Particle Instance Problem

[doffer]

Hey guys.
I'm creating a shot of paratroopers jumping out of a plane.
I've modeled, rigged and animated a paratrooper jumping.
Then i've geometry cached it, and imported it into a new not-rigget mesh.
It all works great!

Next I want this mesh with the animation to be instanced geometry on a particle system, which should drive the actual movement and numbers of paratroopers, as they jump out of the plane.
It should be very simple and straight foreward, but I keep facing the same problem.
I've selected my paratrooper, then my particle system and hit "Instancer (Replacement)".
Now my paratroopers are where the particle are, and the animation is playing fine.

But my animation of the paratroopers doesn't start by the birth of the particles, which they obviously should, but instead follows the first particle.

In this case, the animation is 55 frames long, and the first particle is emitted at frame 1 the next at frame 10, but when the 2nd particle is emitted, the animation starts where the first particle is in it's animation, leaving only 45 frames left, and as the 3rd particle at frame 20 is emitted, there is only 35 frames of the animation left.

So my question would be, how do I tell maya, to go start the animation of each particle on it's birthtime, and not follow the timeline of the instanced geometry?

Hope it makes just a little bit of sense. If it's too much to write, you are very welcome to link to a tutorial. I couldn't find any usefull myself.

What I think I know so far, is that it should be scripted at PP level, where I somehow check for the birth og age, and then the animation must start at age=0 but how to do that, I am not sure.

Cheers.