ocd11

N/A

Was talking with another tandem instructor, and because I'm curious, I asked him what he thought he would do if he ever forgot to hook up all four points on a tandem. He said it's never happened to him, but that he'd talked to another instructor once who told him about the one time that it happened to them. I've seen the pretty well known video of the guy that exits the C-182 without either shoulder point hooked up, who fixes it shortly after exit and before pitching the drogue. The story that I heard was much worse - this guy never realized he'd missed the shoulder points until opening, when the student tipped forward hard as the canopy opened. By the way, other than this *huge* mistake, this guy landed with the student without any issues - the student was fine. I'm not quite sure I know what I'd do in this case. There's no way you're going to get the student hooked up under canopy - unless you're super-human strong, or the student is a 90lb girl. This made me think, and made me wonder what other people might think. Yes, I know that the correct solution to this is to make absolutely certain that you make every effort to prevent it. That you do your hookup procedure the same way every time, and that you make double checking yourself part of that procedure. But... what if? I think my focus would be on dealing with it in a calm and collected manor, to prevent freaking the student out. Analyze the situation, maintain altitude awareness, and work through it. Keep in mind that you're going to need your hands to steer and land the canopy, so you really can't do anything that involves holding the student in any way. Can't really get more specific than that since I can't imagine anything more specific about how this might pan out... I'm curious to know what other tandem instructors think about this topic. What would you do? What would/do you do during the hookup procedure to prevent the possibility?

Hi Guys - I was the D-licensed passenger on this tandem jump. First - I want to say that it didn't take long afterwards for us both to realize that we did not make a smart choice. The thought occurred to me less than an hour later - hey what if the already damaged canopy decides to fail catastrophically and we were at 400 feet? We'd be dead. I personally learned several really important things from this jump. One of the most important, in my mind: If you see damage, assume you are not seeing all of it! We only thought we had two torn cells while we were still in the air. Once we were on the ground, we saw that in fact, 4 cells were blown out and there was a 2ftx2ft hole in the center of the tail. How we missed the hole, I do not know! I did in fact have chicken handles on this jump. We did discuss the opening, the suspected end cell closure, the realization of two cells being blown out, and yet the canopy was fully controllable. It flared properly, it was steerable. We did decide, together, to land it. If I were ever in a similar situation ever again, I'd chop that canopy as soon as I realize it's damaged, regardless of whether it's controllable. Because I don't want the incident report about me to say "attempted to land a damaged canopy that catastrophically failed at 400 feet".