This Saturday I went back to Teuge for another day of jumping out of airplanes. The day started a bit foggy but windguru never failed me so far, so I knew that it would clear eventually. And so it did; around 11 clock in the morning I was part of the first load of the day in the Cessna Caravan, ready to jump.

I decided to try a new canopy this time and having jumped with 3 different 190ft canopies before (Sabre, Spectre, and Silhouette) I was curious about the Pilot, for I had been told it was a more progressive kind of wing. Turns out they were right: In the air I found it to be much faster to turn (and drop, in sharp turns) which is a lot of fun, but I also noticed a couple of things I didn't really enjoy:

Deployments. The deployment of the pilot are "fast and dirty". Compared to it the silhouette is very gentle and smooth; Landings. Compared to my previous experiences with other types, the pilot feels very unstable to me. I know I don't have a lot of experience (39 jumps) but I did notice the difference between landing the Silhouette and the Pilot.

Funny story: In the first jump I thought the hard/fast/clumsy deployment was due to the fact that, while packing, I forgot to wrap the "skirt" after putting the cells inside and right before putting the canopy on the floor to get the air out (packers should know what I mean) but I later noticed that this happened in every jump (not me forgetting that, the whole fast deployment ;)).

I had planned to jump 4 times but when waiting for the 4th flight this guy came to me and asked if wouldn't mind giving up my seat so he could go with a friend of his that was going on a tandem. The clouds were awesome (checkout the video) but, being his 2000th jump, I abode and let him go. The downside was that it was the last load of the day, but I figured I had just made someone really happy :)

Stuff I tried/trained in these 3 jumps include maintaining a stable sit fly for most of the jump and really getting down the details of my fall rate. It will really help the next time I jump with my friend Ricardo in my home DZ.

As a last comment I have to say that one of the loads was reaaaaaally full. Let's just say that my private parts were not too happy with that ride up. Enough said :(

Blue skies!