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From the BD fatility thread, I took this quote to discuss how skydiving experience is an impediment to base:


I acknowledge the skill sets are different and these are different sports. Can anyone with any real insight explain why it is an impediment to know how to skydive and then try base jumping?

Is it that it is a "clean slate" theory? I am just confused as to how just because someone can skydive, they are more impeded to learn how to base jump.

I am thinking this is not 100% true (maybe somewhat true but 100%??) because the basic assumption is that knowing how to skydive is a skill impossible to discard when trying something new. Anyone who has skydived has necessarily discarded some of their "life training" up until that point.

I get that they are two different sports. When approached by any responsible individual a "new sport" I just don't buy that knowing another sport is more of an "impediment" when that very other sport required one to toss out years of ingrained human nature.

Again, this quote, in context, is what is concerning to me considering that it seems to be given as fact from one of the premiere base jumpers on this website. I am neither a BASE jumper nor a premiere skydiver.

IMO skill-set are different from exit up to the 5-6 second mark. After that you got so much air around you that you are in SD territory.

Experienced and current skydivers (like 1000+ jumps) make much much better BASE jumpers because 1. they tend to be good canopy pilots and 2. they have been through and saw enough shit in SD that their attitude is usually not the typical young-dumb-and-full-of-cum-150-jump-wonder-I-want-to-BASE-now-show-me-the-way-I-got-the-money.

 
I think you would find that it’s the type of sky diving as much as any thing else. Some skills translate others are ether irrelevant or even a hindrance. It can be very amusing to watch a hot shit canopy pilot who had a saber for a student canopy, who’s first rig was at 1.2 to one and only got smaller from there, and has made his last thousand jumps on a cross brace. I’ve watched these people bust their ass trying to fly a big slow seven cell. All of their motor skills are wrong. Their judgment is off. They will box them selves into a corner with turn rate, turn radius. They’ll stall it trying to sink it in. It’s always worth a show.

Free fall skills are rather different from exit skills. I love going on balloon jumps to watch them all shit them selves and squeal like a little pig as they tumble from the basket. It’s great watching them paw the air and kick like a student.

This doesn’t even begin to touch on any of the “BASE” specific skills that they will need to learn over time as they go on in the sport. Hell I’m still learning. Right now I’m working on my marksmanship with a big bore rifle. Who would have thought that that would be a “BASE” skill?

Lee

I believe this thread thoroughly explores this.
http://www.dropzone.com/..._reply;so=ASC;mh=25;

~J

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Can anyone with any real insight explain why it is an impediment to know how to skydive and then try base jumping?
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In my humble opinion having as long as 2 1/2 minutes to clear line twists or any other malfunctions without having to worry about bumping into objects would become ingrained recovery procedure or habit to a skydiver over time.

In that respect alone skydiving skills would have to be considered an impediment rather than a carryover skill.

Knowing how to clear the line twists in the first place, and especially doing so instinctively, is pretty much a skill you can gain (and practice with much more safety) skydiving. I've seen people thrown off the bridge here with zero skydiving experience who have experienced line twists and failed to clear them before hitting the water.

One thing that was a real eye opener for me in BASE was dealing with line twists:

In line twists, your first priority is to control your heading, climbing above the twists if you have to in order to steer then deal with the twists.

That blew my mind. It makes sense but as a skydiver I never would have thought of it.

Some very simple BASE jumps can be safely accomplished with much ground training and no skydiving experience. Skydiving experience will always make a first BASE jump safer in that the jumper has at least some experience freefalling and controlling a parachute in a relatively safe environment.

Need it be any more complicated than that?

Depending on the individual, it can enhance or complicate the learning process.

I taught scuba diving full time for many years. Some of my most difficult students were the ones with strong swimming skills. Since many of these skills (proper kick and breathing technique for example)are completely different than those in scuba, it took longer to master because they had to overcome years of muscle memory and habit to develop the correct methods for scuba.

