pchapman

Oh yeah, I did scan the Gary Lewis Para-Commander handbook some years back. It doesn't explain belly mount reserve procedures or anything, but covers packing and flying the PC and how to modify them. There are various ways to pack depending on the speed and reliability desired. Old timers can debate which method worked for them. http://parachutemanuals.com/index.php?option=com_remository&Itemid=41&func=fileinfo&id=308 Jerry mentioned flaring: While one does usually think of 'not flaring a round', the handbook does mention partial toggle or rear riser flares for landing a Para-Commander, because they do have some forward speed and variable lift involved. P.S. I like the part in the handbook about how if you really want to save weight, you can cut out 4-5 lbs from the Para-Commander system. If you did that to a modern canopy you'd just be left holding a set of Slinks attacked to a bunch of short pieces of line...

And I know you've also seen how up here in Canuckistan all you need is a B license (min. 50 jumps) to wear a camera -- and that's very deliberate, down from a C license as it was a decade back. So the newbie coaches with around 100 jumps generally will be flying a camera to help with debriefs, and are doing it legally according to local rules.

Yeah, you will want a mentor! I'm just a relative newbie at PC jumps (jumping them since 2006 occasionally) and will just do a quick reply. Nobody deploys the reserve and then chops. Chop and deploy reserve like normal. Well, dearch, legs forward, cover your Capewells, and all that -- I assume you'll have some info sources on proper emergency procedures. Make sure the Capewells are in good working order. There are some fiddly details with them for compatibility of different parts, but generally if they operate smoothly they're ok, and if the rig and risers were jumped together in the past they should be ok if nothing is rusted up! Just deploying a reserve without chopping was something done in the early days with simpler rounds but not generally with ParaCommanders. With their 20+ slots, a mal that closes off part of the canopy can spin really fast, making a barberpoling of the reserve more possible despite 'throwing into the spin'. Now I knew a local school that trained advanced students on ParaCommanders and belly mounts (through the 1980s!) and didn't have them learn to cut away, but I got the impression that that wasn't normal. If the rig is set up to not cutaway a mal, the reserve should have no pilot chute (and they used to mark that on the container). If the rig is set up to cutaway with, everyone except in the very early days uses a spring loaded pilot chute. A few people jumping vintage round mains for fun in recent years have had to come down under a round reserve for various reasons, and the videos are out there on youtube. Myself included. So you do want to understand the system you're jumping....

to the O.P.: Are you a big guy? I've seen it where a rig is OK "normally" but when there's an issue with RSL length or reserve ripcord length, and the rig is jumped by a big dude, it makes it more likely for the margins to disappear and cause a problem. If the harness is really filled, and opening forces are more, parts of the rig can stretch apart a little more. (It can also depend on rig design, to what degree the reserve container is sewn down to the top of the harness. Some designs have more open space and room to flex than others.)

