Cleared Hot - Powered By BRCC - Full Auto Friday - Round 116 - Fyre and Iceland

Episode Date: July 29, 2022

Traditionally Fridays are for Q and A... Today, as promised a look back at a failed skydiving trip to Iceland through the lens of lessons learned, leadership, planning, execution, and expectations. Hopefully, someone can learn from our experience, or at the very least not repeat our mistakes. Enjoy

All right, ladies and gentlemen, here we go. A little deviation for our normal Friday programming. Usually, as I'm sure people listening to this, no, on Fridays I do Q&A. But, as promised, last Friday, I'm going to do a little bit of a debrief of a skydiving evolution slash event I went to in Iceland. And it didn't turn out the way that I wanted it to. And that's okay, because we're still going to accomplish the goals that we hit. set out to. We're just going to have to get a little bit creative. But largely, the reasons that it didn't work out were based in leadership and planning. Now, I should basically say that this episode was brought to you by those two things, leadership and planning. And I'll probably mention this at the end. If you're more interested in learning about that, very infrequently,

I will go and actually do events in purpose, in person. I'm getting ready to do one on the 6th of August in Dallas, Texas with Mike Glover. So I will put the link to that if you live in that area or can make it. It's one day, August 6th, 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. And we're going to be talking about actually quite a few things that directly dovetail into my experience in Iceland, not all of them. But planning, execution, contingencies, and what you should expect from your leaders is all going to be covered.

I'm going to shut the fuck up. Let's get into this. fall auto friday ish i guess 116 the debrief of iceland here we go i'm looking at danger close now all right everybody let's dig into this um first and foremost i'm actually glad that i didn't sit down and do this right after we got back from iceland because i was pretty hot i was pretty heated about what had happened and i'm glad now that i have a few weeks behind me to chill out a little bit and come to a better headspace because like I mentioned in the intro at the end of the day I think we're going to be able to accomplish the goal that we wanted to originally

we were going to do 16 jumps we were able to accomplish four now we were going to dedicate each of those jumps to a fallen soldier but there's no reason why we can't dedicate each of the four jumps we were able to do to multiples and continue our fundraising efforts which was actually what the trip was all about. So I had partnered up with Mike Sorrelli. We discussed this a little bit on the podcast that he and I did together recently. I can't remember the number of it for the life of me right now, but you could go back and check it out. It's worth a listen. He's a fantastic guest. But we decided we were going to do a fundraising trip to Iceland. It didn't work out the way that we wanted to. And like I said, I was heated. And what I wanted to do was go chapter and verse, name by name.

And that's not the move. That's not who I am. I would have felt pretty good about myself had I done that. And it wouldn't have aged well. And at the end of the day, the person that would have been the asshole in that situation would have been me. So instead, what I'm going to try to do is talk broadly about what happened at the event. If people have specific questions, they can email me and I will answer them to the best of my ability. but I am just not the type of person that wants to directly go after individuals on this particular medium,

given that I host it, and that's just not who I want to be. But there are things that can be learned, and they're going to be based around planning, communication, and when I say planning, mostly contingency planning, communication, and then just how you should behave as a leader and things that you should expect from leaders. So the biggest mistake that I personally made, and I'm going to open with, this because I think it's important is that what I wanted to accomplish on that trip and the planning that Mike and I did on that trip was based on assumptions and that is my fault. You can definitely plan based on assumptions, but you have to know that you are doing so.

And you have to know that things can change and they can audible. I did not plan based off thinking that the information we had or the template that we were trying to create was based off of assumptions. And that is completely and utterly my fault. Now, we did reach out for some additional information and the communication was not awesome back and forth. They were planning an international event, so I get that. But us really driving forward without identifying and communicating with each other before we got over there that, hey, we're actually basing a lot of this on assumptions. that was an error on our side of the house. And throughout me talking about this, I'll be very open and honest,

as I am just in general about when and where I make mistakes because I learn from them and I hope that other people can shorten their learning curve and not repeat the mistakes that I have made. So that was a big one. And this is a big one for planners or anybody who's looking to accomplish something. Just make sure that you can recognize and identify when the plan that you are creating is wholly or partially based off of assumptions. And like I said, it can be done.

