Main-Reserve Entanglement/Unintentional Water Landing: Lessons Learned

[Reginald 0]

I do believe this has been an excellent learning tool for the group. Which is what you intended it to be, of course. It takes a lot of guts to make a post of this sort and then even more humility to read the responses. It’s interesting, in a book I just finished reading “Deep Survival” (Yes, I want it known I actually read a book!) one of the key personality traits of long term survivors is humility. In other words, regardless of one’s experience or “mastery” of a sport always continuing to learn and never acting like one knows it all. You have demonstrated great humility in this post.

It’s amazing that you are alive. I counted no less than 7 mistakes that you personally made in the chain of events - that is normally more than enough to kill a person. You survived more due to good luck than by actions you took. And while luck is a great thing to have it’s obviously not a good long-term strategy.

I think Mykel made a great post and included a lot of solid educational material that everyone should contemplate. It is consistent with what we teach in our FJC and with widely recognized “best practices”.

I have had my share of humbling moments in this sport and hope that I will always be wise enough to continue to learn both from good experiences and mistakes, both my own and that of others kind enough to share theirs for the benefit of the sport at large. Thank you for sharing your experience for the benefit of all.

"We've been looking for the enemy for some time now. We've finally found him. We're surrounded. That simplifies things." CP

[bch7773 0]

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Over time, and especially when your gear is squashed in your gearbag the velcro compresses and gets tighter and tighter. Its a good idea to unpeel and put them back on a regular basis, not just once every six months at reserve repacks.

good point. thats something i need to do too

MB 3528, RB 1182

[wmw999 2,447]

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I counted no less than 7 mistakes that you personally made in the chain of events

And one thing that she did to counter those mistakes was to keep thinking, and dealing with the situtation that she had, and not the situation that she wanted to have, or "should" have had. That's huge.

Wendy W.

There is nothing more dangerous than breaking a basic safety rule and getting away with it. It removes fear of the consequences and builds false confidence. (tbrown)

[AFFI 0]

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I counted no less than 7 mistakes that you personally made in the chain of events

And one thing that she did to counter those mistakes was to keep thinking, and dealing with the situtation that she had, and not the situation that she wanted to have, or "should" have had. That's huge.

Wendy W.

Hear Hear...


And, ummmm, beer?

[Ron 10]

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When I started jumping a wingsuit, I was told an interim step I could use instead of replacing/modifying the risers was to put a piece of 1/4" plastic tubing often used for hooking up a refrigerator ice maker. It is flexible enough and won't trap the cutaway cable if the risers get spun up. Don't know how well it works because my Sabre 170 has been well behaved.

Can I say have a rigger look at it?

And before anyone starts going to Home Depot to fit their risers....Take your rig to a RIGGER and have them do these things. Quite a large number of people have made modifications to their gear and found out the hard way it was a bad idea.

"No free man shall ever be debarred the use of arms." -- Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Jefferson Papers, 334

[kallend 2,027]

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An advantage to using one hand per handle is not having to move your hands over to the reserve handle after you chop. Even if you don't lose visual contact with the reserve handle (a real possibility when the harness shifts and your body position does also) you are losing time. Two hands is faster, a real advantage if you have a low cutaway.

Asking because I don't know since I never bothered to check....Can you use 2 hands per handle with a wingsuit on?

Yes, I did on both my cutaways. I have since stopped jumping a Stiletto with my wingsuit!

...

The only sure way to survive a canopy collision is not to have one.

[AFFI 0]

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Quite a larg number of people have made modifications to their gear and found out the hard way it was a bad idea.

What, I have to take the canopies out of the container? It's just a few stitches...

[Ron 10]

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What, I have to take the canopies out of the container? It's just a few stitches...

Yep, that thought killed one of the best skydivers ever.

"No free man shall ever be debarred the use of arms." -- Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Jefferson Papers, 334

[AFFI 0]

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What, I have to take the canopies out of the container? It's just a few stitches...

Yep, that thought killed one of the best skydivers ever.

Goes to show that no one is above the laws of common sense.

[NWFlyer 2]

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It’s interesting, in a book I just finished reading “Deep Survival” (Yes, I want it known I actually read a book!) one of the key personality traits of long term survivors is humility. In other words, regardless of one’s experience or “mastery” of a sport always continuing to learn and never acting like one knows it all. You have demonstrated great humility in this post.

I really enjoyed that book, and in fact, the friend who borrowed it from me just returned it; might be time for a re-read of that one.

