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veri

First-time tandem (gone semi-wrong); what might have happened?

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Ask any person doing a tandem jump, and I bet the reason they're doing it is to experience freefall. There won't by many that are doing it for just the canopy ride.



I've asked close to 1000 tandem students that I have taken on tamdems that question. Most of them state somethinng along the lines of "the feeling of leaping from a perfectly good airplane." Nothing about freefall or canopy flight. After the jump the opinions have been all across the board as to what they enjoyed the most, be it freefall or canopy flight.



Fair enough - can't argue with that. I'm just going off what I would be doing a tandem jump for. There's a huge difference between a skydive and a hop n pop. By not doing the freefall bit, you're missing half of the experience.

Anyway - I only mentioned it in my initial post out of curiousity. I didn't really want to get into an argument over it - I just personally would of expected to get to jump again if a tandem skydive accidently became a tandem hop n pop instead.

- Dan

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I just personally would of expected to get to jump again if a tandem skydive accidently became a tandem hop n pop instead.



I don't disagree with that point. I wanted to expand that line of thought though, since there are a lot of whuffos that read this site prior to their first jump.
--"When I die, may I be surrounded by scattered chrome and burning gasoline."

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What if on a jump I deploy the tandem at 6500ft instead of 5000ft due to a long spot or changing uppers or some other reason? They didn't get the full freefall as stated. What if we go up in the 182 instead of the Caravan and only go to 11k instead of 13.5k?



there is widespread fudging on the distance and time in freefall. AGL versus MSL, the '18k' runs that are closer to 16, shorting altitude to save time...but there's still terminal freefall, excepting some places that have limits on the big guys.

Given the number whose minds basically black out the first 5-10s, the hnp could be complete before they're even processing the jump.

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yep, shot the shit - just asked him about the early opening, he pointed out a few things in the air, I asked about how long he's been doing this, all that fun stuff.

Unfortunately, it never got to letting me fly the canopy.

Calling tomorrow to get the final word on what happened / probably going Friday.

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I'm told the container struck the aircraft on exit as far as that premie opening goes. Not that I'm too thorough in my knowledge of equipment yet, but it sounds like that could do it.

Weather permitting, I'll be trying this again this weekend.

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Did it again - went beautifully this time. :)

I finally realized something interesting, though. In my newbie haze the first time with the open on exit, I did not notice that it was the reserve, not the main, that deployed. I do remember seeing something fall to the ground when that happened, though being less than comprehensive with the equipment, I'm not quite sure what I was watching :o

Nothing like freefall, though ;)

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damn...because of tumbling after a shitty exit and the JM pulling for me at 11K...I didn't get a free AFF level 4 retry + video. :P Woulda been nice...

but hey..canopy rides from 11K get ya one hell of a view and more time to mess around with spiral turns I suppose.:S
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Did it again - went beautifully this time. :)



Congratulations!

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In my newbie haze the first time with the open on exit, I did not notice that it was the reserve, not the main, that deployed. I do remember seeing something fall to the ground when that happened, though being less than comprehensive with the equipment, I'm not quite sure what I was watching



CAUTION: I am a student with a low number of jumps. I am not a tandem instructor. Tandem rigs are different in some ways than regular solo-jumper rigs. If you go on to become a student, listen to what your instructors tell you about the rig you will be jumping, instead of some random things you read on the Internet. Having said all that...

On a "regular" rig, when the main parachute is packed, the fabric is folded into a little bag. The pilot chute is attached to the bag with a nylon strap, and the bag is attached to the fabric of the main parachute with a nylon strap. During deployment, the pilot chute pulls the bag off of the main parachute, and the air inflates the main parachute. The pilot chute and bag are still connected to the main parachute, and tend to hang off of the top rear edge of the main parachute - you might have seen this on your second ride, or maybe when other jumpers were landing.

The reserve parachute works almost the same way. The pilot chute is attached to the bag with a nylon strap, but the bag is NOT attached to the fabric of the reserve parachute at all. During deployment, the pilot chute pulls the bag off of the reserve parachute, and the air inflates the reserve parachute. Since the bag is not attached to the reserve parachute, the bag (and the pilot chute attached to the bag) are now free to fall to the ground. This is most likely what you saw falling.

My understanding is that the reason why the bag is not attached to the reserve parachute fabric is that this makes for a slightly more reliable deployment of the reserve parachute. The reasons that the bag *is* attached to the main parachute are 1) it "usually" works just fine that way and 2) since it's attached, you don't have to go look for it on the ground and/or install a new one after every jump.

Like I said, I am inexperienced, and will gladly defer to just about anybody with more experience on this explanation. I just thought it might help explain what you saw on your first jump.

Eule
PLF does not stand for Please Land on Face.

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