You just need to know that that's the case and that you're going to need to be ready to audible. Now, I'm going to be talking about skydiving. And I'm going to be critical of some things that happened when we were over in Iceland. And because of that, I'm going to at least lay out a broad background of my own experience in the skydiving world,

military and civilians. So people have an understanding of where I'm coming from and where the critique comes from and the experience that is tied to that critique. So I've been jumped for over 20 years, I think about 23 years at this point. And on the civilian side of the house, I have my tandem qualification, my AFFI, which is accelerated free fall instructor, teaching new people how to jump out of an airplane on their own. Tandem is, of course, attached to somebody else.

I have my pro rating, which allows me to do demonstration jumps into very confined areas or very open areas, depending on what the event may require. And with that, I think, comes the coach rating as well. And I'm not exactly sure what that does because I've never really done any coaching. I like teaching, but I've never been like a load organizing like, hey, everybody, come over here, whatever the fuck that actually does. On the military side of the house, I hold every military or held, I should say, all past tense, because I've been out for a long time, every military air qualification that was available.

I had my tandem. I had my MFFI, which is the same thing as an AFFI, but it's just military students. I held my Air Ops trainer examiner. And before that, you have to be an Air Ups trainer. And I think there's three steps along the way. I held my tandem trainer examiner, my video qualification. I went back and I instructed both in selection courses as an instructor teaching people to jump out of airplanes at the tandem course, teaching people how to do the MTDB program, which stands for military tandem tethered bundle course, which starts with jumping passengers. I did as much as I could in the air world on the military side of the house.

I was part of a team that developed the jump tactics for Afghanistan, very remote drop zones. I have hundreds of off DZ jumps up to and including after even getting out of the military, planning, hosting, conducting a 30-day course in austere operations and unknown DZs, where we were super backcountry Wyoming doing unknown DZs with relatively inexperienced jumpers for almost 30 days. It was one of the coolest jump trips that I've ever done. And the point in saying all of this is jumping out of an airplane and landing somewhere that is not an airport, which is actually what most skydivers have the most experience doing. So there are, you can get thousands of jumps. Let's say I had continued to live in San Diego and I was jumping at skydive San Diego, which is a phenomenal drop zone in southeastern San Diego.

They have a great tandem program, a great AFF program. I recommend anybody who wants to get into the sport to go there. Jeff, the owner is a fantastic person. I lived maybe 10 miles away at best, probably less than that. And I could have gotten 10,000 jumps in years, a matter of five years or less. That would be tough, but let's say it took 10 years. I could have gotten 10,000 jumps at Scottive, San Diego. And I would say the vast majority, the high 99th percentile would have looked at

looked exactly the same, meaning you take off from the same runway, you take the same climb to altitude. It looks exactly the same when you're leaving the aircraft because the aircraft jump in and run in is identical. The landing pattern that you're going to do is identical. So I might have 10,000 jumps and I might be an experienced skydiver. But that does not necessarily correlate or give me the ability to leave that very controlled environment and start jumping into places that have variable altitudes, variable wind condition, obstacles on the ground, let alone the ability to determine where your landing zone is from the aircraft,

spotting the aircraft, knowing when to leave the altitude with the winds aloft. As you can tell, it's a relatively complicated geometry problem. This is not a one-plus-one thing. We're starting to get into some very formulaic stuff, which is actually not that complicated if you have some experience. So the event that we were supposed to be doing had multiple locations per day that we were going to be jumping into, which I don't look at as a big deal at all. There's nothing it's crazy about jumping into those other areas,

as long as they are well briefed and the people getting out of the aircraft know what to expect. There was going to be some varying landing altitudes and wind conditions, which also don't have to be that big of a deal. You can brief the different altitudes between each jumps, between each jump, between each jump. And the wind condition, you know, there's a couple ways that you can show wind on the ground that you can see from altitude all the way up in the aircraft and then under canopy. You'll have what I'll call static displays, which would be like a T or a V, usually made out of an orange panel. And it'll really help somebody spotting the aircraft actually identify like, oh, that's exactly where we need to land. and then they have more of a dynamic indicator, which they did have both of these at the event.

