From: shibuya@bl.cad.slb.com (Hiroto Shibuya)
Newsgroups: rec.skydiving
Subject: US 1992 Nationals (LONG)
Date: 11 Nov 92 03:46:12 GMT
Reply-To: shibuya@bl.cad.slb.com
Distribution: rec
Organization: Applicon; Billerica, MA (USA)

United States National Skydiving Championship took place in Skydive
Arizona (Eloy, Arizona) from October 31st to November 6th.  Here are
some of the formation skydiving (RW) results (sorry I was not
followings other events and do not have the results at hand) and my
experience as novice competitor in the first (yes I bought my case)
competition, competing in intermediate 4 way and 8 way, and 10 way
speedstar.


10 WAY SPEEDSTAR

Competition started with 20 ways, which I was followed by 10 way
speedstar.  10 way is very interesting competion which you compete the
time of the completion of 10 way star from the time of exiting (when
any part of competitor are seen outside of aircraft, which was DC-3 in
this event) the aircraft.  For minimum completion time, serious 10 way
team takes chunk out of the plane, which is lined up in one line from
the small DC-3 door.  They wear special jumpsuit with all kinds of
weird grips and reenforcements, and they line up very tight, usually
taking almost a minute to line up, tighten up and get all the grips.
When they leave, tail of the line gets dragged off their feet and fly
out the door.  If it is successful, star gets completed in a few or
several seconds by grip switching.  If not, very wild funnel.  Almost
everybody must be wearing hard helmets.

Winner was team "Rush" from DeLand, including Tom Piras.  It was a
very rare opportunity to see Tom Piras jumping with Protec on, banging
his head against DC-3 door at practice exit.  He seemed quite into it.

Golden Knights and our team, having no special preparation for 10 way,
just line up tight, then freefly exit and build the star.  Knights
averaged about 12 seconds, which result in 3rd place.  Of course we
ended up last, but we had one round in about 15 seconds, which was
only 2 seconds behind Knights.


4 WAY FORMATION SKYDIVING

4 way was competed by 8 open class team and 16 intermediate teams.
Following is the result of 4 way open class.  After round 8, round 9
and 10 were competed by top 4 teams.

	Deland Vertical Speed	148
	Golden Knights Black	143
	Perris Airmoves		140
	Juggernaut		134
	Golden Knights Gold	 88
	Deland Debris		 87
	Ranch Bowlers		 79
	Perris Mario Bros	 52

Veritical Speed is a team from DeLand which include Jack Jefferies.  I
heared that one member of the team (very rich guy) is paying for all
the cost of the team, including the jump plane he owns, and pay salary
for the rest of the member.  They made 1000 practice jump this year.

Big incident in the 4way event was the "round 2", where every open
class team busted because of misinterpretation of rule and
misengineered the dive.  Round 2 start with two blocks,
blackhole->bipole and bipole->donut.  There is overlap of formation
between these blocks, so it is considered as 3 point block,
blackhole->bipole->donut.  Which was mentioned at the draw time and
most of the people didn't give a second thoughts.  Every team, except
for 2 intermediate team engineered this block to fly the same donut
piece for both transitions, so that one grip is always kept.  This is
against the rule.  Looking carefully at the blocks, one transition is
done with flying right hand donut piece, and the other with left hand
donut piece.  That means you have to switch piece partner.  The
mistake (almost) everybody made is that they mirror imaged one of the
block and merged into one 3 points block.  It is against the rule that
mirror imaging must be applied to whole block.  Highest point in this
round was 6 points, with bust penalty of 9 points!  It was amusing
that it slipped through all these world class competitors, but picked
up by two intermediate teams who were sensible enough to ask the judge
before the dive.

My intermediate 4 way team with about 100 team practice, was
completing about 5.5 points average, which were pretty much what I
expected, but with several busts, including the round 2, result in
less than 5 points and 15th place among 16 :-( Oh well, it was good
learning experience.


8 WAY FORMATION SKYDIVING

8 ways open class was boring as usual that Golden Knights won by 115
points, about the double of the second team, which was pick up team of
Deland Debris, Tom Piras, Jim Hotze, and a couple of others.