Ok, time to rant at an AAD company about their vague statements. SHORT VERSION: They're #@^&% idiots at A.A.D Vigil. Do you guys consider a Vigil 1 battery to have a mandatory life, specifically 10 years? LONG VERSION: Vigils' current manual says: Since then we know the life span has been increased; I'll get to that. The statement above does not state whether the year and time information is their estimate or typical or mandatory. The only statement about a definite life is the screen message one. The manual for the Vigil 1 is v 2.0.7, and it is the same as it has been for years. However, the document is undated and neither the version nor date is shown where one downloads it online, nor does the filename list the version. So one has to download the thing in order to check if one has the current version. There are no bulletins that I know of that deal with the Vigil 1 battery life. But there is a web page that addresses battery life: http://www.vigil.aero/power-pack This brings up the usual issue about riggers following the manufacturer's rules: What counts -- Is it manual plus any Mandatory bulletins? What about stuff one happens to find elsewhere on their site? Am I a bad rigger if I don't google search their whole site for extra information at every repack? That page says: So now they confirm that their "life" in the manual was just an "estimated life". Or was it an estimated but mandatory life? I still can't be sure. So now they say "at least" 10 yrs and 1500 jumps. Clearly not mandatory. Then they make a statement about what seems to be the only reason for a mandatory change -- when the screen messages appear. But to confuse the issue, in parentheses they add a little post script about a mandatory lifetime. Is this mandatory or not as it is just in parentheses? Riggers in the US & Canada for example would have to follow the manufacturers' rules. Is Vigils saying that they the manufacturer also make it mandatory, or are they just passing on the information that a supplier thinks it should be mandatory. No rules say that a rigger has to follow what a supplier to an AAD manufacturer says -- only what the manufacturer of the AAD says. So a supplier's mandatory statement is just advisory to the rigger. After all, Cypres 1's had a module in them that as far as I know was stated as not being used for life saving applications, on the product sheet. But that's cover-your-ass stuff from a supplier who never expected their sensor to be used that way. It's like Vigil deliberately wrote everything to be vague and confusing. If they say "No need to replace unless..." but then give a different reason to replace the battery, here we get into the issue of what to do with conflicting statements. Does one take them in the worst possible way, or best possible way? So if a company says "This is legal" then no other statement in the same document will be allowed to contradict it? Or is it the other way around, where they can write "This is legal" 1000 times, but if they also write "No it isn't", the latter nullifies the former? I bet a lot of riggers won't pack a Vigil 1 with an over 10 year old battery, but this makes a case that that is not mandatory. Depends on which side of the grey area one prefers to go to! One tries to be conscientious but manufacturers' can make it so tough to find and understand what they really want. And no I'm not going to contact Vigil; I'll just interpret their statements the way I choose. They've had over a decade to clarify something as simple as this, so I'll take it as meaning they want to leave it all vague.

@ Amazon You were quick on the draw for the kicker plate and main to come together! Despite the round main, you would have been on 3 rings?

I'll just note that if anyone feels their masculinity threatened by being male and jumping a Pilot, I have seen working jumpers -- full timers at the DZ racking up the jumps -- flying some of the smaller Pilots because they are a reliable canopy that lets them down easily even after a long day of jumping. (They aren't swoop machines but as one jumper demonstrated, you can still femur quite nicely!)

It is possible when putting the seal on to leave just a little too much slack. It's a little fiddly to position the seal just right on the threads with the bulky seal press, and leave some slack but not too much slack. Not ideal but it can happen from time to time. If it wasn't the reserve pin being bumped or nearly pushed out at some point, how about the RSL? Routed correctly, enough slack at the right places, nothing changed from the usual? It could pop the reserve pin upon main canopy deployment. Edit: That was a pretty heads-up response and post; good for a first post by a student!

People ask about "doing the thing with the squirrel suit" or BASE. At least I can answer yes to doing those (but not together!). For me that's better than in the '90s, when one got asked about "doing the thing standing on the board", because of skyboarding getting so much exposure in the X-Games. What does annoy me is the occasional person who has no concept of vertical distance, not understanding even roughly the height of a tall building vs. a skydive vs. Everest vs. a commercial airliner. I'm so used to aviation and physics that it floors me when people have no concept of the third dimension. It's as if someone wasn't sure if it was further from New York to London than from London to Paris. I'm OK with people not having an understanding of how breathable the air is at different altitudes though, because that's a sort of hidden dimension that people rarely have to deal with.

Crap.. One does expect this to happen from time to time to people who push so hard, even those with unusual skills. (I dont know the specific circumstances however, so that's not a comment on any particular activity.)

I don't understand... Looking for a debate? The jumper rotates in some fashion during a spinning mal and chops. Even though he departs any circular motion by flying off at a tangent to the rotation, any rotational momentum about any body axis is retained and the jumper continues to spin, which is subsequently reduced by drag or hopefully jumper action. (Or maybe made worse if not in control of a wingsuit.) Case 1: Jumper has no RSL, takes time to slow and stop the spin, or get off his back, or whatever to get flat and stable, thus no reserve twists. (But is way lower on opening.) Obviously if he pulls right at the chop then the reserve opening is essentially the same as an RSL activation. Case 2: Jumper has RSL, might get twists. 99% (?) of the time not a safety issue. Case 3: Jumper has MARD, it can work much faster and with more force to drag the reserve out, should be less likely to twist. Twists can come from the bag and jumper rotating at different rates during deployment, jumper continuing to rotate through the opening when the canopy isn't rotating, or maybe occasionally the bag dragging past an unstable jumper's body. All it takes is half a twist and an asymmetry when the jumper is pulled upright (with uneven forces on each shoulder and not squarely beneath the risers), for the jumper to easily start rotating under the inflating canopy. I could well be missing some subtleties or not have the experience to know the relative influences of different factors in practice, but the change in time to deploy the reserve must surely affect whether twists will happen?