And that would be something like a smoke grenade. Another thing you could have would be like a wind sock or a wind blade that can give you a little bit of an idea of velocity, but also with the direction. So we had both of those. And that's why I say it doesn't necessarily have to be that big of a deal. But we'll talk about how this comes back into communication here in a little bit. The one issue that I would say concern me a little bit from the initial brief we had the very first night is that there were varying levels of experience. And they weren't necessarily addressed. The organizer, the main organizer and founder, I'm jumping to the end here a little bit, claimed that he had vetted everybody at the event and that they had a minimum of 200 jumps.

And I'll get back to that towards the end. What I'm talking about, that particular individual and his behavior in a leadership position. It doesn't have to be an issue, but it can be an issue if it isn't managed. So that's kind of the layup going into this thing. Jump number one, the very first day. I was actually on, so in the skydiving world, you often hear aircraft. if there are multiple aircrafts that are going to be full of jumpers, they'll often call them loads. So load one, load two, load three, load four.

That's what we had on the particular trip. I was on load one. And early on on the first day, I was asked if I would help spot the aircraft, which I thought was a little bit odd because I was there as a paying participant and not somebody who was actually supposed to be working at this event. I knew almost nothing about the areas that we were going to be going into other than the brief survey that I had been. been shown on the phone an overhead image of where we were going to be jumping in the rough jump run. I'm not aware of any of the planning that went into it. I didn't have the altitudes. I didn't have communication with people on the ground. But the request on the first jump seemed to be as like, okay, I mean, I'm going to be the first person out of the aircraft. I am interested

in landing where I want to, where I want to land and not getting hurt and having a great trip. I'm interested in everybody else doing the same thing. So sure, no problem. There were extremely high wind conditions that were forecast. I'd say over 20 knots. Gusting to when I was on the ground, I would say very close to 30. For my load, for load one, I landed just, I think it was just south of the T. And the vast majority of the people that were on my load landed within a short walk, if not on the drop zone.

And I tried to communicate back an updated release point, meaning when the aircraft, it dropped off our load of jumpers, and then it went back to the airport in Recovic, picked up load two. And in that time, it should be, if you have systems in place, plenty of opportunity to say, hey, this is where we exited the airplane. But based off of where everybody landed, perhaps that you will want to go land, I'm sorry, not land. You will want to exit the aircraft somewhere else. Maybe move it 500 yards or meters or a mile or whatever metric you want to use, as long as it's standard. Bump east, bump west, get out a half a mile beyond. DZ and your group is going to have a much higher chance of successful landing on the drop zone,

uninjured, having a good time. So I tried to update a landing point. And at this point, even after the, you know, I had only done one jump, I started to have some concerns about the planning, coordination and communication that was underpinning the event. The updated release point was miscommunicated back to the jump master for load two. Now one thing that is the lifeblood of operations like this is communication. And day one, like just basic day one shit when it comes to conducting jump operations is the ability to talk from somebody on the ground to somebody up in the airplane. Because as we were watching, I was already on the ground. I had repacked my parachute by the time the second, the same aircraft, but it was the second load came back.

And you can hear them and I was able to spot the aircraft. And really rapidly looking at it, it's like, oh shit, what are they doing over there? That jump run isn't correct. And then you start seeing little black specks exit the aircraft. Those black specks eventually turned into parachutes and those parachutes disappeared on the horizon. So every single person from load two and load three landed miles, miles. miles away from that intended drop zone because we could not get a hold of the aircraft from the ground and say, hey, hey, hey, hey, stop. Don't let the jumpers get out. Re-correct. Extend your jump

run, come back. You know, whatever it is that you would need to tell them to actually get them to release jumpers in the right location. So huge error in planning right there. The inability to communicate even directly back to the other jump masters. I don't know what was passed back to them, but it terminated in the aircraft flying in a location that they shouldn't have been in about 28 jumpers over the course of two loads landing miles off drop zone. Now, in addition to that, three jumpers from that second load actually landed across a river. And when I say river, I'm not talking about something that you could frolic across and jump between rock to rock. I'm talking about a fucking river of glacial melted water, glacially iced melted water.

