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!
Related:
Popular