From: bleck@aztec.ai.mit.edu (Olaf Bleck)
Newsgroups: rec.skydiving
Subject: Re: RW competitors
Date: 10 Sep 92 23:20:40 GMT
Reply-To: bleck@ai.mit.edu
Organization: MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory

In article <4621@disuns2.epfl.ch>, MORET@eldi.epfl.ch (SkyDive!) writes:
|> 
|> Hello !
|> 
|> Are some RW competitors on the net ?  I'm part of an 8-way team and it would
|> be nice to hear a little about competitions (results, techniques...). Is
|> there some interest for those things or not ?


Well, I did 2-way with Greg Galperin (2nd place by a false bust) at the
collegiates--does that make me eligible?

They had ground to air video there, so that's all I can talk about.

Basically, they have a couple of nice $40,000 cameras there with huge
lenses--a cessna takes up half the frame at 10,000ft.  You hop out, the
cameramen keep the camera on you (two separate cameras for redundancy), and
they make a pretty poor video of your silhouettes, with a time code and all. 
Later, three judges (or more) go and look at the video twice, first at full
speed, and then at half speed.  They individually score both the transition
and the point, as correct or incorrect.  The results from each judge is
compared, and wherever the simple majority has you scored as incorrect, you
get a bust.  A bust means that you loose the next n points until the
incorrect point comes around again.

So, here's what happened:  we had a three point sequence, and on one
transition on our second jump it looked like we did a grip switch.  What
happened was that our arms crossed over each other (not touching though), but
the quality of the video is too poor top make that out.  So, there was no
complete separation for that point, and it was scored a bust on the
transition, which cost us that point, and the next two.

So, we protested for a video review, and one official (names I don't recall,
but all of the USPA competition regulars) showed us the video.  She was very
reluctant to do any more than run it at half speed, but we prodded enough to
make her slow it down even more a few times, and there wa at least *one*
video frame that showed complete separation.  Nevertheless, the official
rules were that they look at it once at full, and once agian at half.

They rescored it, and oddly enoughm the second time they busted the point,
and not the transition, so clearly there was some good reason for contention.
Nevertheless, the bust stayed, and we pulled 2nd place by one point.

Now, on to techniques...

1) So.... what do you do about erroneous grip switches?  Before the
competition in fact, one of the judges explained a bunch of things to us in a
conversation Greg and I had with him.  Particularly, with video, whenever you
do a transition it is suggested that you do a "Hi Sheri", ("Hi"--cross your
arms in front of you, "Sheri"--uncross them), to wave to Sheri Scrimsher (sp?
sorry...), former chierf USPA judge.  This signals the judges that you
released your grips completely, even if there is this overlap on the video.

Afterwords, I took a look at some of my video collection with some hot teams
in them, and it looks like it's pretty standard to do--however, they only did
it in situations where there could have been the possibility of a grip
switch.  Take a cat to a reverse cat for example--clearly you can't grip
switch that.

2) Sequences do *not* have to be done relative to the ground.  That is, you
just have to execute the transition relative to the formation.  For example,
take a 2-way cat  to a star with a required transition where the stinger does
a 360, and the stingee does a 180 (direction as indicated in this particular
point).  


  |o|
  -|-    <- stingee-180 either way
  / \
  |o|
  -|-    <- stinger-360 left
  / \

Well, instead of doing that, with the resulting point coming out on heading,
what we did was the stingee turned say 135 degrees right and slid left, while
the stinger did a 225 left, and caught the stingee as he passed in front. 
Relative to each other, the transition is as indicated, but relative to the
ground, it's turned 135 degrees.  This eliminated any waiting that the
stingee had to, and kept the stingee flying at the stinger, thus adjusting
for any sliding in his "360" (note that this was the "100 jumps and under at
registration time" category).  Easily halved the transition time.

3) Get creepers!  The air force contingent brought their nice blue velour
(sp?) creepers paid for with yours and my tax dollars, and we managed to
borrow them for extensive periods of time.  They really helped us visualize
the dive much better insofar as our actual body positions, potential for
tangling with each other, etc., and we actually changed some of our
transitions based on screwups while using creepers.

Well, that's about all I can offer at this time, so good luck.

Oh, to give you an idea of what you need to do to be really good, the guys
from Deland Gang (Craig Buxton, Mark Hewitt, et al.) do 8 jumps a day before
2 o'clock--they have three rigs each, a packer, and video man, and they have
a TV in the plane for debrief.  So, they jump, land, grab new rigs, get in
the plane, de/rebrief, exit, land...  5 days a week.  What a job for the
packer, to pack 40 rigs before I usually make it to a DZ...

-Olaf