I don't even know if it would have been survivable immersion in that water because I think it was just above freezing. But what I do know is that nobody, at least in any of the briefings or meetings or pre-information leading up to the trip, was asked whether or not they have the ability to swim, which again is day one shit. If you are going to be doing jump operations near water, if there is even the chance that you are going to be doing a jump operation that could turn. terminate in somebody landing in the water. You had better fucking figure out whether or not the people that are skydiving know how to swim in case something goes wrong. But I digress. It was a matter of hours before those jumpers were collected again. And I actually have no idea how they were communicating to the load master from their load or to anybody else that they were okay.

Because I didn't realize because I wasn't told, nor do I believe anybody on the drop zone was that they were actually. separated for the group or from the group for a few hours, which raises the hair on the back of my neck. There's good cell service all throughout Iceland for anybody getting if they want to go there or thinking about going. And I'm going to detach real quick from the actual discussion of the jump operations. Iceland is one of the most amazing countries I've ever been to. Strikingly beautiful. Basically every turn that you go around is a postcard. Great cell service, fantastic food, Airbnb's lodging. It was amazing. So if you're thinking about going, holy shit, don't waste, don't waste your time thinking about it. Book it and get over there. That was amazing. So,

okay, back to the jumping. People scattered absolutely everywhere. There is good cell service, like I mentioned, but there were no, a lot of people overseas, and for people in the U.S., I'm sure most of you've heard of WhatsApp, but actually a lot of people in foreign countries rely upon WhatsApp. It's really easy to make a group inside of WhatsApp. None of that. was actually done that I'm aware of prior to these jumps going down. I think they were starting to do that at day two, three, four, and beyond, which we were already detached from the group. But like I mentioned, there was no inner group comms. There was sporadic communication back and forth to the other loadmasters. And the critical air, there is no communication between the aircraft and somebody on the

ground. Now, this was brought up the first day to the main person who founded this event. And it's actually, it's a very simple, very cheap radio shack or whatever the equivalent of radio shack would be solvable problem. You get a radio that is capable of talking on the same frequency as the aircraft or you get two radios and you put one up in the aircraft and one on the ground and problem solved. It would take a few hours, but it might save you a lifetime of a headache in case something happens to somebody and you're not able to communicate. So that was jump one. I already saw a little bit behind the curtain. I was going on with Jump 1 and hoped that because I had a data point, and if you're,

uh, follow 30 seconds out, I think he has a patch and a sticker that say hope is not a good strategy. Very, very good point. It's not. But I hoped that since I only had one data point that this data point was going to change as things went on. I'm like, you know what? Rough start.

Things will get better. But they didn't. So a Jump 2 was actually into where we were going to. to be sleeping that night and the jump itself was relatively easy we got out lower due to a cloud cover flew directly to where we were going to land landed into the direction that the wind indicator was showing packed up our stuff and we waited for the subsequent aircraft to show up I tried to pass information back again and there was another miscommunication it would actually be hard for me to describe how that necessarily played out but it the termination of it

was a jumper essentially nearly landed on a glacier that was nowhere near where the intended landing zone was supposed to be because they got out of the aircraft at the wrong spot. But what concerned me on the second jump, and I talked a little bit about this when it comes to wind indicators on the ground, something that's static like a T or a V and something that is much more dynamic or living like a wind sock, a wind blade, or smoke. It's really important when people are landing under parachute that they follow a predictable and consistent pattern. And you'll hear it in terms of a left-hand approach or a right-hand approach. And it means you make left-hand turns as you are approaching where you're going to land or right-hand

turns approaching where you're going to land. Probably people who have never even jumped can understand that it would be good if everybody does exactly the same thing. Everybody should land into the wind. Everybody should make their turns the same direction so you don't have people turning towards each other. It's very consistent. It's very predictable. And the more predictable the first jumpers down to the ground are, the more that the jumpers who are still in the air under canopy watching, the more informed they can be and they can actually have even better landing patterns. But what I saw were people shifting the wind indicators once jumpers were already under canopy, the static one, the T, and moving it, which is going to change the behavior of people

that are in the air, sometimes at a very last minute position, so they may not be able to change accordingly. But what ended up happening is we had dueling canopy patterns. So essentially, imagine yourself on a one-way road and you see a set of headlights coming at you. That's what a dueling canopy pattern is. You are looking directly at somebody else who is flying in the same direction, or I'm sorry, they're flying in 180 degrees the same direction. So you are head on with them both trying to land at the same place on the drop zone. It doesn't take a rocket surgeon to realize that that shit's dangerous, collisions, turns to avoid each other low to the ground, which can lead to injury. It's an absolute nightmare. And actually, for people who don't know in the

