Basejumper.com - archive

Hey all, I was going to ask Tom but i hate to keep bothering him so i put this out to all of you. i enjoy reading the posts in this forum the most. I have never based jumped but have a real desire to get into it. My only desire though would be to birdman off somewhere in Norway or Switerland. Buildings and bridges would be ok but watching you guys fly out from a cliiff and fly all the way to town just is freakin cool. I could do the learning curve ..ie tracking pants and air time, jumps . I figure i would do at least 200 birdman jumps this year before i get to the point of planing to base.i guess what i am getting at is i am a little confused. i see in the fatality list experienced base jumpers going into the wall. I saw that base fatality # 63 did everything right but still went in. Maybe someone can shed some light on this for me. Even reading through the fatality list i still desire the same as if i didnt read but am just absorbing as much information as possible. I am into skysurfing and tracking so i am very familiar with murphy...

Are you asking why it appears BASE jumps kill people sometimes?

No, I am curious about the "everything goes wrong" and why.... There is always a reason...Ok for instance...not to offend anyone but how hard is it to track away from the wall??

There are several people on the list who did everything right.

Have you seen Iiro's movie? In it, he passes along some wisdom that I think he attributes to Dwain (I originally heard it from Slim, but I'm sure it's been going around for a while).


I guess the bottom line is that there will always be some random, uncontrolled factors in BASE. You can reduce them, but so far, it's not looking like you can eliminate them.

It usually would not be hard to track away from a wall or antenna... but "what if" you had an unstable exit?

I am sure most thought it was easy to track away from a wall.. until the S^%$ hit the fan.

I disagree. I've seen bad shit just happen. The systems we use are just so complex and chaotic that we just can't control everything.

In regards to #63, I do wonder if a pendulator would have helped. So, perhaps that's another bit of random we're trying to work out of the game.

when are you, or are you, going to post plans for "the pendulator "

From an earlier post on blinc:

I used something very similar to a pendulator when I was doing trampoline training at a gymnastics club a few years back. We called it the bungy-support system. I highly recommmend going to your local gymnastics or circus-training facility, and asking them about it.

There are differences, because trampoline guys go mostly straight up and down, whereas the basejumpers want to move forward as well. However, even in gymnastics we have used them to jump from an obstacle on one side of the trampoline, to the middle of the trampoline, to an obstacle on the other side, so they can easily be used for the same purpose.

The pendulators I've hung in on the trampoline had ball-joints at the hips, so you can do front and backloops. Some more advanced bungies even have a hip-ring with bearings in it, so you can do twists in your aerials. I've never been in one of those.

Here's more information: http://www.coachesinfo.com/category/gymnastics/71/

Cheers,

Jaap

You have a local circus training facility? That's just too funny.

So do you.

Hey Tom, Glad you joined in. I like your first reply...i was always on that plane of two buckets.. From surfiing to the military...i have lived my life wiith two buckets....

The systems we use are just so complex and chaotic ...

are you talking about gear? Is the top gear not always the best choice...?

Oh, you bastard....






edit: you know, after looking at that site, I'm probably going to give them a call.

if you dont mind me asking....what was she doing wrong if she was doing everything right? of all the base list fatalities...this one gives me a case of the wonders..

The right gear for the specific jump that matches your experience level is the right gear.

BASE jumping doesn't really have too many gear choices yet, but I imagine someday you will be able to get gear that is too advanced for your skillset if you're a beginner. I know that is already true in skydiving.

"what if" you had an unstable exit....can you explain this....if you are diving out how do you become unstable? iis it not being able to relax or something else....I ask as a kiid i use to high dive and never had a problem knowing direction or where i was going...

BASE exit points are not always dry and stable. In BASE jumping you will encounter ice, snow, sand, rocks, funky handrails, chain link fences, police, wind, rain, ...etc. All of these can halp ensure your exit is less than stable.

Beginners tend to go head low and can't recover in time to survive. Some sites will kill you if you go head low, even if you're not a beginner.

I had heard that in high diving, sooner or later everyone hits the platform at least once, and then they have to get over it and get on with things and then it's business as usual.

Did that ever happen to you, or to a high diver you knew? If so, why?

