CJM

A PC in tow is an ugly debate all by itself with pretty convincing arguments on both sides, but a total malfunction seems a lot more straight forward. For general purposes, I think you pull silver. Chuck had a great point about loose main risers snagging a piece of the reserve. The odds of that may be low, but why chance it if you don't have to? The most convincing argument to cut away seems to be so that you don't have to learn a different emergency procedure. That may be valid for students early in training when they've got large amounts of information to digest, but not necessarily for up jumpers who have become more comfortable with their gear and procedures. There are a lot of emergency procedures that we all learn that don't involve pulling red and then pulling silver. I once made up a personal review sheet that had all of the emergency procedures that I had personally decided to follow for every contingency I could think of and it came out to be four pages long. Think of all the emergency procedures we all know that don't (necessarily) involve cutting away. We have to perform different actions based on the circumstances. So, I say drill for all contingencies and drill the "book" answer. That will dramatically increase your odds of performing the proper action when the times comes. My humble 2 pennies. Chris

Dan Poynter quoted some good figures in his book "The Skydiver's Handbook" (which I highly recommend if you're just starting out). He estimates 1 fatality for every 82,000 jumps, which equates to 1 for every 3,800 participants. These figures can be compared with 1 fatality for every 2,308 hang gliding flights and the 1 in every 2,582 Americans who die each year in all accidental deaths. He also gives some other fatality statistics. Approximately 30 skydivers die each year compared to 105 people who died while scuba diving, 856 bicycling, 7,000 drowned (365 in bath tubs), 1154 died of bee stings, 60 snowmobiling, 47 water skiing, and 300 died after being hit by lighting! Then of course there are highway fatalities which number upwards of 50,000. He's also got some interesting observations "why we jump." Psychologists used to classify risk takers as people who had some kind of Freudian death wish or who were practicing "fear displacement" or were acting out psychopathic fantasies in an attempt to make up for feelings of inadequacy or to demonstrate omnipotence (Of course! Now I understand why I do what I do!) But, he quotes a 1973 study conducted on 293 high-risk competitors, including skydivers. What they found was that risk takers tended to be success oriented, above average in abstract ability and intelligence and that they were rarely reckless. Instead their risk taking tended to be cool and calculated. The study author concluded that risk takers grow up in a "go for it" environment where they are coached to try new things. Meanwhile, their timid friends are being told "Don't do that - you could get hurt." Regardless, statistically skydiving is very safe if YOU are safe. Buy really crappy gear, never inspect it, and then do stupid things in the air and, naturally, your odds dramatically decrease (just as much as if you were a reckless vehicle driver). Most whuffos naturally view skydiving as dangerous and foolhardy simply because it involves performing a very unnatural act. Even babies are instinctively afraid of falling (even though they don't know why). Skydiving taps into a primal human fear. Couple that with the fact that we live in a society in which says "Don't do that - you might get hurt" and it's easy to understand the whuffo mentality. Bottom line is that skydiving is probably safer than some other things you do now if you're smart about it. If you want to skydive and you think the rewards are worth the risks, don't let fear stop you - your fear is instinctive and not based on objective criteria. Don't listen to the whuffos either - they're victims of their own ignorance. Your family and friends may be wary at first, but they can be convinced (there's a good thread somwhere on that topic). It's a personal decision, but just make sure you know what the real risks are.

It seems to me that you can "what if" this issue to death. The possible permutations for all the things that can go wrong on a skydive number in the millions. There's no end to the number of situations you can imagine in which an RSL would be a bad thing. But in the end, safety in this sport is about risk management and playing the odds. All of the fatality reports in at least the last 10 years support the idea that statistically RSLs save lives. You can certainly imagine many situations in which an RSL could cause a main/reserve entanglement or deploy your reserve in such a manner that you end up with severe line twists, but the fatality statistics simply don't support these scenarios as being particularly likely. Certainly nobody wants to be the first to die as a result of one of these unusual conditions, but that's where risk management comes into play. If you have to choose between guarding against the unlikely scenario vs the remote scenario, your best bet is to protect against the unlikely scenario because statistically it's the more dangerous possibility. So look at the statistics...are you more likely to get a main/reserve entanglement from an RSL or are you more likely to smack the ground because you failed to pull the silver handle? Odds are you are more likely to die because you failed to pull silver (for any number of possible reasons - we can't ask those who didn't pull what happened, but it can even happen to experienced jumpers according to the statistics). Can an RSL cause bad things to happen? Absolutely. But it's a remote possibility. It's not a question of confidence that you'll do the right thing. I doubt that many of the fatalities of the last several years lacked confidence in their ability to pull the silver handle, but it takes more than confidence to keep from bouncing. It takes intelligent risk management. The RSL debate reminds me a lot of the seatbelt debate (not in function, but in the form of arguements you hear). Statistics prove that seatbelts save lives, but there used to be a lot of people who wouldn't wear one because they were concerned about getting trapped in the car under water or not being able to get loose if the car was burning. Are those real dangers? Sure they are. Are they likely? Not as likely as a run of the mill accident in which you're thrown through the windshield. I wear a seatbelt because the odds say that I should. This is always an interesting debate because it places at odds two competing characteristics of skydivers. Skydivers are typically safety conscious, equipment geeks who will debate the pros and cons of every procedure or piece of equipment ad nauseum (this thread being a good example). But they're also extremely confident individuals who simply refuse to believe that they might not pull red and then pull silver when the time comes. In the end, it's still a personal decision, but make it an informed, carefully considered decision based upon what you think is the most likely danger you'll face.