skydiving world, almost every fatality and injury occurs under a perfectly functioning piece of equipment, meaning a poor decision is made generally at a lower altitude, usually with a turn and they impact the ground. If I was flying directly at somebody low to the ground and my choice was to be either to hit them and wrap up with them and perhaps become fatally engulfed or make a turn. I would probably make a turn as well. But what if they turn in the same direction? As you can imagine, it's a nightmare. It makes your asshole completely watertight on the ground watching this. It's, again, day one shit. And it goes back to briefing and communicating with your people. Letting them know the standard that is expected. All approaches will be the same.

On this jump, it's all going to be left-hand approaches or right-hand approaches. We will not have dueling canopy traffic. If the T and the smoke disagree, which can happen because sometimes winds shift a little bit, which one are you going to follow? The static T or the dynamic one. Well, neither of them are necessarily a wrong answer, but everybody in the fucking air needs to be on the same sheet of music and have that same answer. So it kind of led to a contentious but not really clarifies.

meeting that evening. Then it gets me to the point of communication when it comes to leadership and planning. Communication is your absolute lifeline. Now to briefly tangent off of this on the third jump, which is the next morning, a link or a broken link, I should say, in communication was highlighted again because there was a woman who broke her leg on landing. She didn't do anything wrong. The winds were just a little bit higher than probably expected. I think she was probably flying backwards under canopy given her wing loading. But she was out to field for 20 minutes trying to get a hold of somebody and ended up WhatsApping somebody in load two who ended up WhatsApping somebody in load one, which finally

got the information to the people that needed it. And they launched, and I use this extremely lightly, the medical team. Imagine being that person, 20 minutes. trying to get help and not being able to get it. Communication. It's the lifeline of operations like this. It has to be clear. It has to be concise and it has to be understood.

People should never leave a brief or an after action review with questions. That's your time where you can't, I hate to militarize terms, but the term that we used to use the military was commander's intent. That's the time where you have to explain the intent to ask for questions, to make sure that everybody has a sheet of music and that it's exactly the same and we're all reading it from left to right as opposed to right to left which i'm not sure you ever do that with music but i hope people can understand the example clear concise and most importantly understood by everybody that is in the room all right jump four this is going to tie me back into contingencies when it comes to planning i'm sure i've said this before in the podcast especially when it comes to talking about uh excuse me

Movies. Movies focus on shit blowing up and bullets and, you know, all the stuff that can be exciting and fun. I guess unless you get hit by either of those. What they don't show is how much time is actually spent in the mission planning process. I'd say 72 hours. I mean, and there are, trust me, there are times where you're briefing in 30 minutes with a sharpie pen on a wall, and that can work depending on your background and experience in the unit that you are with. But a 72 hour planning cycle is standard.

the vast majority of that time is spent identifying contingencies because it is possible to make all of your critical decisions before they actually become critical. And that is exactly what you want to do to relieve burden on a battle space commander or an event leader in a situation like this. do not ever put yourself into a situation where something happens or do the best that you can to not do this to put yourself in that situation where you're now in an emergency and you're trying to figure out what it is that you should do and you're trying to figure out what are your options do everything you can to war game scenarios and events so that you've already thought through those things so it's no longer a decision you're following a branch diagram okay this happened and we've already about this. Did this happen? Yes. Okay, do that. Did this happen? No. Okay, do that. I don't even have

the vocabulary to describe how much that reduces the burden on leadership. Military, civilian, event, on a mission, it doesn't matter. Make critical decisions before they become critical. Contingency planning is the key to that, and that is the what ifs. Primary, secondary, tertiary, first, second, and third plans. We had that for talking about, you know, landing up or jump operations we had that for landing areas on military jump operations for wind indicators we'd have static we would have a backup of smoke grenades and a backup to those smoke grenades we would have windsocks uh comms what if we don't have comms let's say the radios do fail is there a way that we could signal to the aircraft that you know what we realize

that we don't have comms but we want to execute the jump operation do we have a way to signal to them like whatever you do do not drop and you can think your way through these things Medical options. You know, what options do we have if this type of injury occurs? What options do we have? Do we need to make sure we have if it becomes a risk to life, limb, or eyesight? Food and water requirements, et cetera. And it just goes on and on and on.