I think of exits like throwing a ball. With practice you can get good at throwing it where you want. But sometimes, something happens and the ball slips or sticks and it flings in the wrong direction. I suppose the same thing could happen on an exit - loose rock (that maybe looked really solid before) or distracting bird or noise or trivial wind gust or view (in the "Down and Out" post the book quotes Jean Boenish looking down too long / at the wrong time and almost getting into trouble for it).

hey dexter, thanks for the information and your time.. another question...what is the track to feet achieved per secound....if you have perfect track and 7 secounds of good track, what distance are you from the wall? I see that experianced base jumper are hiitting the wall with off heading openings. But if they where a good distance away from the wall you would have more time to react. I rember thiis tower as a kid we use to jump off in a small resevoir that was about 50 ft. I would always do a gainer and would always move away from the tower...are you saying when you gaiin more speed you can back slide to the wall? and if you could explain the head down thing....thanks

No , i never hit the boardor the tower...but that was always on my mind no matter how good i got. Its like when i skysurf.."i am not very good" but always thinking everything is going to go wrong ...

hey, there is a base jump almost gone wrong comming up in a fw minutes on national geographic channel 276 on direct TV

it is called great trango tower in Pakistan.... 10 secounds to impact...Nick and another guy...

Tracking doesn't start immediately after exit. It takes a bit of time to get airspeed to get lift/force, and then it takes a while for the lift/force to accelerate your heavy butt, and then it takes a while for the increasing velocity of your butt to translate into distance.

The canopy has a couple hundred square feet of nylon so it does a much better job of flying in just a few seconds time than a human can. (Plus it gets the unfair advantage of starting with as much or more airspeed than it needs to fly optimally.) Unfortunately if the human was trying to fly his body away from the rock, and the canopy decides to go the other way on opening and fly toward the rock, the canopy can probably get back faster.

Now, I have no BASE jumps and I don't expect to soon. But that's not because I don't like BASE, it's because I know I'm not good enough.

And that's more knowledge about BASE than I used to have.

Hello Vandev,

The biggest component that your missing about the "what if you have a bad exit" is that you are dealing with dead air when you exit. This means you need to nail your exit or you're along for one hell of a ride... Meaning that you don’t have relative air to fix the exit until you’re at least 4-5 seconds into the jump...

Many of us have messed up exits... Even exits that are relatively simple. The same exit point is never the same, nor are the jumping conditions that surround it. This includes your physical and mental state…

I like FrogNog's throwing a ball example... It hits the nail on the head...

I have had one building strike as a result to slipping at exit point. The exit point was wet and I lost my footing when I launched. That slip had me doing aerials in a blinc of an eye, @ sub 250ft... So I pitched and hit the 5th floor right after line stretch. Ended up with a severely bruised spine, pulled and bruised muscles, and banged up internal organs... It took the hospital two days to stabilize the internal bang job I did. And it took months for the pain to go away…

Anyway, the moral of the story is that you’re not simply pushing away from the cliff. You are doing your best to exit at a 45 degree angle to prevent a head-down or head-high exit. And again, the fact that you don’t have relative air to help you out when you exit, you’ve got what you’ve got once you have exited…

Does that all make sense???

...

Michael

thanks bro...ill take that advise...i am also not good enough to base either..thats why i am asking all the questions.... I just watched a base jump on tv that almost went wrong. It was in pakistan an both guys tumbled on ther backs and rolled over and over but never moved back to the wall.. They wher close but never went back....This is why by seeing this and reading about experianced jumpers hitting the wall i ask the questions...

Hey Michael, yes it makes perfect sense...thanks for the relpy...yes i rember doing a heli jump and it took a few secounds to get the move on but i still felt in control to a very good degree until that point i felt i had lateral movement...

 

reply]

I had not heard that one before. I like it

Getting the launch right is of prime importance in my jumping. How the kinetic energy of the launch plays out and the affect that the inertia of my arm and leg movements have on the end resulting body position is a subject of never-ending thought and rehearsal for me.

As I was discussing with Jaap recently, I call this "inertial interplay".

