Early history of Tandem parachuting

[Droppedbomb 0]

I am writing a chapter in my Master's thesis (Innovations in Air Insertion: Involving Parachutes) on tandem parachuting and would like to find the early history of this form of parachuting.

I have found some stuff on the Strong Enterprises website (who appears to be the first to develop a tandem system) but can any one point me to a book or any other sources on the early history of tandem?

[PhreeZone 20]

Bill Booth at UPT and Ted Strong at Strong both invented Tandem skydiving around the same time. Contact both of them to get the details you are looking for.

Yesterday is history
And tomorrow is a mystery

Parachutemanuals.com

[airtwardo 7]

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Bill Booth at UPT and Ted Strong at Strong both invented Tandem skydiving around the same time. Contact both of them to get the details you are looking for.

Also try to get a contact email or #, from the Strong Ent. people for Mr. Bill Morrissey.

Bill had quite a bit to do with the concept & development of the Tandem back in the early 80's.

I did some large venue demos working with Bill back about 1985 trying to showcase the system, and got my rating from him in 86.

~ If you choke a Smurf, what color does it turn? ~

[Zing 2]

I remember Bill Morrisey coming through Ghoulidge on a demo tour with the new Strong tandem system we'd heard stories. Seems to me that the rumors were both Strong and Booth had a rig in the works.
I flew the first tandem that jumped at Ghoulidge, it being Morrisey and a woman (who's name escapes me today) who was in the front harness. If I recall, she was traveling with Morrisey and was the official tandem passenger.
It all seemed pretty straightforward, if not a bit cumbersome, and it wasn't the first Strong rig I'd seen with flaps and stuff fluttering in the breeze.
Morrisey had talked about a couple torn canopies, broken lines, etc. during the development jumps, but the tandem drogue chute wasn't in use yet.
They did a semi dive-out sort of exit, stable and all, but holy shit, did they get up a head of steam in a big rush.
I followed them as best I could with the 182 without stressing things too much. Couldn't keep up at all, but I did manage to keep them in sight until opening. I'll take my old free-packed dactyl openings to one like they had any day.
The main didn't appear to open so much as it seemed that Morrisey and his passenger arrived at the ends of the lines of an open parachute INSTANTLY upon deployment. The canopy held together, though and they made a couple jumps that weekend
It wasn't long before the drogue came into use.

Zing Lurks

[JerryBaumchen 1,389]

Hi Dropped,

IMO Strong was way ahead of Booth in the development of a tandem rig. If I remember correctly (and don't bet any $$$ on it) Strong had his rig on the market at least a year before Booth.

I 'think' the very original Strong rigs were designed to be static-lined from the aircraft due to any delay causing hard openings and canopy damage.

Strong once told me that on the very first jumps on their prototype tandem they had a 26 ft LoPo conical for a reserve canopy.

I have a very early video of Jerry Rouillard doing a tandem without a drogue when he was operating a dz in Dallas, TX. It has a clip of Strong explaining just what his concept was for this type of parachute system; and it was not as a circus ride as we have today. If interested, drop me an email.

JerryBaumchen

PS) IMO (again), if you want the very early history then I would recommend contacting Strong.

[usedtajump 1]

Was Rouillard's drogueless tandem video during a certification course? If so, I got my Strong rating at that same course conducted by Ted and Bill in 1985 and could be in it. I worked with Jerry at Lavon North DZ for about 3 years doing tandems and demos with him.

Damn, those drougeless tandem jumps were insane!!! I had an opening so hard that it cracked two of the passenger's ribs. After that, I elected not to do any more tandems until Ted came out with the drogue system.


Ted's primary focus was for his system to be the next revolution in student training but it was just too much of a quick money maker for the DZs to use it for any other purpose than what it's become. Besides, I never thought it was a very workable training method compared to AFF.

The older I get the less I care who I piss off.

[murrays 0]

I pulled at 8-10 seconds when jumping the drogueless Vector that I purchased in 1985. Partly due to hard openings and partly due to the fact that a lot of passengers didn't like the high speed wind from tandem terminal.

The drogue changed things a lot but not all for the good...the more complicated gear and procedures have contributed to a lot of fatalities over the years.

--
Murray

"No tyranny is so irksome as petty tyranny: the officious demands of policemen, government clerks, and electromechanical gadgets." - Edward Abbey

[NickDG 23]

Yes, it might have been better to keep tandems to static line (gee, you could do 50 of those a day) or at least short delays. At least for me.

I was probably the first one to throw a tandem drogue over the tail of a twin beech and get towed . . .

