Category: Skydiving

Gotta love the sunset load.

Labor Day weekend is a busy one at the drop zone.  Lots of meat bombs to drop over the unsuspecting Wisconsin countryside.  I hope you’re having as much fun as I am!

A young man from England with a month to kill before starting a new job came to us this summer and asked us if we could teach him how to skydive.  At the end of the month he had a skydiving license, 50 new friends and a lighter wallet.  While training with us he  put this video together of his time in Wisconsin.  Enjoy!

I’m sure many of you have been wondering what the heck is going on with Kerry?  No post in almost a month?  Is he dead?  In jail? Or just plain lazy?  Well, here’s the answer to those questions.  Not dead, my superior piloting and skydiving skills have saved me from many close calls over the last few weeks.  Not in jail, my lawyer says there is a good chance of getting off free.  Not lazy, OK maybe just a little, but yesterday was the first day in over a month that I didn’t fly or jump out of a plane and I have to tell you, I’m beat.  We haven’t had any rain here in Wisconsin for weeks, my poor runway, and that means no days off for Kerry, so just keep jumping and flying until we tell you to stop.  The sun is setting earlier every day now and I’m sometimes getting home before 10:00 pm so I’m hoping to have more time to post in the near future but in the mean time I’ll try and entertain you with whatever I can crank out whenever I can.

As promised.  I’m in the number 3 slot singing All Shook Up.  Apologies to any Elvis fans out there, I was just following orders.

I have a few side jobs that I do to make a little extra money now and then, start revolutions, overthrow governments, deflower virgins, rescue damsels, after putting them in distress of course and flying small planes around the world.  You know, the usual stuff.  One of my all time favorite jobs is being a member of the Flying Elvi skydiving demonstration team.  What the heck is a Flying Elvi you ask?  Why it’s a bunch of old guys dressed up as the King of Rock and Roll jumping out of an airplane, crashing into a parking lot at some random Indian casino and then putting on a super awesome lip-sync show.    That’s what a Flying Elvi is.  Stand by for the video.

 

 

 

 

Yours truly exiting the Caravan and making memory’s by filming a tandem student.  Oh and by the way, we were over a big hole in the clouds so so regulations were busted, I swear, really.  And you couldn’t prove it anyway.

When they started using turbine engines in skydiving aircraft the jumpers rejoiced.  No longer were they crammed into old DC-3’s and tiny Cessna’s and forced to endure a long slow clime to altitude.  Turbine aircraft like out Cessna Super Caravan can haul 19 jumpers up to 13,000 feet in under 12 minutes.  But turbine engines have their own set of problems, one of which being getting them started.  Turbine engines need a lot of battery power to get them started safely, if your battery is too low the turbine blades wont be turning fast enough when the fuel ignites in the combustion chamber and when that happens the temperature can climb so high that the pilot will be forced to shut down the engine to prevent trashing a VERY expensive engine.  This is know as a hot start.  To prevent this most skydiving operations use a start cart to help boost battery power during starts.  A start cart is usually a number of batteries hooked together in series to provide ample voltage/amperage? and re-charged after each use with a battery charger.   Using a start cart is a great way to prevent damage to the ships internal battery caused by multiple starts a day.  It is, on the other hand, a big pain in the ass when it breaks, especially when there’s no reason for it.  Every year the dropzone in Texas that we lease our plane from sends up a start cart and every year the cart they send up is a piece of crap.  And every year it breaks and every we overhaul it.  And every year the cycle repeats.  So the start cart broke this morning and our expert start cart technician, me, determined that the problem this time was the charger.  Maybe it would help if they didn’t use a charger built sometime in the 1950’s to power their Million and a half dollar aircraft.

Me setting up for a buzz job to celebrate my friend Kevin making his 151 one armed skydives for parkinson’s disease.  You can see the crowd gathered in front of the building to congratulate him and moon me as I fly past.  The GO PRO on the tail of the PAC-750 makes it look like I’m going to fly by at a safe altitude and as far as the FAA is concerned, I did.