pchapman

Although 99.99% of skydivers and riggers don't care, it is an interesting question, whether they are still banned. The Aussies have an '85 rigging bulletin that discourages their use and requires that all blast handles in sport use have the center post drilled. (RAC No. 501 Rev. A) The Brits have blast handles in a long list of old stuff that is "banned or strongly recommended not to be used". (That includes side pull belly mount reserve handles, so in typical BPA fashion they get pretty strict.) Canada has Technical Bulletin #30 from 1987 saying "The T&SC recommends that CSPA Riggers do not pack any reserve container with an Anti-Wind Blast Handle or with synthetic (not metal) ripcord handles of any type." Nothing against use on mains. Poynter I says that the USPA banned blast handles in 1968. But are they still banned in the USA??

Yeah, no gadgetry? You have any hip control to keep legs in position? Did the roll happen because too sudden an upper body twist forced the leg down, or did the leg dip itself at the hip? You've got some dearch going on, which might be less if the legs were closer together like for anyone (depending on your stiffness), but at least you can compensate and stay stable with your arms. The only para I jumped with had knee braces and a wing in the crotch area to control the legs better -- but you have the advantage of having been licenced before the injury so you know what to do. That will help a lot! For landing, do you have one of the typical setups with a strap from the chest strap hooked up to the knees to lift them?

I don't know about courses, but it seems like BirdMan actually did suggest keeping the wings closed, from pretty early on. For reference, an undated BirdMan manual I downloaded back in June 2002 states: (Emphasis added)

Hey, I also used to breakoff at 5500' ... when I was on 56 to 60 way formation attempts in Ontario in 2004. Snicker. Sorry for the digression, but I couldn't help myself Michelle.

you obviously did not RTFM (or you didnt understand it). Hint : Page 18 from Cypres2 manual The manual does say "When the takeoff airfield and intended dropzone are in different locations, CYPRES must be switched on at the departure airfield." But it does not say WHY. Will the Cypres catch fire? I don't think so. Will the calibration be either that of the DZ where the Cypres was turned on, or possibly the airfield one drove to, depending on the time and rate of altitude change involved? Yes, sounds like one of these will be the case, and with the airfield higher than the DZ, 130' may be an acceptable offset. So the interpretation of "you must do something" depends on what your goal is, and what the consequences are. Divalent has contacted Airtec who seem to have said that he could just leave the Cypres on. So while it is good to have a careful reading of the manual, in this case the information from the company EXPANDS ON what the manual says, which also means that it CONTRADICTS what is in the manual. This is an interesting case where the manual is right in a sense but does not cover all possible reasonable courses of action. The manual does give a method that takes a little more time but makes it unambiguous what altitude the AAD is set to. Divalent sees everyone else just leaving their AAD on and happens to go a little further in investigating the situation, so he's the one dealing with the arguments...

Regarding the nose: You're thinking about rolling the tail, once it is wrapped around the nose. On most canopies the nose inlets aren't wrapped at all; but they have occasionally been rolled on particularly hard opening canopies. One can roll a tail really well with a lot of tight rolls to slow the opening. (Using small diameter "tight" rolls so as not to use up too much length of tail in the rolls.) Or for faster openings, just do a couple loose rolls, just enough to help hold the pack job together while one is grasping the roll while placing the canopy on the ground. Before the tail rolls cover it, the nose of the canopy is facing you while packing. A standard technique for speeding the opening is to keep the nose fairly far out, not pushing it back much into the pack job. But one can't introduce a lot of variation there as far as positioning the nose goes. Psycho packing is only a small (but significant) variation on pro packing, so it isn't that foreign. On the other hand, having someone local to help out is quite valuable. However, psycho packing is used both as an aid to packing control, and to make openings slower / softer, so it isn't that likely to the be thing for you. As for asymmetrically closed end cells, as long as the canopy isn't snapping into a turn so fast that it has any chance of line twists, it isn't a problem with the hard deck. Sure, one can worry about what direction one will be facing, but it isn't like some real malfunction, so busting your hard deck with only that issue, isn't a big deal. But I can't help you with anything specific to the Safire2. Or just get used to being open lower. :-)

+1 for actually going & communicating with the guy Jeff's answer is pretty reasonable and leaves things open. There needs to be a short term response to the problem, but then there can also be a long term response. Of course the insurer wants to "standardize" in the sense of standardizing on a safe way to exit the airplane rather than a dangerous way to exit. A very good way to standardize what people do, is to standardize what people are taught, and that can be done by standardizing the training the teachers receive. So the idea of "standardized training" could mean a lot of different things, and doesn't automatically imply a whole new USPA instructional and ratings system. Exactly what the role of the USPA should be, remains to be argued.

And she can fit her whole hand in!

Erdnarob mentioned the great weight of early square mains. The same applied to some of the rounds. For the popular ParaCommander, there were various ways to lighten it. One guide to ParaCommanders gave you ways to reduce the weight of the canopy about 5 lbs, by shortening lines, removing some heavy tapes, etc. If you did that today with a main, you might be staring at a set of links...