Look at the BASE fatalities for a moment:

# 11 Launched head-down / fouled with lines
# 12 Launched head-down/cliff strike on opening
# 27 Launched head-down/cliff strike on opening
# 37 Unstable launch/lost height awareness/impact
# 38 Unstable launch/lost height awareness/impact
# 42 Over-rotated launch/ impact ledge
# 44 Unstable launch/cliff strike on opening
# 47 Over-rotated launch/ impact cliff
# 56 Slipped on exit/cliff strike on opening
# 60 Over-rotated launch/ impact cliff
# 63 Unstable launch/impact cliff
# 64 Launched head-down/cliff strike on opening
# 67 Unstable launch/impact cliff
# 84 Over-rotated launch/ impact ledge

16% of BASE fatalities due to poor launch. Just an observation.

g.

You'll have a hard time convincing me that most BASE jumpers can't control whether they walk away from a jump or not when it's not right.

Remember--It's always YOUR choice to leave an exit point. Which direction you leave is also up to you. There is usually a short way to the bar and a longer way to the bar. Pity to go in strictly because you were too lazy to hike down in the wrong conditions and chose to jump instead, wouldn't it?

I'm of the opinion that if you EVER decide to walk down, you've made the right choice.

.02
pope

Agree, there is no such thing as a chicken in BASE. I think it takes more to climb or hike, or ride an elevtor down.

We're using big sheets of nylon, stitched together in specific patterns and thrown out into various speeds of wind. While we can predict what is likely to happen when that nylon hits the airflow, there is no way we can be certain that it will happen exactly as we think, every time. Even in a laboratory, I doubt we could create exactly identical openings every time. In the real world, where wind, temperature, body position, etc, etc, etc, are different (even if ever so slightly) every time?

I should start by agreeing that knowing when and how to walk down is one of the most important skills in BASE. But maybe we need a better way to say "Sometimes you can do everything right..."? The point, I think, is that there are some incidents from which we, as BASE jumpers, can learn nothing except that BASE jumping is dangerous.

Can BASE fatalities be prevented without exception by walking down? Yes. Is that always a helpful analysis of what happened, particularly for those of us who like to jump when the conditions seem good? I don't think so.

Hi Tom...

I think it was because of #63 that the Kjerag Pendulator was created. She did have a few jumps from the potato bridge and exited just fine on every one of them. (5-6 jumps) I do wish she'd had another 6-8 from the Pendulator...

It seems like the brightest stars are the ones that burn out quickest. To me, they are the comets of human life.

Peace,
K

I have hit the platform once, luckely only with my hand and luckely only some flesh was gone and I didn't break anything.
I was performing an inward dive, and probably didn't jump far enough.


I didn't have a lot of experience, so that is why I guess. I can't follow classes, so I have teached everything myself upto now.
I have had a lot of 'close calls', meaning, seeing a diving board less then 5cm (2 inches) is pretty scary.
The fear of hitting the platform again (but with my head) is the only thing that keeps me from doing a gainer.

Diving helps to learn how your body works in dead air, it doesn't teach you how to exit in a direct way, since in diving you go head first. Don't exit as in diving or you'll get scared
I don't know if diving helps a lot for training an exit, since I have never basejumped.

vandev: as a diver you should know that even the best sometimes have a bad exit/jump and land bad, so even the best basejumper can have a bad exit/jump. Only, in base the results are often worse.

Thijs

In a nutshell, for me at least, that's all you need to bear in mind. EXPERIENCED, in fact, VERY EXPERIENCED, no I'll go one further, MORE EXPERIENCED THAN I'LL EVER BE, jumpers die all the time. We can analyze the facts, try to learn the lessons, but i guarantee you that 10 years from now, EXPERIENCED jumpers will still be dying.

Be humble, know that you are fallible, know that even if you do 1000 perfect BASE jumps, just 1 bad one is enough to bring about your end. Know that even if you do everything you perceive to be right at the time, you can still be making mistakes. Know that the bitter irony of fatigue is that one of symptons is you'll never realise you are fatigued. Know that hindsight and lists and stats are wonderful things which can be learned from but don't actually help you at THAT moment.

As flippant as it sounds, and as cool as it looks on Xtreme t-shirts, there is a great amount of wisdom in the philosophy of "shit just happens". I'm sure someone somewhere in some university can provide a beautiful formula to prove it too.