This is where the student attitude can make a difference. As an experienced skydiver, if they go into the sport saying "I've done a thousand jumps, just show me the exit point" and then try to use the same skills and experience to jump a bridge that they use to exit an Otter, you have a problem waiting to happen. If they use that past knowledge of how long it took them to learn to exit a plane cleanly, and realize that they need to go through that learning curve again to achieve a proper BASE exit, then the learning experience should be that much more successful.

A better analogy would be teaching SCUBA to someone who had never even tried swimming at all before. Would you do that?

I don't want to sound like I'm making the conclusion just yet but I've been reading the input from all of you and it made me think....(thank you for replying BTW). It sounds like the "impediment" could be bringing the attitude that success in one sport automatically equates to success in another sport.

Maybe the problem is thinking BASE is a natural progression of skydiving? Maybe it's harder for a well-seasoned skydiver with the wrong attitude to look at BASE with open eyes and as a student?

I'm hopeful that most "well-seasoned" skydivers got that way because they always considered themselves a student of some kind and were always open to learning something new. But then there are the exceptions.

I just found it difficult to believe that given two different people, both with the "right" attitude to making a first BASE jump, that the one who's skydived is more impeded merely by the fact that the sports' skill sets are different.

What do you think - is it in the attitude?

Jason

RhondaLea, I disagree.

BASE jumping and skydiving also have the following in common:
-freefall
-development of better awareness through experience (both in freefall and under canopy)
-pull priorities (1: pull, 2: pull on time, 3: pull stable)
-development of better judgement through experience and being exposed to incidents



different - yes

entirely different - no.

While the specific movements involved in safely deploying, flying and landing a large, lightly-loaded, 7-cell, BASE canopy compared to a small, highly-loaded, 21/27 cell crossbrace skydiving canopy are very different, the mental processes required to do so are very much the same.

While many people might say you cannot learn anything applicable to landing a BASE canopy in a tight area by landing a highly loaded crossbraced canopy on a huge dropzone LZ, I say that you do learn many applicable thought-processes and those are far more important than simple reflexes.

One of the most valuable things you can learn from (a relatively large amount) of skydiving experience is to control your body and parachute through a feedback loop. To do this you must learn to understand how your possible inputs affect the system and how the system communicates its state through its outputs.

Case in point is stalling your canopy or riding your canopy very near the stall point to set up a landing in a specific spot. While the stall characteristics of a BASE canopy and loaded crossbraced canopy are very different, the feedback is very similar. The crossbraced canopy has a much smaller flight range and control stroke and is far more sensitive around the stallpoint, which makes it better practice than a large 7-cell because they are so forgiving and therefore only develop your awareness and skill to a lower degree.

Doing 200+ skydives a year on a loaded crossbraced canopy has you:
-on the permanent lookout for everyone else in the sky and on the ground -thinking about and keeping track of the wind conditions
-walking the landing area before ever landing there
-aware of your altitude and location at all times
-plan escape routes or 'outs' before exit
-constantly evaluating the canopy traffic and your location and height in order to move to a contingency plan if needed
-making contingency plans before you need them
-keep stable through deployment or suffer the consequences
-thinking 2 steps ahead of where you are

The skills above transfer directly to BASE jumping.


I believe this is only true if you are a bad skydiver or a skydiver who has built up lots of ego and no real experience but lack the judgement to know it.

I am also not advocating doing all your skydives on high performance canopies either, doing jumps on a large 7-cell lo-po canopy is needed also.

I figured she meant the fact that they might jump off chest to the wind and rely on air to get them belly to earth.

Actually, yes I have. And again, it was determined by the attitude. If the person did not swim because they were deathly afraid of water, you had to overcome those phobias first. Once that was done, or if the person just had never gotten around to learning to swim (and there are more of those than you think!) the practical skills came pretty easily because you were working with essentially a clean slate. No old habits to get rid of.

Edit to add:
I realize the differences between teaching in a controlled pool environment, and hucking someone off a structure, but I believe the basic pretext of attitude vs. skills is a valid one

Did you teach them to swim first, or just go straight to the SCUBA?




