Oh my word! I have been villified on Pprune! Thank you Ian Seager for not joining in the hysteria - I enjoy your magazine by the way.
It's not a scam, I'm not selling 'X Box' boxes or lighters that aren't lighters, I am sharing a very informative Power Point presentation (comprising upwards of 30 'slides') which contains everything your average PPL might want / need to know about dropping parachutists. It is rather well written (if I do say so myself), explains what you need to have, what you must do, what you mustn't do, what the risks are etc and it took me almost a day to write / compile. Against this background, it did not seem to me to be all that unreasonable to seek modest pecuniary reward in exchange for my efforts in compiling this 'great work'.
Accurate information on flying at parachute centres is surprisingly hard to access (as some of the posts on this thread appear to indicate) and I would have willingly paid a small amount of money (£3.20 the last time I checked) a few years back, to learn in an instant EXACTLY how to go about flying for free.
For clarification, a PPL CAN drop parachutists (and hence fly for free) although he cannot of course be paid for doing it.
This will be the second time I have sold this on Ebay and to date, it has made me £6.40 - so hardly a fortune and certainly not an amount even remotely proportionate to the amount of effort that went into the 'product' that I am selling.
One might argue that all the information in my Power Point presentaion is available in the public domain - which of course it is (if you know where / can be bothered to find it), but then by the same token, so is everything in Ian Seager's fine magazine. However, we are still happy to pay him his £3.40 for it because a few of his chaps have gone to the effort of gathering together all the information it contains and presenting it in a format which we can all read on the bus.
Whichever God you support, may he go with you.
Julian
Last edited by julian_storey; 30th Dec 2005 at 12:00.