Don’t ask, it's a long story, and I come out looking bad in the end . . .

NickD BASE 194

[JerryBaumchen 1,389]

Hi usedta,

It was not during any cert. course. It had some quite good looking female as the passenger and (I think) it was part of some promo via a local tv station. I haven't looked at it for quite some time, though.

Also, when you look at the video (as a jumper) it makes you think that they made more than one jump with this woman; although the storyline suggests only one jump.

JerryBaumchen

PS) I actually got the video from Rouillard many years ago.

[kkeenan 14]

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...can any one point me to a book or any other sources on the early history of tandem?

Skydive Radio did interviews with both Ted Strong and Bill Booth about (among other things) the early days of Tandem development.

Check the website at skydiveradio.com and look at the index of archived shows. Both of those are in the early podcasts.

Kevin

_____________________________________
Dude, you are so awesome...
Can I be on your ash jump ?

[Droppedbomb 0]

Thanks for all the information you guys have provided. I emailed both Bill Booth and Ted Strong and have already heard back from Ted. I am currently listening to the skydive radio article with Ted Strong. There is a lot of great information out there and you guys helped me and are continuing to help me with my research.

[sraja 0]

Question - wasn't early tandem experiments done by stuffing 2 people in a single rig? I mean by putting the chest strap around two people and the leg strap around 2 legs? I remember reading somewhere that some french dude did this with a tiny girl as initial experiments in tandem parachuting. Some old timer could perhaps shed some light on this??

[Erroll 80]

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Don’t ask, it's a long story...

Isn't that exactly what this forum is for?

Pray tell.

[airtwardo 7]

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Question - wasn't early tandem experiments done by stuffing 2 people in a single rig? I mean by putting the chest strap around two people and the leg strap around 2 legs? I remember reading somewhere that some french dude did this with a tiny girl as initial experiments in tandem parachuting. Some old timer could perhaps shed some light on this??

I don't know about 'experiments' ...back in the late 70's I knew of one U.S. jumper that had taken his kid a few times on a jump similar to what you described.

~ If you choke a Smurf, what color does it turn? ~

[Jim_Hooper 4]

I believe the jumper you're thinking of is Mike 'Beanpole' Barber who built a single dual harness to take his girlfriend's severely disabled (and underaged) son on a few jumps. Some folks were scandalized, others thought it was pretty cool. There is a photo of them in freefall in one of the Skies Call books. Check with the folks at DeLand.
Hoop

[jonstark 8]

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I believe the jumper you're thinking of is Mike 'Beanpole' Barber who built a single dual harness to take his girlfriend's severely disabled (and underaged) son on a few jumps. Some folks were scandalized, others thought it was pretty cool. There is a photo of them in freefall in one of the Skies Call books. Check with the folks at DeLand.
Hoop

Don't forget that Bob Favreau took his son on his 9th birthday on the same jump as Mike for Kirk's 11th. There are pix of them outside the 10 man star that Slots built around Kirk.

jon

[wdy_bnckr 0]

First one that I heard of was done by Gary Dupuis D-242 at the Deland, Fla. DZ. Gary was at the '66 Nationals at Talequah, Okla. and was limping. I asked him how he hurt himself and he said some parents at the DZ had asked him to take thier son up so he strapped him in his harness and jumped. The landing was harder than he expected. Believe it or not..

[Jim_Hooper 4]

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I believe the jumper you're thinking of is Mike 'Beanpole' Barber who built a single dual harness to take his girlfriend's severely disabled (and underaged) son on a few jumps. Some folks were scandalized, others thought it was pretty cool. There is a photo of them in freefall in one of the Skies Call books. Check with the folks at DeLand.
Hoop

Don't forget that Bob Favreau took his son on his 9th birthday on the same jump as Mike for Kirk's 11th. There are pix of them outside the 10 man star that Slots built around Kirk.

jon

Jon, I'd forgotten about Favreau (one of the all time good guys) doing a jump with his boy, just as I had forgotten Kirk's name. Thanks for reminding me.
Hoop

[jonstark 8]

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First one that I heard of was done by Gary Dupuis D-242 at the Deland, Fla. DZ. Gary was at the '66 Nationals at Talequah, Okla. and was limping. I asked him how he hurt himself and he said some parents at the DZ had asked him to take thier son up so he strapped him in his harness and jumped. The landing was harder than he expected. Believe it or not..