Intermediate 8 way was much more exciting although at much much lower
level.  At 5th round, there was one first place team, and remaining 4
teams were all at the second place with same score.  At 6th round, we
funnel the exit big time and thought we were off the race, but all
other team did equally bad, and we ended up at tied second place.
Next morning we did a jump off with the other California team to
determine the 3rd place.  We tied again.  Rule is that after one jump
off, if it is tie, the team with higher maximum score will win the
place.  But we were tied with that too.  When the score came out, they
extended the score board with 3 more rounds, telling us to go as far
as we want.  But fortunately, tie broke at next jump and we were
awared with Silver.  Cannot complain for the first national.


GOLDEN KNIGHTS

Many thanks to RW Golden Knights for helping out with 8 way.  They were
always helpful to anybody when we ask questions, showing us the
details of King Air exits and pretty much engineered the whole dives
for us.  Also I learned quite a bit about Knights which I didn't know
before.  First of all, they are not as lucrative as I believed.  They
have very limited budget, and Knights demo team is self sufficient
that their budget depends on income from their demo exibition.  They
were practicing out of contracted civilian Twin Bonanza (yes, that
shitty jump plane) this year.  They hated it.  Also I thought they 
have unlimited access to military wind tunnel, but in reality, they
are not allowed to use it at all.

Knights have some interesting preference.  They don't like booties,
although they are quite common among other top competitors. (Vertical
Speed, Airmoves, etc.)  One Knight said that he turns using his knees
quite a bit, and having booties put tension in the front of jump suit,
which limit the knee movement.  They don't use microline on their
Sabres.  They prefer dacron because of softer opening (more line
stretch, slider comes down slower) I was wondering why none of Knights
pull down their sliders.  I think they are using F111 slider because
they didn't sound that noisy.


COMPETION OPERATION

Judging of RW was quite controversial.  First of all, they were too
slow.  It took more than a good hour or two for them to come up with
scores.  Also quality of judging was low because they limit the
viewing speed to .5 times, and never something like frame by frame for
critical situation.  According to them, it is competitors
responsibility to display clear separation and complete grip at this
speed.  It is not reasonable because with something like 20 way, or
even 8 way, how can you reliably check all the grips without stopping
the frame?  According to Jack Jefferies, his team had a few bust which
was overlooked by the judges.

Quality of video people was questionable too.  There were 3 incident
where cameraman fell off the plane before exit.  One cameraman took
out Golden Knights in the middle of dive when he got too close to
their burble and fell into it.

One cause of the problem is that staff of the Nationals is miserably
under paid.  How can you attract quality camera flyer if they get paid
only $35 a day making about 10 very stressful camera jumps, hustling
to every load, packing themselves?  Pretty much same for manifest and
judges.  In the middle of 4 way competition, they had to shutdown one
of the King Air to allow video and judges to catch up.


KING AIR

Because of some negative comments, I was wondering about jumping out
of King Air, but I liked it a lot.  They had 2 of them, one was the
Skydive Arizona's latest addition, and one from SkyDance.  Very fast
to altitude, and slow enough on jump run.  Front floating was not bad
at all, and 5 floaters with a cameraman for 8 way exit was quite
manageable.  It was a little tight with three 4 way team (each with
cameraman) during the practice, but it was quite roomy when they
limited the load to only one 8 way team or two 4 way teams during the
competition.

*******

Overall, it was lots of fun.  During these 12 days in Eloy, I made 20
competion dives, about 20 practice dive and 10 or so fun dives.  Met
many new people, bumped into a several old friends.  It was also nice
to revisit Skydive Arizona which I visited at Coolidge 3 years ago,
when I had 30 jumps.

If you started to get bored with whatever skydiving you are doing
every weekend, if boogy jumping started to get not that exciting, want
challenge but cannot wait for next 300 way attempt, and if you
happened to have a few friends feeling the same way, make a team and
go to Nationals.  I assure you that it is fun and rewarding.

Hiroto