I'm not saying you have to have three options for everything, but it's not a bad starting place. So jump four, second jump of the day. We were briefed that there was going to be an altitude offset. And for people who are jumpers, you'll understand that with modern equipment and modern altimeters, or even older ones, I should say, that requires some modification to your equipment. So if you are going to jump into a drop zone that is in this instance, it was nearly 800 feet higher than where we were taking off,

you need to make adjustments not only to your altimeter that you're going to wear on your wrist. So when you look at the numbers, they're actually commensurate with the altitude that you're at. But if you're going to jump with an AAD or automatic activation device on your reserve, they are set to fire at specific altitudes. And they are not capable of determining, oh, well, you're taking off lower and you're going to be landing higher. It doesn't work like that. And the inverse doesn't work either. Oh, I'm taking off higher and you're going to be jumping lower. So let me do that math for you.

No. It's a digital system, but it's analog, meaning that the user needs to go in and change the settings. once you change those settings they are locked in until you change them again or until it recycles itself depending on the product that you have when it goes off at the end of the night and turns itself back on my point in saying all this is altitude adjustments or having an offset between where you take off and where you land if it's 50 feet you're going to be okay if it's 800 feet you need to make sure that everybody has their shit dialed or it could lead to very serious issues. So we take off after making the adjustments, fly to the primary drop zone. And I'm not even

going to use the term primary drop zone. Because I wasn't aware that there was an alternate. Completely clouded over. I think I saw the T for like half of a second. There was absolutely no way. And the clouds appeared to be very low, maybe at two or three thousand feet at most above the landing area. So people would have been opening up into the clouds with no way to orient the direction to go. Not the most awesome experience. I've done it. plenty of times by accident. It sucks. And you basically pick a direction and you go, you know what, I hope I'm lucky today. And every single time I've done that, I also haven't been lucky as a side. Decided that we're not going to go and jump. I told the person that was supposedly running the aircraft.

I'm like, listen, I can't see the drop zone. And he says to me, let's jump into the alternate. And I had a bunch of questions at this point. Primarily among them were, what the fuck are you talking about? There was no alternate DZ that was briefed. But then immediately after that, what's the altitude of the alternate in what direction is the wind coming from? And a phone was produced that showed a little bit of an overhead image of where we could jump into. And it was a little bit more linear because it was an old grass runway with a structure that was on top of it. I had never seen it before and I could not get the answers on the altitude and the wind indication. So gave people the choice, the person who was running the aircraft, gave people the choice.

to either stay on the aircraft and land because the plane was going to land at that grass runway or they could exit. So we spotted and I got out making a guess as to what the winds aloft were doing. I was incorrect. We actually exited downwind as opposed to upwind, which is not what you want to do. I recognized that when we were in free fall, deployed my canopy higher because of that. And I was unsure of the information I was receiving about the altitude of the DZ. So I pulled higher, turned my canopy into the wind, made it right back to the drop zone.

Not that big of a deal. But it could have been. Landed on the drop zone and my altimeter said negative 790, meaning that let's say I had gone to my normal pole altitude, which would have been, I'll use 3,000 feet. If it read 3,000 feet, in reality, I was only at 2,200. Let's say I had had a malfunction and I had burned it dead. and say maybe I'll go to 2,000 feet before making my go-no-go to execute a emergency procedure in cutaway. Well, I wasn't actually at 2,000 feet. I would have been at 1,200 feet. The computer attached to your reserve doesn't give a shit if you make a mistake when it comes to inputting information. So in this situation, had somebody gotten behind the power curve

and ridden through their decision-making altitude, your go-no-go hard deck from when you need to cut away your main and fire your reserve? With a mis-set or inappropriately set AAD, it would be very easy to burn through the altitude in which that would fire. And the next thing you know, you have a main canopy out and a reserve canopy out. And if they entangle, you are proper fucked. And the survivability of that is not something that I know. But it's not very high. I can't give you a mathematical one on that.

