 Power Training By Jim Slaton
This article was written November 8th 2006 in response to discussions on these forums and questions presented through E-mails here at canopypiloting.com. The topic of this discussion is about understanding the "power band" in canopy swooping and answers surrounding some of the questions associated with powerband techniques. So, you have practiced maneuvers up high, you have practiced your set up down low and you have even set up a entry gate or a course to practice with. You have experimented with adding extra weight, using a RDS and have even tried larger rotation turns. Your swoops are improving but your learning curve has leveled off and you are looking for the next big tip, trick or inside information to give you an edge Before we get into this discussion lets cover some background. Hopefully, (unless you have been off the planet for the past 10-15 years) you realize that many swoopers have paved the road you are now on which took a lot of time, money, disappointment, heartache and among other things broken bones. We should all learn from others mistakes TRIAL AND ERROR Learning through the process of "trial and error" is as tough as it gets and has been around for as long as I can remember. It has played an important role in the evolution of our sport during what I like to call the "golden years" of swooping, which was between 1990 and 1998. During the Golden Years the Stiletto 97 owned the sky, a guy named Rickster Powell was the King of Swoop and "Anti-Gravity" was the number one video on the skydiving market which was available exclusively on VHS. Seriously, if you ever get a chance to pick up a copy of "Anti-Gravity" please do so and take a look at our sport in the late 1990s. Rickster Powell is a serious pilot and he was doing things that the skydiving community had never been seen before. Rickster was such a good swooper you would think he went to the best canopy schools, received the best coaching and trained at the best swoop park but this was not the case. Rickster had no canopy schools to attend, no canopy piloting coaches to call or expensive swoop parks to train at. Like most of us during the "Golden years" Rickster taught himself through "Trial and error". Rickster was known for swooping into aircraft hangers, kiting, swooping through obstacles (like Palm trees) but through trial and error he paid the price.The art of trial and error has one simple rule...."If you survive you will get better". With the advent of competition swooping and Blade running in 1996 the first factory team (Team Extreme) was born. From this team evolved a whole industry around swooping including swoop schools, sponsors, swoop websites, swoop clothing, swoop expeditions, ground launch rigs and more. More information is available today then ever before some of which was held top secret and exclusive to factory teams until now WHAT IS THE "POWERBAND"? "You need to turn high enough in your set up to hold your canopy in a dive long enough to build the full potential of the canopy (reach max speed)". Its very hard sometimes to explain canopy piloting techniques and procedures. Its hard to get the point across clearly. When talking about aerodynamics, parachute design parameters and flight techniques it can get even harder to explain! I will do my best to explain the "power band", what it means to me and answer some questions surrounding power band techniques. Understanding the power band and how to find it will help you reach your full potential when swooping. Lets get on with it then. What is the power band? Well, it can mean many things to many people and if you ask ten people that same question youre likely to get ten different answers. Learning the power band and how to use it is a great challenge to most. The power band is the spectrum of energy you can build between normal full flight and max speed. Think of a speedometer on your automobile. You can go from zero to the fastest your car will allow as long as you have enough road or in our case altitude. The vehicle decides how fast you can go but getting there and managing the vehicle is up to you. Max speed on your canopys speedometer will be the fastest you can get the parachute to go. Parachutes, just like the wings of an aircraft are designed so air flows faster over the top than the bottom. As the velocity of air increases the pressure decreases which builds a "low" pressure over the top of the wing and "lifts" the canopy upward. In simple terms, as you put your canopy in a dive using the front risers it starts to increase its speed and as the speed increases it builds low pressure and more lift over the wing. As more lift is generated the wing it is lifted upwards so you feel the front risers pulling upwards out of your hands. Some canopies have more front riser pressure than others generating higher front riser pressure. These canopies can be more demanding and require more technical skill from the pilot. Once a canopy reaches max speed it will have the most pressure over the wing and the max lifting force applied against the pilot controls. As the wing reaches this point the front risers that were used to put the canopy in a dive have most likely resumed to the full flight position. As the canopy continues to build lift during the turn and reach max speed it will want to recover through its own "recovery arch". Once the canopy gets to the base of its recovery arch it will return to level flight and start to decelerate. When the canopy returns to level flight from the recovery arch it begins its major deceleration process. One more time, "once the canopy gets to the base of its recovery arch it will return to level flight and begin the deceleration process". So, the power band is the spectrum of energy you can build between normal full flight and the max