At risk of digressing, I taught adult swimming lessons for 6 years. I don't have any SCUBA instructional ratings, but just from a water safety perspective, teaching a non-swimmer to SCUBA dive seems like non-starter to me. Why the heck wouldn't you want to teach them to swim first?

Having seen first hand how much a person who can swim and has grown up around water and swimming can take for granted (I once had to perform CPR on a non-swimmer who didn't realize the diving boards were in the deep end of the pool, where the water would be over his head), I shudder to think what dangerous assumptions a non-swimmer might make in the SCUBA environment, or a non-parachutist might make in the BASE environment.

If I had had more skydiving experience and especially more canopy experience, I would not have had the injuries I've had BASE jumping. Period. Now I walk with a slight limp and I paid a lot of money for injuries that I could have prevented by just making skydives.

do you all agree?



edited to format bold

Yes.

You can put first time SD students under a BASE canopy loaded at .7.

Try to put them under a velo at 2.5.

Flying a docile big 7 cell is no where nearly as demanding as flying a highly loaded twichy SOB, more landing it than flying it.

NO.

I still need to unlearn habits developed while swooping...
- different approach angles
- different required range of motion
- I can turn my BASE canopy far closer to the ground
- swooping does not require a stand-up landing with no forward speed
- BASE canopies collapse differently from swooping parachutes
- line twists create different hazards

use the correct tool for the desired learning.

sorry - my fault - i guess i have to edit my posting because the quote referenced to "stall-drills", didn't it?


do you all agree?

no, I did not mean that it's better practice for stallpoint drills.

I meant it is better practice for the skills I listed after that paragraph:

If it's better practise overall, then why would anyone that fly's a 21/27 cell have any trouble landing a big tarp.

because there's idiots everywhere...

My point is that even (I think especially) jumping the skydiving canopies most different from BASE canopies (crossbraced canopies at high loadings like 1.9 and above) develop mental skills that help you when flying a BASE canopy on BASE jumps.

As homework I leave it up to you to see what percentage of active BASEjumpers regularly skydive a loaded crossbrace canopy and how their BASE landings compare to BASEjumpers who don't, as you obviously have too much free time.

Being able to quickly identify and correct a dangerous situation with instinctive canopy inputs (while swooping a highly loaded x-braced canopy for example) is one hugely important skill in BASE. A swooping freeflyer with thousands of jumps may not be very familiar with a big 7-cell f111, but they should be able to quickly figure out that their canopy is opening off-heading and is going to slam them into a wall if they dont yank on some seatbelts.

Most first-, second-, or tenth-time skydivers have little or no concept of their heading, no idea what their canopy is doing on opening, and have to memorize flash cards to figure out why their canopy isnt there, square, or flying where they want it to.

Additonally, somebody may appear to be a great student and pick up the book knowledge and exit practice very well, and then brainlock when they are actually put to the test.

Most experienced skydivers have already dealt with their share of high-speed no-shit-there-i-was-about-to-die situations, and the shock and awe has been replaced with automatic corrective responses.

Whether those responses are correct is another story... but its better than freezing...

That was the funniest thing I have read down here. Witty yet informative in an "in between the lines" sort of way. It makes me feel a small amount of shame for posting my question as a serious one when there was such a funnier way to do it

jason

From the BD fatility thread, I took this quote to discuss how skydiving experience is an impediment to base:


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Quote
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The skill sets for each sport are entirely different, and while an airplane can be used to practice certain things (i.e., canopy skills), skydiving is more of an impediment to a first-time base jumper than otherwise.

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I acknowledge the skill sets are different and these are different sports. Can anyone with any real insight explain why it is an impediment to know how to skydive and then try base jumping?
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Frankly, Brian never got a chance to use any skill sets he might have had, because he suffered from sensory overload on exit when encountering an environment he hadn't experienced for 30 years or so.

It's not just the skill sets your muscles learn, it's acclimatizing your brain to the environment it's going to encounter. Brian had too much experience to be a neophyte and too little to be comfortable, he probably fell into that category because of his own unique history, but here is someone who would have benefitted from a few practise jumps -- anywhere.