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I counted no less than 7 mistakes that you personally made in the chain of events - that is normally more than enough to kill a person.

Well, the seven "lessons learned" included at least a couple things I did right ... but I'm not going to turn this into a math debate; that's not what it is about.

[AFFI 0]

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Well, the seven "lessons learned" included at least a couple things I did right ... but I'm not going to turn this into a math debate; that's not what it is about.

You did some things "RIGHT" for sure, you never gave up, you fought and survived - that says a lot about the killer instinct needed to survive. Furthermore you went public with it and learned from it to better yourself, that is a lot more than a lot of people would have done.

Applause to you from me, great recovery from a great recovery...

[monkycndo 0]

Ron, I actually got the idea from a rigger. The risers on my Talon had enough room in them for the tube to just slide in. I made no mods to the risers. After I installed the tubes, had a rigger look at them to make sure it was OK. My mistake for not adding your concerns to my original post. Good catch.

50 donations so far. Give it a try.

You know you want to spank it
Jump an Infinity

[bob.dino 1]

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Ron, I actually got the idea from a rigger. The risers on my Talon had enough room in them for the tube to just slide in. I made no mods to the risers. After I installed the tubes, had a rigger look at them to make sure it was OK. My mistake for not adding your concerns to my original post. Good catch.

For the benefit of others, some of the problems that can occur with ill-fitted riser inserts:

• Can the cutaway cable fit outside the hard insert but inside the fabric channel of the riser? Then it could be trapped there by twisted risers.


• Is the insert secured in the fabric channel? If not, it could slide down the cutaway cable and prevent a timely canopy release.


• Is the far end of the hard insert sealed? If not, and the tip of the cutaway cable can reach that far, twisted risers could trap it, preventing a cutaway.

There's probably other failure modes as well, but those are the ones I can think of right now.

[mjosparky 4]

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I counted no less than 7 mistakes that you personally made in the chain of events

And one thing that she did to counter those mistakes was to keep thinking, and dealing with the situtation that she had, and not the situation that she wanted to have, or "should" have had. That's huge.

Wendy W.

Wendy, you have made an excellent point. We all make mistakes on every jump we make. Its how we deal with the small mistakes while not losing sight of the big picture that allows us to go up and make more mistakes.

The first thing the instructor of my FJC said to the class was, “This is a thinking man’s sport, you stop thinking and you will die”.

Early in my career as a Firefighter an old salty Chief told me “Effective firefighting is a series of corrected mistakes beginning with the fire.”

My idea of a fair fight is clubbing baby seals

[tbrown 26]

Lesson #7: Don't get distracted or complacent about packing. I have replayed that pack job over and over again in my head, and I cannot distinctly remember stowing the left toggle. Looking at the canopy afterwards, the left toggle was loose and the right was still through the cat's eye. I always field-stow my brakes.....

I have three points in the packing process where I check that my pilot chute is cocked; I should also have double- and triple-checks of my brakes.

[NWFlyer 2]

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I have to disagree with the idea of stowing brakes when you land. Brake stows are a part of packing and you can't reliably do it correctly when you're trying to take off your helmet & goggles, clear the landing area, look out for swoopers, talk to your friends, and who knows what else. I stick my toggles in the keepers to prevent them from spinning and twisting up the steering lines, but that's all.

I definitely see your point there; the landing area can be very distracting. But it's such habit at this point that I probably won't stop doing field stowing, I will just add check points into the process; when I lay my rig down, when I'm stowing the risers. I like the field-packing technique, though I often find when I'm running my fingers up the lines I end up unstowing and restowing anyway because I have to take out twists.

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God I'm so glad you're alright. If you were on "the list" from this weekend I'd have puked and gone off to bed for a week or two...

Well, damn, I think that might be one of the nicest things anyone's ever said about me. In a dark, skydiving humor sort of way, anyway.

[popsjumper 2]

I'll say it again..Krisanne you handled a bad situation well given all that went on.

My point is that not all mals are "by the book" and you were able to work with what you had without panic. Thanks for that.

My reality and yours are quite different.
I think we're all Bozos on this bus.
Falcon5232, SCS8170, SCSA353, POPS9398, DS239

[moonglo 0]

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Except for wingsuiting I use an RSL, so no matter how fast I am one handed or two handed, the RSL will beat me.

Sorry for the hijack, but why not use an RSL for wingsuiting? I've seen 2 wingsuit malfunctions now where the jumper was saved by their RSL- they were spinning on their backs and the relative wind was blowing their wings over their handles, and the legwing was inflated adding to the spin!
That was enough for me to consider adding an RSL or Skyhook to my next rig now that I started jumping a larger wingsuit (V-1).