I knew that Dupuis, "Doopee", got pretty badly broken when he figured he could do a PLF from the hangar roof and broke the hell out of his legs. Still suffering today. Don't remember the story of him jumping with someone else in his harness but wouldn't put it past him.

jon

[sraja 0]

So with all of the above folks probably taking "passengers" even before the dual harness system - would it be right to say that tandem parachuting was in works even before Bill and Ted came along and improved it by million-fold???

[airtwardo 7]

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So with all of the above folks probably taking "passengers" even before the dual harness system - would it be right to say that tandem parachuting was in works even before Bill and Ted came along and improved it by million-fold???

You could say that!

http://www.dropzone.com/cgi-bin/forum/gforum.cgi?post=2923571#2923571

~ If you choke a Smurf, what color does it turn? ~

[skypuppy 1]

As chronicled in the book "As the Chute Went Up" by Dolly Shepherd (with Peter Hearn) -- in 1908 Dolly went up in a balloon with another girl to do a double parachute jump (separate parachutes). The other girl's chute however, wouldn't separate from the balloon, so the two girls held on to each other and eventually parachuted off together under Dolly's chute. Dolly was seriously injured in the landing and spent some time recovering but was eventually able to return to parachuting.

If some old guy can do it then obviously it can't be very extreme. Otherwise he'd already be dead.
Bruce McConkey 'I thought we were gonna die, and I couldn't think of anyone

[poppenhager 1]

Yea,I remember that one.There was a picture of it floating around.POP

[DualHawk 0]

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Also try to get a contact email or #, from the Strong Ent. people for Mr. Bill Morrissey.

When I first came to work for Strong Enterprises, Ted's first suggestion was that I spend as much time as possible talking with Bill Morrissey about the history of tandem skydiving, and Bill's instrumental role in it's creation. Over the last year, Bill has recounted to me some of the coolest stories about the history of tandem skydiving from his personal perspective.

I have pointed Bill to this thread and asked him to share some of his stories about the early days. It may be a few days or so, but either he or I will post his observations when he finishes writing them.

If anyone would like to get intouch with him directly, just shoot me an email at tomnoonan@strongparachutes.com and I'll provide his contact info.

Best Regards,

Tom Noonan
Tandem Director
Strong Enterprises

[NickDG 23]

>>Isn't that exactly what this forum is for?
Pray tell.
I don't mind telling this one because of the valuable lessons involved. I wrote it up before but I can't find it now – besides every time I tell it, it gets better

And not because I'm making anything up, but because I'm getting smarter and reading new things into it . . .

I was working as an Instructor at a So Cal DZ in the early 80s. We had a semi-marginal DZO in terms of she really wasn't firing on all cylinders. And we were always in constant battles over her methods. Anyway she purchased one of Ted's tandem systems when the drogue first came out. Tandem wasn't real well know on the west coast and this was the first tandem rig I'd ever seen except for pictures.

The DZO, who was also a master rigger, assembled and packed the rig the night before and brought it to the DZ Saturday morning. The next day Sunday, she had several students lined up for what would be the DZs first paying tandem jumps.

She decided it would be a good idea to send up the rig with two experienced jumpers prior to trying it on the paying customers. There were two visiting jumpers on the DZ that morning and both stated they had tandem experience. I won't mention names as one later became a friend and neither is jumping anymore.

So they both got into the Beech D-18 we were using and went to altitude. Well, long story short they never managed to get the drogue out. I had my head down and was busy getting the first jump course ready when I heard something strange and looked up. And there they were whistling through about 1500-feet at tandem terminal with nothing out.

At the last second the guy on the back finally got the drogue out, but he'd already pulled the drogue release in an earlier out of order, "what the fuck do I do now moment."

The opening was very hard and the canopy suffered some blow out cells but they landed okay in a heap, out of breath, and damn lucky to be alive. This incident was eerily similar to another that happened some time later at Perris when two members of the Visions team, both skygods (in the best sense of the word) smoked a tandem in with nothing out for pretty much the same reasons. Basically, those reasons were not knowing what the hell they were doing.

The DZO took the tandem main home that night and repaired it. When she brought it back the next morning she was looking for someone to take it up for a flight check.

And here's where your's truly comes in . . .

"Nick, just take it up alone and do controllability check on the main."

"Sure, no problem." I'm a rigger, I thought, an experienced Instructor and jumper, and it's just another rig. So it was on a five minute call when I had my first real up close look at a tandem rig. "Gee," I remember thinking, "there's sure a lot of handles on this thing."

I traced them all down to see what they did and donned the container. I don’t think I was any more wary than if I'd been jumping any unfamiliar rig. The Beech was heading out for a close by morning demo and I was the only one on board getting out over the DZ. On the way up, recalling the previous day's events, I went through a mental dirt dive which consisted solely of, "Get the freaking drogue out, get the freaking drogue out, get the freaking drogue out."