I think you mean to say that he possibly had a sensory overaload.

[replyAs homework I leave it up to you to see what percentage of active BASEjumpers regularly skydive a loaded crossbrace canopy and how their BASE landings compare to BASEjumpers who don't, as you obviously have too much free time.
From what I have seen there are many types of BASE jumpers and skydivers who BASE. From only BASE to every once in awhile jump an object. As a lot of people have said these are different ballgames, treat them as such.

You see the same kind of thing when seasoned RW skydivers try to learn to freefly. However, it's by no means a universal attitude. With base jumping I would think it would be an even rarer occurrence considering the elevated stakes of "getting it wrong".

I hadn't intended to post more about this, but I've since seen that there were additional comments in the Incidents thread, in addition to the comments in this thread, and the following seems to have gotten lost in the shuffle:

Brian Schubert did not die because he lacked canopy skills, and the context of all my comments in the incidents forum is Brian's death.

In that context, setting up canopy skills as the issue is a strawman.

On the other hand, I did not and do not dispute that good canopy skills are important--they're actually essential for most jumps--although I would say that for a water landing off NRGB during Bridge Day, even the most rudimentary canopy skills will do the job.

But it is also possible to learn canopy skills without ever making a single skydive, so if you're going to make the case that skydiving experience is essential to successful basejumping, you're going to have to get around all the paragliders who fly their wings a lot better than many of you.

<aside to space> Thank you again for teaching me what I needed to know to make my jumps off that bridge successful and well-nigh pain-free.

This puts it all into context. I hadn't thought of it that way before. This makes practical what was, until now, academic for me.

thanks,

jason

Now that is a strawman - your original post (on which this thread is based) said that skydiving is an impediment to base jumping, not merely that it wasn't essential.

I find it hard to believe that at least a few skydives would not have made Brians mind more able to react during his jump.

Except it isn't true, unless you're doing balloon jumps.

Practicing off a diving board or even the side of a swimming pool is a whole lot closer to what it's like to make a base exit than is exiting from an airplane.

There are people who seem to be edging to the conclusion that Brian would not be dead if he had had some airplane jumps prior to Bridge Day. I don't think it gets more essential than that.

Nonetheless, your point is taken. The use of "essential" is not essential, however, so just roll it back to what I said originally.


I have known people with many thousands of jumps (skydives) to brainlock. So why do you think that experience is the cure for brainlock?

rl

I know I'm going to be too literal here but aren't the things you describe actions to get the appropriate "skill sets?"

I'm not saying one should NOT do those things for the purposes of this discussion.

I'm wondering why the person who does those things and has NEVER jumped from a plane are less "impeded" than a person who DOES those things and has jumped from a plane in your opinion?

Maybe I'm reading too much into it. The only thing I know about BASE is what I've read on this site. And that means I really don't know anything. I haven't jumped in 2yrs and it's turned me into a sad non-jumping dork who cannot stop looking at this site every day. Maybe one day I will get a life and take it to the sky and be able to contribute something useful here.

jason

I don't think it would have guaranteed a safe jump, I think it would have made brainlock less likely.

Some people have said that due to the skydiving gear that Brian used to jump, he might have valued a stable deployment much more than we do now, due to the unreliability of that gear.

IF the cause of Brian's fatality was overdelay to get stable, due to a fear of unstable deployment, then being current on modern skydiving and/or BASE gear COULD have made him more comfortable with deploying unstable due to the better reliability of gear now.

Being a current skydiver (but inexperienced or low-experience BASEjumper) will also have the effect of making you used to having a flying parachute above 2000 ft. Therefore stepping off a bridge at 876 ft will have you nervous about being low already and therefore way more likely to under delay (even if pulling unstable) than overdelay.

All you need to do to verify this statement is surf the bridgeday pics to see many unstable deployments from short delays that worked out just fine.