Good job NW Flyer!! Thanks for sharing and glad you're ok

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[Bolas 5]

I went back and looked at some of the RSL threads in the wingsuit forum. Interesting reading and valid point on both sides.

Something to think about.

Stupidity if left untreated is self-correcting
If ya can't be good, look good, if that fails, make 'em laugh.

[NWFlyer 2]

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That is the coolest part about our sub-culture, good people all over the place. The difference between that and “Arm Chair Quarterbacking” is this – How many armchair quarterbacks played in the NFL, or for that matter past JV in high school? I would suspect probably not many but when receiving critique’s in the skydiving arena, sure you have to take it with a grain of salt but the advice usually comes from a source that has had some level of experience in the game and ego’s aside really just want to share their knowledge and experience with others so they don’t end up in the incident report. It’s like a big family of people who probably would not typically mix.

I've been thinking a lot about this statement and I think you're both right and wrong. In this sport, it is definitely very easy (especially at my experience level where almost everyone has more experience than me) to get analysis from the "experts." Carrying your analogy forward, it'd be like I'm the JV quarterback getting advice from Peyton Manning... except I can find Peyton by the beer fridge and online, etc., without having to work too hard or go through his "people" to get to him.

The flip side is that I think there are a lot of very experienced people in this sport who, either through pure luck or pure skill (or a combination of both) who haven't been in situations where shit hit the fan or didn't go as planned, so they don't really know how they'll react.

One of the more memorable conversations I've had in this sport was with a well-respected jumper at a local DZ, after she had her first cutaway ever at 1400ish jumps. She said (I'm paraphrasing here) "I was really pleased to see that I reacted exactly as I had trained; as much as you practice and train you don't know how it's going to go till you're there." It's all well and good to talk about couldas and shouldas and wouldas before or after the fact, but there was only one person under my canopy that day.

Doesn't mean that the armchair quarterbacks don't provide value, just that they weren't there. I find myself doing the same thing sometimes when I read about incidents (both fatal and non-fatal). I find myself thinking "Well, I wouldn't do that" but do I really know? No.


Edited to note that I'm not a huge football fan, so let's not get into the debate of whether Peyton Manning was the right name to use in my analogy. Save that for the Bonfire!

[tbrown 26]

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I'll say it again..Krisanne you handled a bad situation well given all that went on.

My point is that not all mals are "by the book" and you were able to work with what you had without panic. Thanks for that.

At least there weren't any sharks in the water....

Your humble servant.....Professor Gravity !

[NWFlyer 2]

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At least there weren't any sharks in the water....

Well, unless you count all the whuffo guys who came out to help me ... they were probably hoping for the special view that only a wet shirt can provide.

[champu 1]

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This is a great idea! I haven't used cleaning my cutaway cables as an opportunity to practice my pulling my cutaway cable (with the RSL disconnected, of course!)

Why do you care if your RSL is disconnected or not if you're standing on the ground with your main in your rig?

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A brake that fired is perfectly fixable by yanking on a rear riser until you have enough time to release the still stowed brake.

Don't count on being able to stop the spin from a toggle fire by pulling on the rear riser of the unstowed side. It may work, or it may do nothing and feel like pulling on a wet noodle. Your best bet is just to pop the other break.

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PEEL, then pull. My first mal I had a hardish pull. I thought ,"Oh, what the hell?!?!?!?!?" And I applied massive power to the handle and I felt the velcro rip. At that point I realized that the velco was holding it in, not a hard pull.

Same thing happened to me using one hand on each. I tried to pull cutaway and it went nowhere. So I reached over with my other hand, did two hands on the cutaway, held onto the handle witih my right hand and grabbed my reserve handle with just my left hand and pulled.

I was actually kinda surprised I did that, it was definitely not something I practiced.

[NWFlyer 2]

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Why do you care if your RSL is disconnected or not if you're standing on the ground with your main in your rig?

Probably not an issue, you're right, but I often clean my cables before I pack so my main is already out and I'd hate to have the riser dropping to the floor pull the RSL with it. Probably too gentle a force to do it but just in case ...

[bodypilot1 0]

Glad your ok packing procedures on a regular basis may have prevented all of the things that happened on this jump and you were very lucky it was over water. Every day you jump, refresh your memory of the shit that can happen, and be ready for it.



Be safe
Ed

www.WestCoastWingsuits.com
www.PrecisionSkydiving.com