Don't assume the wall is vertical all the way to impact. Most walls have underhung sections or a talus which requires not just a track, but a perfect track to outfly. How do you know if you're outflying the slope. Instinct, gut, visual references, past experience. How do you accumulate a library of these without putting yourself in the proverbial firing line first. You can't.

peace

ian

huh?
http://www.imagedump.com/...ck=get&tp=222746
well i do agree,that you always can walk away,but that aint the jump it self...
soon as you leap off the object and still do evrything right,you can be killed before you even notice it...

Hi Vandev,

Those are a thinking man's thoughts and you sparked a good discussion. Thanks for that.

However, let me warn you of another danger in BASE jumping, just so you are ready for it when the time comes. Of all the BASE jumpers I've seen start in the sport the great majority all say pretty much the same thing you did.

>>My only desire though would be to birdman off somewhere in Norway or Switerland<<

Then after a few high cliff jumps you'll travel back to your hometown with the BASE fire in your belly. Your resistance will crumble and the next thing you know you'll be raping and pillaging every object in sight. I'm just letting you know so you'll recognize it when it happens.

After all these years we should have come up with a name for this malady . . .

NickD
BASE 194

>>You mean Basentery? Foot and object disease?
"Uh oh, he's got basentery, better get him to an antenna..."

>>there is no such thing as a chicken in BASE<<

That's correct, but there is a "Chicken BASE Award." J.D. Walker started it in the 80s. You must stand, ready to jump, on all four objects, "and then chicken out to the max . . ."

NickD
BASE 194

I call it BASE fever, after Summit fever in mountaineering.

big walls are not really the safest. To say #63 did everything right is a bit of a stretch. terminal big wall jumps can overwhelm a newbie especially since many things are required: good exit, tracking, altitude awareness, visual overload.

regarding wing suit jumping, that adds another element of chaos. I would suggest doing simple base jumps for quite a while to get your bearings.

Read the base fatality list, #70, while on a wingsuit jump. avoid pilot chutes with hackey sack handles.

J.D. - haven't heard that name in a while.

J.D. and Dead Steve put me off on my first jump, a 600 foot cliff.

Dead Steve broke his leg BASE jumping in Saudi Arabia and missed his flight home. That flight was Pan Am 103.

But, that's not how he got his name . . .

NickD
BASE 194

He's the one shouting "party till impact!" yeah? Heh, saw that video, what a lucky bastard

what a way to live... suffer a broken leg and inadvertantly miss a dealy flight... simplyamazing...


Wow...The stories that would flow once the drinking begins with the "old folk" here

[

That's correct, but there is a "Chicken BASE Award." J.D. Walker started it in the 80s. You must stand, ready to jump, on all four objects, "and then chicken out to the max . . ."I didn't realize I could get a chicken BASE number. Hell, I could have got it so long ago I'm sure that my number would be in the double didgets. Damn it, if only I'd known about it sooner. What are the numbers up to now?

And then it morphed into a cooler thing. It meant you BASE jumped enough to encounter bad WX conditions on all four objects and were smart enough to walk back down . . .

NickD
BASE 194

Thanks Nickd, I actually learned allot from reading the base fatalities. For one i learned that what i wish to someday be ready to do is what kills experienced base jumpers. I see only one or 2 that got killed on a low object. It seems the ones that get you are the ones that you can really fly...and have the most hang time. I have also learned that this sport is far from skydiving in most ways. just because you have 10,000 plus jumps doesnt mean you can leap of a rock. Its a hole different game with much higher stakes but it seems much more like flying...

I think it was because of #63 that the Kjerag Pendulator was created

What is this device that was created and what does it do?

Steve earned the nickname from his notorious BASE malfunction rate. 3 mals on BASE jumps, all with the use of a round reserve to save his life. The idea that a reserve is useless in BASE is simply foolish. Funny, his BASE reserve openings were less than 100'. One was at 20'. He once did a time analysis of realization of malfunction to decision to do something to pull reserve handle. The decision time came to 1/8 second or so. Pretty quick and generally beyond the physiological capabilities of most humans.

