle before cutting away the malfunctioning main:
If you do this you dump your reserve into the malfunction which is what we call BAD. Connor didn’t do this incredibly stupid thing so he got to move on to…
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Dropping your handles:
When you pull the cutaway and reserve handles they come completely free, and if you drop them gravity takes over and they have a tendency to go down. This can be a problem when you are still a few thousand feet in the air because they are impossible to find and cost about $175 or more. Each. I’m sorry to report that Connor dropped his reserve handle, but seeing I dropped my reserve handle on my first cutaway I’ll give him some slack. (still disappointed though)
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Not following or at least keeping an eye on your gear:
When you cutaway a malfunctioning parachute it also goes down and seeing it can cost up to $3000 you really want to keep track of where it lands. Ideally if you can you land next to it so as to avoid many hours searching the corn but failing that you should at least have an idea of where to look. Connor’s only cost $500 but he did a good job and circled it under his reserve planning to land right next to it, just like to pro’s do. But he screwed it up, which leads to the next thing you can do wrong when cutting away from a malfunction.
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Landing next to your gear but screwing it up:
Ideally you land next to your gear, gather it up, walk out to the road and wait for a ride. But that’s hard to do if you screw up the landing and hurt yourself. Landing next to your gear is a pretty bad ass thing to do. But if your skills at landing in some random location on the spur of the moment don’t match your balls things can get painful. Luckily all that Connor did was to get a little slow and stall his reserve canopy just before landing. Oh wait, that was the stupid part. The lucky part was that he did it over thick tall corn. Which leads me to the last mistake you can do when cutting away from a malfunction.
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Screwing up on video:
Now I’ll admit that the boy did a pretty good job on his first major malfunction. Hey, He jumped out of a plane at 14,000 feet, did a shit hot skydive, had a spinning malfunction, dealt with it, landed next to his gear, and walked out to the road with it with a smile on his face. Unfortunately we still get to critique his landing.
Pushing It
Some men are not truly happy unless they are constantly risking it all, going bigger, sacrificing safety for adventure and adrenalin. Pushing it. Now even though I happen to fall into this category I never graduated to the level of Dean Potter. Dean is one of those guys who had to go that extra step of doing crazy stuff without safety gear or backups. As you can see in the video he likes to do stuff like free climb without ropes, walk slack lines, (tight ropes) without a net or safety line and wingsuit in the mountains where none have dared to fly before. Of course you might say “But Kerry, you do dumb stuff all the time! You jump out of airplanes hundreds of times a year, you like to scud run at treetop level, and you fly single engine planes over the ocean for God’s sake!” While all that might be true I do try to always have a backup or way out when I do dumb stuff. When I jump I have a reserve chute, when I scud run I do it in a plane that I can fly IFR in if the clouds get too low, and when I ferry fly over the ocean I have a tiny rubber raft to climb into if I go down. OK, that last one is kind of stupid. Unfortunately if you push it long enough without a backup sooner or later you run out of luck and all the skill in the world can’t overcome bad luck. Last week Dean Potter ran out of luck, or to put it more correctly he pushed it once too far. Dean and a friend jumped off a 7,500 foot cliff in Yosemite in an attempt to fly their wingsuits into the valley below. But to do this they had to make it through a tricky narrow notch in the rock to make it to the open air below and beyond. Unfortunately they came up just a little short and didn’t make it. Sometimes that’s what happens when you push it.
More Oops
