It was the Belgian Parachute School who did this test on canopy's, I was involved in it and we did a siminar on the PIA symposium.
The test was to see the increase of porosity on several canopy's thinking that the number or kind of jumps was the factor. We see this was not the case but the surface where we packed and the number of pack-jobs let the porosity increase.
We have reserves of 10 years old, never jumped only repacked every 120 days, the porosity was rised to an average of 9 cfm. This is high for a canopy that never jump as you know new fabric (F111) have an average between 0 and 3 cfm. We see a lot of hot-spots on the left side of the canopy because we did side packing. Also the middle cell have a huge cfm factor because of the use of a molar strap.
We can only conclude that the handling and packing surface increase the porosity of the canopy. The lifetime for a reserve canopy in the Belgian Army is 12 year, in the civilian is 20 year. Most reserve canopy's are made of F111 fabric and we know that a high porosity can effect the opening of the canopy this is something we don't want on a reserve canopy.