Sometimes they don't entangle and they'll fly side by side or in a biplane configuration, neither of which are awesome. haven't experienced both. Survivable. If they entangle, though, you're fucked. And this to me was a huge safety issue. Also, when we landed there, there was no water of any kind. There was no facilities of any kind. There was no food of any kind.

Mike and I actually went and remedied the water situation for the group because it was the right thing to do. And that's neither here nor there. But if you're ever in a place where you can do something good for others, fucking do it. but at that point based off of my experience and what I had seen

I was very heated and if I'm being honest I didn't have one of my greater moments and I did in fact twist off a little bit I'm not a yeller I'm not a screamer but I gave some very direct

not polite feedback to one of the organizers and then from there Mike and I escalated that to the founder and the original creator of the event. And it was everything that happened before this debrief in communication with the founder and then his behavior that got me over the edge of realizing that I could no longer be a part of an organization like that. I talk a lot about, you know, when I did the opening, I talked about the seminar that

Mike and I are going to do in Dallas on the 6th of August. I spent a lot of time talking about leadership characteristics and behavior that we are screening for and that we demand out of leaders inside of the SEAL community. Enlisted an officer, there's no free pass. I don't only give a shit what your rank is. You might get a little bit more of a, not going to get a pass, but you might get a little bit more of a rope if you're super junior, but that shit goes away really fast. And, you know, one of the main points is the ability to be humble so you can maintain your objectivity and self-awareness. And what I will say is this particular individual that we were talking to was defined

by their arrogance. And I'm not saying that in a judgmental way because people can live their life however they want to. And I know this person was very successful in the business world because he made a point of telling us how much money he had, which had nothing to do with fucking jumping. Live your life how you want to. But if you're in a leadership position and you are leading from a position, and you are leading from a position of arrogance, you are fucking everyone that is underneath you and stepping on

their heads to try to make yourself feel better. And my personal opinion on that is that you should fuck right off into the sunset. I can't stand it. And it is one of the things that grates against me the most. Everybody messes up. And I view this event and the people that were at the event in exactly the same way. Like, I don't expect anyone to be perfect. Because when I look in the mirror in the morning, I see somebody who has made so many errors in their life. And I'm that how could I expect anybody else to not make those same errors? Hopefully they make less than me because I'm definitely fucking trailblazing when it goes to the errors made in my life. Hopefully others can learn from those.

But it starts with not being arrogant, being humble, and being able to objectively look at yourself and learn from your failures. What we got from this individual instead was, well, this is just how it's done. This is how we do it here. He said things like, there's no such thing as safe or unsafe, only less safe and more safe. he made a point of saying that everybody at the event was vetted and that they had the commensurate experience level needed and his minimum was 200 jumps and this was an awesome I don't know if Mike planned this but it was fucking awesome there was a load of people walking out to an airplane and Mike goes hey man how many jumps you have and the guy goes 185 the guy next to him goes

I only have 120 and it's just to be able to watch the look on this arrogant cuck's face as he had to process that in real time as we were both standing there. It warmed my heart a little bit. And I don't know what this is about me, but I enjoyed it for sure. And I tried to break down everything. A lot of the things that I've talked about already, you know, communication being the lifeblood, air to ground, people being injured and not being able to communicate. And his answer was, this is just how we do it here.

You know, it's not unsafe. It's just less safe. And, you know, you guys are unhappy. And I kept trying to say, it was not a matter of being unhappy. I'm concerned for people's safety. And let me be clear. In all of this, the one person's safety that I was not concerned about is my own. Because I have a background in doing things like this, as does Mike. But I was incredibly worried about the safety of other people. And I realized that I had almost no impact or no ability to impact what was happening other than telling people where to get out of the airplane. And I actually wasn't even telling them. Mike and I would exit and everybody else would follow after. But I wasn't involved in the planning process and the entire mechanism, the entire Choo Choo Choo Choo Train of this event. was already concrete and rolling down the tracks.

There was no way to actually change the direction or write some of the wrongs that I had seen, you know, metaphorically up on the chalkboard. So the breaking point for me was when we were talking about communication and how there was no ability for somebody who potentially was separated and injured to communicate, when this person said to me, well, they could just send an email and, you know, the email is monitored so it'll make its way to us. And I was like, that's it. I'm like, I'm done.