To add to that: That would be the "ghostplane" I believe. It can be hard to beat the stunts of the 1980s jumpers! I don't know where I got the attached photos; some place off the web. (But I've also seen video where the trailing canopy spun up after the cutaway, and it took the one jumper some time to get himself free.)

But that guy had a rig on, didn't he? Garry Connery did get some sort of waiver to use a one parachute system though, and wore that BASE rig. I don't know the Brit system, whether he had to go to the CAA (their FAA) or the BPA or both. Red Bull never had any luck in the US asking for airshow demo waivers from the USPA, for low level openings operations, did they? (It was unclear to me from DZ.com threads, whether the FAA really did want to see the USPAs reaction first or didn't want to be the one to refuse first, and sent the jumpers to the USPA. I certainly don't know the facts on that one.)

A fair enough guess but it actually looks exactly like the right side RSL riser on a 2013 Vector III I just packed. Complete with sharp hot knifed edge on the confluence wrap. Hard to see on the photo in the thread, but it does wrap the confluence of the two risers. Still, it doesn't seem like the wrap would hit the edge of the wider reserve riser much, given that the cutaway cable housing pushes them apart. As has been listed, possible culprits still include the AMP fitting and the RSL velcro. It is annoying to see nearly exposed RSL velcro on a rig these days, when other companies have gone to velcro hidden under a flap so that if any gets exposed, it isn't chewing the shit out of anything important. (Or there are nice no-velcro designs, but I see how UPT keeps Velcro to prevent the Collins lanyard from being easily back-driven by the Skyhook in case of rare emergencies like that which prompted the staging loop and split RSL lanyard.) The bottom end of RSLs don't always stay in the right spot in use so velcro gets exposed. I remember some student Vector III's where I sewed a light webbing flap on, between the RSL stuff and the reserve risers, to keep exposed RSL velcro from fluffing up the reserve risers any more than they had in just a couple years.

Heck if he tracked from 4.5 to 1.5, he pretty much doubled his tracking time, if one guesses that 3.0 is a pretty typical modern pull altitude for a newbie/intermediate jumper. With his 200 jumps I think he should immediately strap on a wingsuit, because there one can easily double one's freefall time. For most of us, it messes up our sense of time & altitude but he's already all adjusted to that! .... Just kidding.

Thanks for finding that or knowing where to find that, to put the issue to rest.

This time I've got something more specific that could help: In one of the older threads I linked to, I see that Cliff Schmucker, president of SSK the Airtec distributor in North America, stated: Thus while we don't have a specific statement from the FAA, a major AAD manufacturer approves packing reserves where the AAD will time out during the repack cycle. (Of course, with the rig effectively timing out when the AAD is times out).