speed through the recover arch. To fly in your power band is to fly at the maximum speed into the swoop before any deceleration occurs. So as pilots we want to turn high enough to dive the canopy long enough to reach max speed but not start to decelerate until the canopy has reached the entry gate or the start of the swoop. If we do this we are considered to be "flying in the power band". If you reach your power band (max speed) and then decelerate before you reach the entry gate or at the start of the swoop then you are considered to have "flown through your power band". Did you guys catch that? The max speed and power band of each canopy depends on many things. This includes but not limited to wing size, wing shape and wing loading. The first thing a pilot must do when getting a new canopy, changing a canopy size or changing their wing loading is determine the performance envelope of the canopy. Did you catch that? This is accomplished by performing a series of "Performance drills" that we will discuss in detail later. THE LEARNING PROCESS Turning high enough in your set up to hold your canopy in a dive long enough to build the full potential of the canopy (reach max speed) is only half the game. Maintaining that speed you have built up all the way to the entry gate is another. Typically (hopefully) pilots learn these important skills as steps in the learning process. The order of the learning process is as important as the steps themselves. It will take a canopy pilot much longer to learn all the necessary tasks and how to apply them if learned out of sequence. This is very common with the "trial and error" process discussed earlier. What is the learning process? What we are talking about here is the main steps in getting the most from your high performance canopy while conducting high performance approaches. These steps include but are not limited to: 1) Find the Performance envelope of the canopy by conducting "performance drills" up high (search the forums at www.canopypiloting.com to learn more about "performance drills"). 2) Practice your set up with focus on accuracy by swooping over water, through a gate or some type of defined course (search the forums at www.canopypiloting.com to learn more about accuracy and the "course layout"). 3) Practice flying within your "power band" by appling the data and information learned up high during the performance drills. Pilots should apply all data a little bit at a time during the learning process as building blocks towards reaching the power band. 4) Maintain the speed after reaching the powerband by using different flying techniques during the set up and turn (like harness turns). 5) Fly efficiently in order to maintain the most performance from your canopy during the final stage of the landing.... the swoop. It is a shame to conduct all the steps above only to have the swoop spoiled in the last phase by not flying efficiently. This is one of the areas most commonly ignored during the swooping process. This can be accomplished with things like a proper body position (see November photo of the month at www.canopypiloting.com, a controlled release (search the forums at www.canopypiloting.com for "controlled release"), good rear riser use, control input release sequence, flare timing, etc. Think about it all for a minute, we have collapsible sliders, removable sliders and removable deployment bags but yet we come in with our legs straight out and body wide open. The benefits of applying all the steps at the correct time in the correct sequence should be obvious. If a pilot has not trained enough in all the above areas then they may be forced to focus too much in one area distracting them from other important steps! For example: you must first practice your accuracy at your set up point before power training. Flying within your power band wont mean much if you miss the entry gate and get a zero! Lets break it all down for you and see how power training can work for you. Think about how long your average turn takes from the initiation point (SUP: set up point)......4,5,6 seconds? How long is your recovery arch after completing the turn...0.5,1, 1.5 seconds? How long are you swooping across the ground or through a course.....3,4,5, seconds? Nick Batsch's recent 665ft swoop with his JVX is a good example that I will use here. Nick's distance run was only a few feet short of the current FAI world record so it is safe to say that it is one of the longest swoops on record... especially in time. We have several different video angles from the competition which show every part of his set up which is available to you for viewing at www.canopypiloting.com Keep in mind that the video was filmed from a 30ft high air traffic control tower next to the competition course at around the 600ft from the entry gate. If you review the video and count the seconds in time your self please understand that the original footage was slowed down about 30% in postproduction for our online viewers (swoopers like to watch set ups slowly). Your probably asking..."what does all this 3 second 4 second stuff have to do with the power band or flight techniques"? Among other things, this number crunching process takes the "guess work" out of your approach, set up and landing so you can refine your set up. Nick was doing a multiple rotation turn from about 1100ft, which took about 4-5 seconds during the dive, 1.1 second during the recovery arch and about 6-7 seconds during the swoop across the ground. This is all very important data and tells the story for those paying close attention. Pilots can use this information to compare data and crunch the numbers giving a better idea of not only Nick's set up but also his "power band". Here is the data from Nicks record runRotation: Multiple rotation turn.Altitude: 1,100ft.Diving time: 