I understand you are in a place where you are not going to accept any level of responsibility or accountability. And at that point, Mike and I decided to detach from the event. I have watched enough carnage caused by poor decisions. And in this situation, especially when it comes to jumping, the structure of how it was set up and then the personality and attitude of the individual at the very top and how it was being run. Let me be very clear. There were some fantastic people who were also involved in running this event. Very high-level skydivers with robust levels of experience. Nothing but great things to say about them because they weren't in charge at the end of the day either.

They were coming on board to help run and facilitate an event that largely seemed to be planned by other people in a vacuum. I couldn't be a part of that. I tried to describe in every way possible with my limited vocabulary the error chain that I saw that was continuously growing and having links added to it as opposed to being addressed at the earliest points. And I don't want to be around when somebody else gets hurt or killed. But I had no control over the event. I had no ability to make those changes that I think would have helped.

So in the end, Mike and I did the only thing that we could by controlling the only thing. that we could, which was ourselves. So we audibled, and Mike went back a little bit early, and I was able to explore an amazing country with my fiancé and my business partner and his partner, and it was a fantastic additional week. So I'm glad I had that week as well, too, because it allowed me to decompress a little bit. Like I said, I was tempted to come right back into the studio and just be like, this person, that person, you know what?

That's not me. That's not what I want to be. And like I said, if people have very specific questions, email me directly and I will give you the most direct answer that I feel is appropriate. And at the end of the day, everything that happened, the injury that did occur, the things that weren't planned for, you know, another huge miss that I couldn't believe that I didn't even, I didn't even determine until talking to somebody after we had detached from the event was they didn't even have a rigor associated with a group. There were 75 jumpers, each doing multiple jumps per day. If anybody on that trip had a cutaway, which statistically happens about one out of every 888 jumps, I believe. Their trip was immediately over because there was nobody that could repack their reserve. A reserve has to be repacked by a certified rigor.

And for a trip that size, like for me, when I was doing military trips, we had 30 people, I would have two or three rigors on site with toolkits to make sure that if that happened, the training isn't over. over. Now, I could have made, I guess, more peace with their not being a rigor had I known going into it. But I planned on the assumption that there would be, and that's my fault. Everybody else did as well. This trip was $7,000 in change. Imagine being on your first day of jumping and you have a cutaway and you realize your trip is over, but you weren't told about the rigor. You never asked about it because you assumed that, you know, they would be present. Now personally, I have multiple skydiving rigs because I was a professional skydiver for a long time. And that's a luxury that most people don't have.

I also didn't bring a second one. So, again, on me for planning based on the assumption that there would be on them for putting together a skydiving operation and not having the support required to make sure that people can continue to jump if they have a malfunction. Personal opinion. There's a lot that can be learned from it. And things like this, you know, things like this to tie this back into my old job, It's like a classic AAR. And for clarity, I covered about 40% of what happened. I don't want to get into the specifics of other things because it would, to a degree,

I guess, target specific individuals and I don't want to do that. But after actions or events that don't go well, they only have usage if you're open and honest in that debrief and after action review process and things are changed going forward. I voiced my concerns on the first day. I voiced my concerns on the second day. Nothing was changed. And the only choice that I was left with was to detach myself from that event because I don't want to be around it anymore. I've seen it happen too many times. And I don't want to be associated with that, especially if I can't do anything to change it. And again, not because I was worried about my own safety. I was concerned with the safety of others. So for those of you who have asked why Iceland went the way that it did, that's the best broad overview. that I can give you with the lessons learned, the importance of planning, focusing on contingencies, the lifeblood of communication, and a brief breakdown of, you know, in this case, I only highlighted the poor behavior of that arrogant fuck who is in charge of the operation. And hopefully, people listen to this can learn something from that. If you want to dive deeper, join Mike and I

on the 6th of August in Dallas. And if you don't live in Dallas, don't worry. We're going to try to do one a quarter and the next one's probably going to be up in Montana at the new coffee shop which isn't going to suck and on that note I will leave you to enjoy your weekend because I've been running my mouth for almost 45 minutes have a good one