At 12.5 we turned jump run and I got up and moved towards the door. Everyone else aboard was giving me the wide eyed "better you - than me look" and (thanks Airtwardo) the thumbs of death.

I looked out, did a bit of spotting, and cleared the airspace. What happened in the next two seconds is a bit hazy. I thought I stepped through the door cleanly, squared up into the wind, and nonchalantly reached back and pitched the drogue. But what I really did was bang my bare head into the top of door, make a half hearted quarter turn into the wind, and threw the drogue like it was a live and already smoking hand grenade.

I then experienced an opening shock and thought, "Wow, that drogue must be pretty big. That felt almost just like a canopy opening." Then I noticed my arms and legs were in front of me and I thought, "How cool is this! I'm not even arching and I'm falling stable."

It was only then I noticed something was wrong. The horizon was right above my toes. I looked up (really behind me) and there was the Beech right there. I remember this like it was yesterday, "Holy hell, I'm in tow!" Probably fairly similar to when a motorist thinks, "Shit, I just drove off a cliff."

I got hold of myself by thinking, okay, nothing really bad is happening right at this moment. So don’t make the next mistake that's going to kill you. As calmly as I could I looked down at the four handles on the front of the harness. I was going through Bill Booth's tandem malfunction flow chart years before he first published it. Then, for the first time, I got scared. None of these freaking handles did what I needed to do.

Meanwhile, up in the Beech's cockpit, Bob Metz was kicking back in the left seat on just another of his thousands of jump runs when the yoke slammed full forward into the panel. His first thought was, "What the hell did those knuckleheads in the back come up with now to fuck with me?" But he couldn't pull the yoke back at all.

I'm at the point now where I'm hoping Bob will put the airplane into the lake.

Looking back again I see several pairs of stunned eyes peering at me from the door. "I must look like a real dork out here." I sadly thought. Then I noticed something is changing. The horizon was moving, it was moving down in relation to my feet. I didn't fully realize it at this point but the Beech was going over as the drogue bridle had fully jammed the elevator in the nose down position.

I saw maybe three bodies fly past me, but the rest, including Bob, were stuck now and in for the whole ride. After a few more seconds I whittled my options down to first pulling the main cutaway handle and then the drogue release. I'd be left with the tandem reserve and be good, but what would happen to the aircraft? I was wracking my brain trying to figure if the main would open with bridle fouled and pull the tail off the Beech?

I looked back once again, but now it "was" kind of looking up as we passed about 50 degrees nose down. And I saw the gear coming down on the aircraft. In a flash I remembered being around the bonfire one night and hearing Bob Metz saying to a new jump pilot, "If you're ever flying the Beech and you don't know what's happening, put the gear down."

I reached down and with one hand grasped the cutaway handle and with the other the drogue release. I was thinking, my god, I hope this works out for everybody when suddenly I came free. The speed of the dive had finally broke something.

I flipped over on my belly and looked at my wrist altimeter. This all started at 12.5 and now I was passing through eight grand. I looked above me and the drogue was long gone and I was just trailing the naked bridle behind me. So I thought I better start right now and I pulled the drogue release.

Expecting it to act like any other ripcord I was surprised when it moved a few inches and just stopped. I pulled harder not knowing if maybe that's all it did? But nothing happened so I pulled the passenger drogue release and it did exactly the same thing. I looked at my altimeter and the local mountains coming up on my right. I was at five thousand feet and I decided no matter what was happening I'd pull the reserve handle at 4 grand. That way I'd have a bit of time to hack on things with my hook knife if need be. But, unknown to me at that time was my hook knife was sitting on my Racer and that was lying on a packing table.

I was pulling as hard as I could on the drogue release, but what I didn’t know was while in tow I sucked the cables through the grommets on the Three Ring drogue release and that was jamming the ripcords. I was just about to give up and pull the reserve handle into the trailing drogue bridle when one handle came out. (Thank goodnss, Ted, for the double loop) The main bag came off my back, and without the drogue it let the lines go in like super slow motion. But it opened and at about 3000 feet I was just sitting there, spent . . .

This was a few years before anyone said, "Tandem is not just another parachute jump." But gladly, I'm here to tell you that is correct.

Bob landed the Beech okay with some dents but no other issues. And the DZO took the cost of a new drogue out of my pay packet that week, so there's another lesson . . . but lastly I'll admit . . . See Nick jump, don’t be a Nick . . .

NickD BASE 194