So would one suggest that a vacuum packed Simula aircrew parachute, with a repack cycle of 5 years, which can be equipped with an AAD, can never be packed if a Cypres is installed? After all, the Cypres would always time out its maximum 4.5 year maintenance cycle within the 5 year repack cycle. Ok, I don't know much about those military-use parachutes, or what rules apply to them, so I probably have details wrong. But it would still serve as a thought experiment to show how silly the idea is, that one can't pack anything, unless every component is good for the full length of the reserve repack cycle. If the same issue came up in Europe, some Europeans with a 1 year cycle might lose 11+ months of AAD lifetime if they got it packed the wrong day. Pack it one day earlier, you get a rig good for a year. A day later, supposedly the rig couldn't be packed at all in that configuration because something times-out in 364 days. Even if you have a rig good for that last year of AAD life, if you have a mal or get the rig wet and need a repack, suddenly you're shit out of luck? Admittedly, just because an idea is ridiculously stupid, doesn't mean it can't be the way the FAA does things. I thought it was understood from prior debates on this subject that a rigger doesn't have to guarantee the rig for the whole duration of the pack cycle, in particular where the FAA reigns. But I'm just talking and don't have any proof at hand.... (As for the other topic of liability if someone jumps the rig after the AAD is expired, well that's personal choice. After I pack a rig I don't have any control over whether the jumper pulls low or lends it to a fat friend who overloads the reserve or fires it at too high a speed or forgets to turn the AAD on or stores it next to outgassing lead-acid batteries or whatever.) EDIT: As has been pointed out in prior discussions, one understanding of the situation is that the FAA rules are that one of the requirements for a rig to be legal for use is for it to have been packed in the prior 180 days. That doesn't mean that if you pack it, it has to be legal for 180 days. The FAA also mentions a list of people who are responsible for a 'parachute operation' -- which includes a jumper and not just a rigger. So the jumper is on the hook for misuse of an approved parachute. There was a PIA thread on the topic in 2006, which didn't come to any clear conclusion about what the FAA really wants but the basic issues were discussed: http://riggers.pia.com/post/expired-cypres-and-120-repack-cycle-1322971 And an old DZ.com thread, which at the time was also concerned with Cypres 1 batteries being out of date: http://www.dropzone.com/cgi-bin/forum/gforum.cgi?post=2383787;sb=post_latest_reply;so=ASC;forum_view=forum_view_collapsed;;page=unread#unread As for liability, another example from those old threads was the issue of how Cypres 1 batteries were only approved for 500 jumps over their 2 year life. Did one just stop rigging for active jumpers, because you couldn't prove that they wouldn't violate the AAD manufacturer's rules, and thus the FAA's rules, during the next repack interval?

That shows an old problem with the precise use of language. The average can't be confused with the behaviour of individuals.

Dwaine Weston meets the Royal Gorge Bridge, for those not clicking through

The article references a study in the British Medical Journal, Christmas edition. I seem to recall that that issue always includes some humourous article not meant to be taken too seriously. For example, a paper of theirs in December 2003 suggested that the use of parachutes to save lives relies mainly on anecdotal evidence, and has never been subjected to a proper randomized, controlled trial. Properly, one has to have some people jump without functioning parachutes, and some with, in order to test their efficacy. "Parachute use to prevent death and major trauma related to gravitational challenge: systematic review of randomised controlled trials" The abstract: http://www.bmj.com/content/327/7429/1459 (Even for that humour piece one can't see the whole paper, but I have found it somewhere online at one time.)

Agreed, it seems that way. But that's good stuff you brought up. It's hard to keep track of all the secret US government stuff tested on unaware citizens... ... the Tuskegee syphilis experiments, the MK Ultra LSD etc experiments, the plutonium injection experiments.

Who knows, maybe hitting the water at an angle would make the impact G's slightly less of a belly flop.

Nice video you found! Inside video is awesome. But fair enough, I'm at a dz that has never ever used outside video for AFF. So having inside video is way better than no video at all. And you can have it on every jump, at basically no extra cost. Seems to work pretty decently especially if the instructor scans the whole student's body. But yes the issue of snagging is a big one, especially if just using a gopro and not a traditional boxed sidemount Sony CX etc. The video also shows how poorly behaved a pilot chute can be, even a hand deploy with no heavy spring in it, when close in to a jumper's burble. On its own it would have escaped earlier, but being on a short leash it just kept flopping back into the burble. Did the instructor just use the helmet's regular release system rather than some quick release? Hard to tell at first glance. At least he eventually got to that, while the reserve side instructor tried to hold the main bag from going anywhere too soon. So what do instructors do at other places? Do many skip inside video or do many do it anyway?

I think that's skydiving... But seriously, it can be hard to tell as an experienced jumper to what degree one is relying on an audible. So even if one is saying one is relying on the audible, one may well be at times keeping track out of the corner of one's eye how the altitude is doing. Well, one hopes... And the more people one is with, the less likely everyone will go low -- Being in an 8 way starts to be like having 8 audibles in one's helmet. (The complacency issue I find that affects me is that breakoffs are are often so high that one starts to not care as much about altitude, because there's extra already built in. Not like when one broke at 3.5 -- there when everyone went low, you were LOW. When one adds in doing video for tandems, or doing AFF / PFF, one gets used to having so much extra altitude. Just something to watch out for, whatever one's reliance on the audible. )