Re: [base695] Base and the OODA Loop
base695 wrote:
Been thinking a bit about the OODA loop and how it could help prep our responses to SHTF.
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It obviously lends its self to use in the base environment....a 180 off a low building is a bit of a fight for ya life. The quicker and better you can go round your loop the better your chances for survival.
One interesting titbit about the ooda loop is that if you are subject to shocking/unexpected stuff happening you generally re-set and go back to the beginning of the loop. This means you might never get to the decide or act step if you keep hitting stuff...this might explain why some people freeze. So one lesson to take out of this is that you use the occurence of (multiple) impact to short circuit your own OODA loop and jump straight to Acting...maybe hard riser turn away. (not my idea, credit to Rory Miller author Meditation on Violence) Obviously some people do this anyway but not all, and its worth thinking about before you get into the situation.
Love your mention of OODA for BASE but not sure I concur with your latter conclusion.
As it says in the wiki article, "One of John Boyd's primary insights in fighter combat was that it is vital to change speed and direction faster than the opponent. This is not necessarily a function of the plane's ability to maneuver, rather the pilot must think and act faster than the opponent can think and act."
Applied to BASE, I see it this way: Your normal OODA (which includes the prep thrillseek mentions) is designed around what you _generally_ expect on the jump, i.e., a normal jump with no problems, with a sub-set of emergency procedures to deal with off-heading openings, lineover, object strike, etc.
If you're prepared ahead of time, when SHTF, you do sorta "re-set" to Observe but really, other than keeping your shoulders level, about all you can do during deployment is Observe anyway, so you really haven't left the Observe part.
What does happen, though, is that when one of the aformentioned subsets happens, you have to cycle fast through the Orient/Decide/Act parts and, as you said, a lot of peeps don't Orient fast enough to deal with a subset and then they "get behind the airplane" and things go from bad to worse instead of bad to better.
It happened to me at the royal gorge. Long story short, I had an opening problem that put me low heading toward a wall, then I had a toggle snaggle but instead of Orienting to this subset and deciding to fly straight down the tracks or even land in the river near a boat, I was still mis-Oriented for a "normal" jump and turned back toward the landing area and that resulted in a bad crash.
Basically, you're always in the Observe mode while you're jumping. what is most fluid is the Orient part because if you can't figger out what's going on, you can't Decide properly and then however you Act ends up making things worse instead of better.
On the flip side, I was just starting to flare on a skydiving landing when somebody cut across the flight pattern right in front of and below me. Talk about a "subset" of a normal jump!
Anyway, in this case I oriented instantly and flared harder and lifted my feet as high as possible at the same time and my heels slid cross the top of the canopy and both of us landed normally with do disturbance of our flight paths.
Having said all of this, I think you're really on to something here, and hope other readers will go to the wiki article and elsewhere and learn as much as possible about how to apply OODA to jumping because it really is an excellent framework on which to hang our procedures and thinking.
Good on ya, mate.
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