Loose line stows

[DaVinciflies 0]

I am noticing an increasing number of people who choose to use large stow bands and single wrap them on the non-locking stows so that the lines are very loose and merely held in place during positioning of the bag in the container.

The theory is that it is no different than a stowless bag and that loose stows cause the bag to rock less during deployment thus improving opening characteristics.

The jumpers I have seen adopting this technique are typically jumping high performance, highly loaded (>1.9) ellipticals and x-braces.

I admit to packing this way for myself now and the deployment does seem "smoother".

What do you guys think?

[sundevil777 102]

My non-locking stows are quite loose, Pilot 210 at WL of 1.15, no problems at all.

Of course the good knowledgeable folks at PD strongly advocate double stowing everything as a path toward soft openings. However, they also say the reputation of the old Sabre had for hard openings was only due to packing errors, so what do they know.

People are sick and tired of being told that ordinary and decent people are fed up in this country with being sick and tired. I’m certainly not, and I’m sick and tired of being told that I am

[Beatnik 2]

I have been doing this method for quite some time without any hiccups. I go on the theory just like you stated and look at it as the same way a free bag works. I done this with lightly loadings of 1.2 to higher of 2.3.

My bag has balanced stows, meaning that the stows are more centralized on top of the bag and they are designed to payout without a lot of rotation.

I am quite happy with the results and don't plan on changing it anytime in the near future. But the 1000 or so jumps I have done like this is a really small sample size in the grand scheme of things and is really statistically insignificant to whether or not this is a good way to go.