He was enlisted as a pilot at the time. He got sent to Saudi by the military after getting into legal trouble doing a jump off a large California cliff. While there, he scoped out a 600' cliff called 'rag's head point.' Literally a point. Essentially impossible to hit unless the 180 was a perfect 180. He hit the wall and landed in great pain. He had two friends with him. One was filming on top. The other was on the ground. The ground man happened to be a weight lifter, and this allowed him to carry Steve on his back through 7 miles of Saudi desert to civilization. The very next day, Steve missed the Pan Am 103 flight. He had tickets for the flight but had to return them to the military because he missed the flight, for a refund. Simply amazing. I am so glad to have been with Steve when he made his first BASE jump after the Saudi accident. I still have his JD Walker BASE rig that he used to earn his BASE number (174) over in the corner of my bedroom. Steve sent to all his friends his close call list. It's three pages, typed, written in a hair-raising style. I may post here some time. Hey, I thought the Cessna jump from 240' sail slider up with a small pilot chute to be pretty gutsy. All went well, and it's easy to critisize this one if you don't know the details of how it was done.

-Chris

It's a launch simulator. It allows you to practice launches (many of them, repeating a very short time). It's essentially a dynamic line run between two trees. The jumper exits one tree and holds body position as he falls/slides along the line. Then he is lowered to the ground. It's a great way of (a) learning what your launch position will do and correcting it, and (b) getting a little of the psychological effects of exiting, to reduce the potential for overload when you first do it for real. I'm a huge fan of pendulator training.

Ok, but if i came to you or any experianced mentor and told you my goal to wingsuit of kreg or simular within a year , what would you tell me i should do to prepair for the big one? Is that a unrealistic time frame .... I am just using a year as a gauge..

do you have a picture of one? i could put one in my backyard... launch riight into the lake.... on the serious side, did this girl use one of these to prepaiir for her jump? also Tom, if you exit unstable and are falling flat, when you start to pickup speed wouldnt you be able to get tracking as you would get more stable? i am talking about a large launch object..

And fear, and the shakes, and...

I have given this some thought recently. Before starting BASE jumping, I did 3-4 balloon jumps and 6-7 heli jumps (not in preparation for BASE jumping)and I felt I always had control. However, how would I know? There was no one else jumping with me. There was no object nearby for reference. I really wasn't thinking about whether I was stable or not in the first few seconds because I had lots of altitude to get stable.

So maybe my perceptions were not necessarily reality.

It works quite well. I was much more afraid jumping out of that tree than I was leaving the bridge. It prepared me quite well!

Well there was the slamming into the park bench that added a little to the stress...

Roflol!

That ain't nothing! You should ask about the experimental contraption that a Twin Falls local put me in one day. Imagine a vertical-only pendulator and having all air pushed out of your lungs in less than a nanosecond and the girly sound that might make.

And then I was stupid enough to volunteer and do it again. Talk about fear.

We had a great laugh though. My first rope-jumps....

Yea... for a short moment in time, in a previous life, I was known as screetch monkey...

My first Base jump.. I jumped (after a loooong wait) and after I realized I was really falling, not flaoting... I let out a multilevel pitch capable of breaking glass made of crystal....

Hey Tom, I have been watching the jumps from the good stuff dvd of Dave Barlia in Baffin Island and the Snow board jumps in Norway. He seems to get great clearance from the wall. Does anyone care to comment ?/ and is the guy a top base jumper? i see him in warrem miller movies and stuff... and yes, i saw the cutaway.... does anyone else skysurf or snow board the walls?

Yes.

He's pretty low key, but very skillful, and a super cool guy. He's also been doing this for quite a longish while.

There have been several other people skysurfing and snowboarding off big walls (and skiing). Dave was definitely one of (if not the) first, though.

If you want to see some cool skysurf BASE footage, check out Beyond Extreme.

Is there any more info available on the pendulator, and possibly info on how to go about building one?

I searched the web and this forum a bit but didn't find much. Sounds very interesting either way.

I've been emailing back and forth with a writer preparing a BASE article for "Outside Magazine" for an upcoming issue. Maybe some of you have heard from him too. Anyway, at first he asked my help with some basic fact checking concerning the BASE Fatality List and I did that, but as we went along I started getting worried about some misconceptions (naturally enough on his part) that he had.

