Thanks to Paul, I now have a picture of me under my canopy…Cool!

Jeremy coming in to land

As I previously wrote about, I just received my D-license yesterday. The D-license is awarded to applicants from the USPA who have achieved 500 skydives and a couple of other requirements. Anyway, my license number is D-29580. That means that I am the 29,580th person to receive my D license. To put that in contrast, the city of Minneapolis has 372,833 people alone. If you take all the people that have received a D-license, there is less than 10% of the population of a major city, and not even the largest major city. Now, it feels like I am in a small community even more. Imagine, walking around in Minneapolis and being able to talk to 1/10 people about skydiving, that would be pretty neat. Now spread those 29,000 across the US and imagine trying to converse in a sane manor with anyone about the sport of skydiving..

Of course, there is (maybe) more people in the US that skydive that don’t have 500 jumps yet or they don’t get their D-license period. However, if there is one license to get, it would be the D because that is the highest one that you can…so, I don’t know how many people there are that skydive in the US.

Another tidbit: According to here at the time of this writing, the US population is ~305,378,753. I am 0.0096863% of the population. Interesting.

In response to my last post, I just hit another milestone today..that is 200 jumps in a calendar year. I now have 200 skydives in ’08.

Let me look at my log books and break it down for comparison:

• 2008: (so far) 200 skydives
• 2007: 199 skydives
• 2006: 85 skydives
• 2004: 19 skydives (not including static-line, training jumps)

It is interesting to note that I was close to 200 last year, but I have had a much better year this year while being around home more often and spending more time with my girlfriend. I think I have struck a very good balance this year and I am very happy about that (not to say that it can’t be improved somehow?).

200 is an arbitrary number and has no real meaning, just a round number that is nice to see.

I know, cliche as this post may be…I remember all too well where I was on Sept 11th. US History class in 9th grade. Sitting in the desks watching CNN.

I think this is real touching and a very good job by Team Fastrax, a skydiving team of really experienced canopy pilots. Original post can be seen here on the PD blog. They are jumping at ground zero with 7 US flags of various sizes trailing thier canopies. The plan was to drop all the flags at the same time at approximately 10:30am ET, the time when Twin Tower two fell.

The team views this jump as a very special honor and a way to say thank you to the members of all the fire fighters, law enforcement, and military personnel, who have served to protect the freedom that we all enjoy.
Below is the list of jumpers and sized flags they will be jumping during this special event.

Travis Donley – 7800sqft
Stuart Schoenfeld – 3700sqft
Niklas Hemlin – 2000sqft
David Hart – 1100sqft
Dan Pangeti – 500sqft
David French – 500sqft
Robin Heider – 275sqft

Good job guys, times like this that make me proud to be associated with skydiving.

I spent the majority of last weekend skydiving with a video camera strapped to my head. This is not the first time but it was the first time trying to film a tandem skydive. It actually went really well. I kept the pair in frame the entire time, I got the entire exit including the plane leaving, and I also was able to flip on my back and film the deployment. Some things that I need to work on include conserving altitude, staying closer to the tandem pair (there was quite abit horizontal separation at first), and being able to fall slower. I need a baggier suit, which I am working on this week.

The guy that I videoed didn’t want to pay for a video, so I utilized it as practice time. My skills are no where near paying customer quality. Afterwards, we were watching that video and I was getting tips from the local experienced skydivers and the tandem passenger was watching as well. He liked it and wanted to “support my cause” and offered to buy it. I didn’t charge him full price but he even threw in a tip above what I asked him. Very cool.

Overall, it was a good learning experience. I think I will like flying video and hopefully I can get even better at it soon.

For those of you that don’t know, CouchFreaks is a skydiving boogie (party) held every year over Labor Day weekend in Fort Dodge, Iowa. They bring in Skydive Arizona’s Turbine Fleet of aircraft which is great lift capacity. Honestly, they could use one more turbine to solve the manifest delays but that would also create more problems.

Some personal highlights:

• NPSL Meet 4. Our team, Wissota Wild, finished in 2nd place for this meet and 2nd place overall. Whoever won this meet was going to win the overall standings. We had one bad round and it cost us. Congrats Team JETT
• PD was onsite and I got to demo 2 different canopies for 71% of my total jumps, that is 10 jumps on demos and 4 on my own canopy. Two fold, a) I didn’t put wear on my own canopy, b) The Katana is a very fun canopy, I wanna get one!
• AWESOME jumps, this year I made a point to make some off the wall jumps, including something called a “Tube Jump” and a “Magic Carpet” – The tube was insanely fun. 3×3, 9 person, that we rolled out of the back of the SkyVan.The tube spun forward about 3 times, backward about 1.5, stalled out, and then silo’d, estimated speeds of 150-160+ mph. It lasted until about 8000 feet until Marty let go of it. Then it broke up and people were scattered all over because we were going so fast.
• My first Caravan jump, kinda neat but not a plane to write home about.
• Oh yea, free beer 24x7

Good times had by all.