4-5 second turn.Recover time: 1.1 second during recovery arch.Total time: 6-7 seconds We cannot tell whether or not Nick was flying within his power band because we do not have his data from his performance drills but that is not the point here. If Nick performed his performance drills up high ahead of time then he knows the performance envelope for the canopy he is flying and he has the important data for number crunching process. Armed with this information he would know if he was flying "in" or "out" of his power band. He could then make all the necessary corrections with his set up to get the results he was looking for. I want to be clear here, making the entry gate has to do with "accuracy" not the "power band". The topic of this discussion is "power training", not accuracy, which is a totally separate topic. Scoring the entry gate and going into the swoop with max speed is what we are talking about here! So, if you do your performance drills up high and determine that the max time you can hold your canopy in a dive is 6-7 seconds and your losing about 700-800ft during that turn then the first thing you are going to do is make sure you have the correct data. This can be accomplished by conducting the performance drills many times over the course of dozens of jumps. Remember, we are trying to take the guesswork out of the process so we need to know for sure. Yes, you will probably know after just a few jumps but it will help you now to know for sure. You are then going to take the data and use it as a starting point in your set up. The altitude of the turn, the deviation of the set up point (offset left or right) and distance from the gate is common set up considerations. You are going to keep your distance to the gate and deviation the same based on your accuracy training. Your altitude and rate of turn is what youre changing at this point. You are going to try and apply the 6-7 second rate of turn and 700-800ft loss in altitude to your set up. Remember, a slower turn is a wider turn and you might have to change your set up point to compensate for this. For example: if I do not offset enough to compensate for the slower, wider turn then I might come out of the turn off line and have to make a last minute correction to get myself into the gate. I will apply the 6-7 second 700-800ft turn to my set up and see how it goes. It would be smart for you at this point to add a little bit of a buffer to your altitude and add 100ft to make it 900ft total. So you will attempt to reach your set up point at 900ft. There are many signs that will tell you if youre flying in your power band or not The feel of the risers and their position during the turn. Release point of the front risers. Do you have to suddenly release the front risers or make an input to bring yourself under the wing to make the gate? The sound of the parachute, the deceleration process sounds much different than the acceleration process. The harness pressure. Watch videos of your swoops shot from "inline" with the entry gate. Above all, you must compare the data and crunch the numbers. How do your numbers down low compare to the performance drills up high? I think it would be helpful at this point to list the average and max set-ups from pilots on the Pro Swooping Tour AVERAGE PST SET UP TYPE OF TURN: 270 degrees ALTITUDE: 800ft/270m DISTANCE: 200ft/65m DEVIATION: Offset 30ft/10m RATE OF TURN: 6 seconds ULTRA PST SET UP TYPE OF TURN: 630 degrees ALTITUDE: 1100ft/375m DISTANCE: 400ft/135m DEVIATION: Offset 100ft/33m RATE OF TURN: 9 seconds By conducting performance drills up high and number crunching down low we put to rest many questions and myths about canopy swooping including question #1. "Is a larger rotation turn better than a smaller one?" well I guess that is matter of opinion but consider this. If you do your performance drills up high and figure out that the longest you can hold your canopy in a dive is 7 seconds then your power band is 7 seconds. What is the difference then between a 450 with a faster 7 second rate of turn or a 270 with a slower 7 second rate of turn...nothing! If your power band is 7 seconds then you have 7 seconds to work within your window. The size of rotation of the turn mostly comes down to which turn you are most accurate with and another important angle. A smaller turn must be slower and if the turn gets too small then the rotation must stop. If during the turn the rotation stops the canopy will want to recover which makes for a more difficult set up and youll be tracking across the ground in the direction of the stop. A larger rotation turn enables pilots to turn higher and dive longer. The larger rotation pretty much guarantees that the pilot will have enough altitude to reach their power band (max speed) each time but they will need to maintain that speed to the gate. Pilots that have not practiced addition flight techniques like a controlled release or harness flying will have to resort to a smaller rotation turn at a lower altitude. These is due to the fact that every time they turn higher they cant hold their canopy in a dive long enough or maintain their speed to the gate. In this scenario the canopy starts to recover early causing them to plane out high or fly through their power band. Like I said before, reaching your power band is one thing but maintaining that speed is another. I hope this helps to put things in perspective. Pilots no longer need to learn through trial and error. Here are a few departing reminders about power training Learn the performance envelope of your canopy. Conduct performance drills. Dont skip steps in the learning process. Breakdown youre set up and approach each time. Visualize your set up and approach. Take out the guesswork. Do the math and crunch the numbers. Expect the unexpected. Until next time.Jim |