I never hold out much hope a non-jumping writer is going to come even close to getting it right as even after all the years I've been writing about BASE jumping I'm sometimes not sure I'm getting it right.

This morning's topic was "chute failure" and how many jumpers are victims of it. It's obvious he couldn’t make the distinction between jumper error and anything else. First off I told him a "chute" is something coal goes sliding down and what we use is a "parachute." That said I explained that to me "parachute failure" is when you deploy and your parachute blows up to the point it won't support you, or your harness comes apart. And to my knowledge that has never happened to any BASE jumper.

Things like 180s not corrected in time, late or fumbled pulls, and striking objects in freefall are not gear failure, but jumper failure. Talk to most non-jumpers aware of Jan Davis' death in Yosemite and they will usually say her parachute didn’t work. The truth of it (and she was a dear friend of mine) is Jan didn’t work.

At first I almost declined to help this writer. People often say to me that I write well so I should write about something besides parachuting, something that pays better. But the point they don’t get is it's not enough to write well, you have to know the subject inside and out to be effective. If I tried to write about snowboarding or surfing or mountain climbing I'd sound like an idiot to those who knew those subjects.

I'm pretty sure I could get a BASE article published in one of the "extreme" magazines that are out there right now and make a few thousand dollars to boot. But what does that make me but a gloryhound like I often disparage. I don't mind things like writing for SKYDIVING or doing interviews on Skydive Radio as that is "in house" stuff.

Anyway, the reason I decided to help him is "Outside" ran another BASE article back in about 1982 or so and it was pretty good. And in the end it's either let him founder along or help him, so I helped him.

All this is my way of saying when the article appears, and if it blows chunks, don’t blame me . . .

NickD
BASE 194

I know...I don't know jack shit. Still...

Seems to me that #63 (with all due respect) is not a case of "everything done right so I dunno what went wrong". If you lose balance and strike a cliff, it's pretty obvious what went wrong. You lost balance
More practice (more balloon, chopper, bridge jumps) might have avoided this.

The only thing that would keep me from getting into BASE are total malfunctions (such as pilot chute/canopy not inflating, or canopy not coming out of bag) and possibly 180's.

I've seen two movies on the net that made me wonder about the dangers of Base. One is a trailer on the Triax site of a guy jumping at BD. First his pilot chute refuses to inflate and when it finally did his canopy never fully opens. Dude gets away with it.
The second movie is similar (also @ BD I believe...but earlier) but it ends in tragedy. A pilot chute inflates but for some reason the canopy never exits the container. The jumper fell to his death.

This is the former http://www.triaxproductions.com/BD04_spot_03.wmv
(Sorry if I'm out of line or stating the obvious when not appropriate)

well.... lets look at what should be obvious assuming you (or anyone else) is seriously considering base....

this is all in relation to the first video...

wrong number one.. look at homeboys rig... wrong tools for the job...
thats like hitting a baseball w/ a golf club...
itll probably work, just not as well as the bat would.. (its a skydiving rig....)

wrong number two... you see the way the bridle goes around his arm? hence the hesitation... and the gonthrow... pc is to small for that short of delay...look at all those oscillations...

wrong number three.... the canopy is dbagged.... and id be willing to bet, given jumpers other gear choices, that it probably isnt a base canopy either....

how you determined that his canopy never fully opens is interesting, considering the clip ends with him flying under the bridge.. but ....
the moral of the story is this...
as long as you dont jump shit gear, you chances of survival greatly increase....

and a total on a base rig is a rare bird indeed....(dead as fuck, but rare nonetheless....
i can think of 2 off the top of my head however, one where the pullup was left in the closingloop, and one w/the bridle through the legstrap...)


good luk

I lol'd. Ok thx for pointing all that out.

My point was that losing stability is probably not about bad luck. It's all about the skill bucket.

(The second fatal vid...I've been checking the list but neither of the descriptions fit the picture. So nevermind...)

That's a standard 42 BASE PC. I took that same PC off the bridge this year attached to a 370. Marta assured me that it was more than adequate for a 370, and I know the canopy Alex jumped at BD 04 was way smaller.