As for those zero-skydive paraglider BASE jumpers who have mad canopy skills, I have this to say: Scott Watwood

I think that's pretty wild speculation myself. He did train for this jump, and I'm sure that the need to pull on time was made quite clear to him. Unless he were made to go out of an airplane and deliberately pull unstable, I don't see how it would matter.

How long a delay did Mike and Brian take from El Cap, I wonder.


No disagreement there. My friend Marc had a couple thousand skydives and he'd done at least 12 jumps the weekend before. He counted very fast and ended up tangled up, but he lived.


I didn't even have to click the link, Sam. :) I stand by the position I took in that thread. I have two different friends, one dead (Hoover) and one no longer jumping (a close friend and colleague of Dr. Death) who had much the same experience as Scott. They were both current skydivers at the time. Anyone can have an off-heading opening, and Nick's list makes it clear that sometimes there's not much one can do about it.

Having said I didn't need to read the thread, I did it anyway, and I concede the fact that there's probably no convenient way to deal with the issue of learning how to handle deployment short of a skydive. Of course, if one had a legal bridge in the neighborhood, then I suppose one could learn to handle deployment issues that way just as easily as from an airplane.

Then again, I remember spending some time in a hanging harness. I believe the stated purpose was to train me to deal with malfunctions and to teach me to cutaway. So that's another option.

Still, it's important to note that the idea of "deployment is the most dangerous part of the base jump" is irrelevant with respect to NRGB and thus, inapplicable to what happened to Brian.

And exiting from an airplane more closely simulates (and thus aids one in acclimating to) the fear factor and sensory overload experienced by an uncurrent jumper at the instant of a real BASE exit than practicing off a diving board or even the side of a swimming pool does.

I saw the video of Brian's exit off the Bridge. Presumably you saw it, too. Was that poor exit position evidence of a lack of muscle-memory training; or was it evidence of his level of physical conditioning, or was it evidence of fear factor and sensory overload? Obviously there's no way to know for sure, but it's a reasonable inquiry.

My first jump off that bridge felt nothing like jumping out of an airplane.

It felt very much like jumping from a high board, something I have not done since I was very young.

But it may be different for me than for anyone else in that regard. I'm extremely sensitive to noise--it stresses me out a lot--so my jumps off that bridge and the single balloon jump I made were much less stressful for me than any of my airplane jumps.


It seems to me that Brian's exit was about normal until he started kicking his feet. I believe that if you check with people who have watched fatalities (of the "nothing out" variety), you will find that kicking is not uncommon somewhere between 1000 and 500 feet.

If I had to point to anything that makes me believe he brainlocked, the kicking would be it.

Sorry, but that still misses my point, as well as the points of several other people who've said the same or similar thing. We're not referring to the physical feel or skill; we're referring to fear factor, sensory overload and brainlock in someone who was decades uncurrent.

by now you should understand there are vastly differing opinions...

why do you trust the original quote? might it be wrong?

You're trying to say that currency lessens the fear factor, sensory overload and brainlock.

I don't agree. I don't think currency has anything to do with it.

Clair's input would be valuable in this thread. There are others whose input would be useful, as well, but she's the only person who has actually posted here who I know has had the experience of making a base jump with no prior experience.

I don't recall that Clair ever had an issue with fear, sensory overload or brainlock.

I definitely understand now. When I read that quote originally I must admit that it did not seem right to me. With just a few jumps I didn't want to jump on board or against it.

jason

I mean you no offense, but I simply cannot fathom how you arrive at that conclusion.

We'll have to just agree to disagree.

i must say, that in ANY situation, (ANY), currency just may be the most Important factor. ESPECIALY parachuting. period ( . )

That may be but it's very uncommon for an experienced jumper to transfer the pilot chute from one hand to the other, a very dangerous maneuver in any jump particularly a base jump. That's the thing that really distinguishes this from the normal "freezing up" of brain lock and highly suggests that sensory overload was involved.

Skill?

How about an inborn ability to deal with unknown in a millisecond?

It is the calmness of not having any fear.

It is the peace of mind at the exit.

Relax,

Everything is going to be alright!

C Ya!

"Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear - not absence of fear."
Mark Twain (1835 - 1910)

"Courage is doing what you're afraid to do. There can be no courage unless you're scared."
Eddie Rickenbacker

Sensory Overload, BrainLock and Fear

BrainLock and Sensory Overload are ( one in the same ).( they go hand-in-hand). no separation of the two are necessary.
Fear is a total separate emotion which only comes into play to accelerate the Sensory Overload. Prior to exiting or in the events that follow.

Sensory Overload of mental state will cause a retardation of motor skills.
Retardation of Motor Skills is, BRAIN LOCK
Motor Skills that are held ( In Check ) by CURRENCY, is a ----> REPETITIOUS PRACTICE of a that CHOSEN SKILL of the BASE Jumper.

It Is, TOTAL BULLSHIT that anyone would think that the practice of staying-being current. Has No Bering on, Lessening Sensory Overload and Brainlock.
BASE jumping requires sequences of mechanical life saving maneuvers that the brain must have memorized and muscular movements that are routinely directed by the brains repetitious memories of drills or problems that routinely must be solved in actual jumps. Muscle Memory and Currency of Jump will help give the BASE jumper a, Desirable Ending to His Exit off a fixed object.
CURRENCY or REPETITIOUS PRACTICE of a CHOSEN SKILL will help keep the REALITY of circumstances of the events at hand, IN CHECK. Which will let you the BASE jumper MAKE THE PROPER DECISION TO SAVE his/her FUCKING LIFE.
.

I don't agree. I don't think currency has anything to do with it.
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This isn't rocket science. The Science and psychology of teaching, and the science and psychology of learning have been studied and understood well for decades. Any skydiver taking an Instructor course in Canada takes a coaching association of canada course that transcends specific sport and gets down to the science of bringing about learning.

Much of that has nothing to do with specific skills, but as much to do with mindset. An experienced jumper brainlocking about what is the next point is a totally different thing to what happened here. Even someone reacting poorly to the high stress of a spinning or fast malfunction would be different than this. Brian's brainlock meant that he didn't even get the chance to use any emergency procedures, and was much more likely to occur because of a lack of preparation.

Would it have definitely saved him? We'll never know. But it couldn't have hurt....

Everybody knows the two sports are the furthest dissimilar there is. One has "diving" in it's name while the other is "jumping"; it's like apples and elephants. That's why if you enroll in an FJC they will never ask or care about any SD experience, since it's soo irrelevant.

Absolute bullshit.

What is this, a sarcasm-free zone now?

Oops. Did that just go zooom over my head? If so - sorry.

I think the emoticons were a hint

I'm not a divemaster/scuba instructor. It could be easier to teach someone swimming the diver way if he/she has no background in swimming.

Is walking an impediment to running????????

After all, they are two different sports...


I need to be blunt here. The "people" who think skydiving is an impediment have no idea what they are talking about. There are isolated cases of extremely poor instruction where bad habits may have to be "unlearned", but overall, skydiving is a VERY crucial and useful stage of the development of a BASE jumper.

Anyone who thinks they cannot learn adequate/useful/prerequisite skills in skydiving are narrow minded, ignorant, individuals who you are better off steering clear of!!!!!

If you want technical details / risk analysis / arguments both for / against that are based on logical facts, feel free to email me or request as reply to this post.

With decent instruction, you can learn that in skydiving. In fact, you could safely simulate AND PRACTICE IT, if you really wanted to.

Or, you could talk about it when learning BASE jumping. Then, when it really happens, you could suss it out when you first experience it. You know, during that 0.25 seconds you have between opening and impacting the object you jumped off.

Of course it is better learning this during BASE jumping and not skydiving!!!!!


NOT.....

Speaking of attitude:

- you are referring to the fact that some people can be extremely competant at one sport and crap at another. This is true in BASE / skydiving.

- the other attitude that is worse is that prerequisites and cross skilling are useless.

Please do.

Kris.