-Blind

>>The second movie is similar (also @ BD I believe...but earlier) but it ends in tragedy. A pilot chute inflates but for some reason the canopy never exits the container. The jumper fell to his death.<<

This sounds like Steve at Bridge Day '87. BASE pilot chutes and longer bridles weren't mandatory at that time but they were strongly recommended. Steve was jumping a skydiving rig and hand holding his stock pilot chute. It was his third jump on the same setup that day. His girlfriend was standing by the rail.

He did a good stable three second delay and pitched. The pilot chute went to the end of the bridle, came over his back, but never inflated. At between five to six seconds Steve pulled his reserve ripcord and his reserve pilot chute launched cleanly and pulled the reserve free bag to line stretch but impact with the river came at that point.

I wish we would have been more forceful with Steve. The staff did tell him he wasn't using the right gear, but it was a different world in those days. While no self respecting BASE jumper of that day would have used the same setup, the problem with telling skydivers that was they would come back with look at how many others are doing the same thing. I recall one fellow who accused me of trying to profit by suggesting he pay fifty bucks for a BASE pilot chute. Sadly, it took this fatality to get the point across about using BASE pilot chutes to the skydiving community.

Steve's last words as he climbed over the rail were in rebuffing comments about his small pilot chute, "It's always worked before . . ."

After Steve's body was retrieved jumping resumed and about 15 jumpers later another guy did almost the same thing. He towed his skydiving pilot chute for a good while after he pitched but it finally inflated.

BTW, in the case of what Tom is saying about doing everything right and still getting killed. You're right, there isn’t one report on the fatality list that says that, but here's the point Tom is making, we damn well know its possible . . . so don't wait until it happens to believe it . . .

NickD
BASE 194

And beer, wine, whisky, and funky tobacco.....

And one where the pilot chute was not attached to the canopy......

and one where the tree the static line was attached to came out of the ground and went over the cliff with the jumper......

and one where the static line broke cause it was attached to a pc which was left in the pc pouch for the jump.....

Nobody?

Guess I asked about a well-guarded secret

There's no secret to it really. Come to Twin Falls and you can jump one. I actually get quite a kick out of watching people use the thing. It's very useful, and very entertaining.

I actually do hope to make it to Twin Falls next year to take a FJC once I'm more comfortable with my canopy skills... so I guess I'll just have to wait until then to see this thing

Vandev wrote:


I would just like to bring up that Kjerag and Lauterbrunnen are VERY DIFFERENT PLACES! Requiring very different attitudes and reactions to problems - well, specifically I have 180 openings in mind.

To me, Lauterbrunnen tries to kill me more than Kjerag does. The jumps you do in LB are the type that are most critical - those in the 6 to 11 second range with slider up. This is potentially much more dangerous than a longer delay off Kjerag. It is more likely to get an off heading with a slider and you are not delaying as long so aren't as far from the wall.

I don't wingsuit, but I sure would choose kjerag over LB to begin BASE wingsuiting.

Don't read too much between these lines, I am not trying to stir up controversy or give advice to those who know much more. As usual it is just my 2 krone worth.

Spelling ain't as important as communication!



t

Interesting, I've recently wondered about this after seeing the footage. Do you know anything about the decision making process that led to this? Is there a BD playbook that handles such a situation? How many people decided to stop jumping for the day?

I'm not implying it was the wrong decision; I can see arguments either way. I'm just curious.

Thanks,

Jaap

did this really happen?
And if it did/does and the tree hit the person during freefall is that considered a tree strike ?

I imagine the tree didn't actually catch up to him until he hit the ground, sort of like Wiley Coyote running off the cliff holding an anvil in the old Road Runner cartoons.

>>Do you know anything about the decision making process that led to this? Is there a BD playbook that handles such a situation? How many people decided to stop jumping for the day?<<

While it's sometimes normal to stop jumping for the day at a DZ after a fatality, that's not usually the case at a large boogie. Bridge Day is more like the latter and isn't something you can just come back and do again "next week."

Stopping the jumping is also admitting defeat in a way, it's like saying, "Gee, maybe this IS a stupid thing to do." I think continuing to jump validates and celebrates the deceased participation in the sport.

Did some not jump after Steve's fatality? Probably, but it was personal decision on their part and that's how it should be.

NickD
BASE 194