The problem is that it mentions a "newly established" service life. Does that mean newly established since the TSO, or newly established since your rig's manual was published? The company could say that it isn't a newly established service life but the original one appropriate to the serial number of the gear being sold, just like any other change they put in the manual. And, it isn't clear whether that "next paragraph" is supposed to stand independent of the previous paragraph, or refer to the situation in that previous paragraph, which talked about cases where a service life was changed after a particular item was sold. Most damningly, why would they even include "and sold before a service life was established", if the following paragraph means that it doesn't matter? That "sold before" quote seems to imply (but does not state) that something might be different for rigs sold after the manual was changed. It's like saying "Persons over 18 may vote". That says nothing about persons under 18, but is taken to imply that something might be different for them. Or do they mean "a parachute" as a TSO'd type, rather than an individual physical item? In that case the stuff about "a parachute [type] ... sold before a service life was established" would mean that as soon as that type of parachute was on the market, any changes to service life in the manual have no regulatory force. The trend of the opinions in this thread certainly is towards "you can't change the original TSO limits with the manual", which is fine by me. But I personally still think the FAA statement can quite reasonably be interpreted different ways, which makes it so maddening...

Re: fadidawood's experiences While plenty of people have done fine going through static line, there is a bit of a military quality to it. If you can't hack doing what you need to do, or can't hack getting out of the plane on your own (as fadida did a couple times), you're done, tough luck, you might as well go bowling and stop wasting your money. So static line isn't as forgiving if a student has problems. And many students with problems, make fine skydivers later, if they can get past their problems. PFF (and beyond that, the tunnel) gives people the TIME to sort out what they need to do. (I was one of the first PFF instructors at fadidawood's DZ #1, who was trained by one of the head honcho's at DZ #2... who co-owns a tunnel. Very handy for them! )

I did indeed make a silly error in my posting when I knew how the system works; the photo is useful for people. UPT does use the large diameter reserve cable housing as I stated, presumably for the large metal "pin puller" end of the cable for those who are using a steel ripcord cable. Still, the solution for everyone is not to junk their rigs and buy a Vector III.

Unfortunately they're big on mandatory AAD's in Australia. Have to watch out for that.

I'd really like to believe that, but the FAA statement tends to support the other interpretation. Still, it doesn't necessarily rule out what you are saying. A canopy sold before a service life is established clearly can't have one added later in a manual. But then is putting a limit in a manual a restriction on newly produced canopies? Is "establishing" a service life something that can be done in the manual, or as you suggest, it has to be done through the TSO or AD. After all, the letter does say "To hold a parachute owner to a newly established service life ..." which doesn't clearly specify if it means it applies to owners with old manuals, or owners buying with a new manual. Given that this issue is so contentious, I'd like to see other evidence suggesting that only a TSO or AD can change hard limits for parachute life etc.

Aside to the thread: I actually do seem to have a scanned manual for the 350, from GQ Security USA 1980, that I got through Beatnik. Just skimming it, I see no life limit. PM me your email so I can send it. (I'll also submit it to parachutemanuals.com)

For better accessibility, I've OCR'd the main contents of the letter from the FAA to the USPA: I think I caught any OCR errors but let me know if anything slipped by.

Thank you for posting. Very interesting! [edited: Others beat me to these points but anyway:] There's one important thing the letter states, but which can easily be overlooked. Note that it says "and sold before a service life was established." Although the grammar of the whole sentence is slightly messed up, this suggests that if you bought a parachute AFTER a service life was put in the manual, that life does apply. So an old Softie pilot rig has a potentially unlimited life, but a new one would have whatever limit is now in their manual. Although it isn't spelled out, the letter seems to imply something else important -- which I wish had be clarified: Changing the manual doesn't seem to affect the original limitations on the gear. So if a new manual shows a different packing method, the packing method in the old manual is still legal, because that's how the gear was certified. If the manufacturer thinks it is dangerous, they can apply for an AD. Whether new manuals complement or supersede old manuals, that's a huge issue that riggers have argued about in the past.

Sometimes one sees a reserve that has some color staining, from dyes bleeding, or also discoloration from brass grommets against the reserve fabric. What opinions are there on that? I don't know of any specific problems with it, but the topic came up among a couple other rigger friends of mine. (Sure, any bad stain on a reserve is worth a tensile test.) Is there any reason to expect any fabric issues from staining in contact with brass grommets? I'm not quite sure of the chemical process involved. Sometimes there's the greenish colour of a particular copper oxide, but I've also seen reddish stains. Discoloration does crop up from time to time. I wonder if it happens to rigs in a very humid environment, not necessarily from getting the rig wet without a repack right away.

At the start: "But even then, the parents are not far away" I'm guessing those were young birds learning to fly. That was sort of a "swooping hurts" video for birds. (You do have a bit of German on your blog webpage?!)

Typical skydiving round canopies of the late 60's and early 70's had a sleeve, which added a LOT of bulk, and many were of a more complex design then the reserve and were bulkier for that reason. In the era before custom civilian rigs, military bailout rigs were often converted for skydiving use. So the military backpack might have, for example, contained a 26' Navy conical, and was relatively thin. The canopy was exactly the same as might have been used in a civilian jumper's belly reserve. So the canopy bulk would be the same, although what it would "appear" to be would depend on whether you thought the spread out but thin backpack seemed "bigger" than a lumpy belly mount or the reverse. But for the civilian skydiver putting a ParaCommander or similar canopy in the backpack, the sides would be extended a few inches with sewn-in additions, to fit the bulk of the canopy & sleeve. (Rigs that were made for civilians later, could of course be sewn the right size from the start.) The ParaCommander has something like 24 different holes and slots in it, which means a lot of extra tapes supporting the edges of holes. I'm not sure, but I'm guessing that added a fair bit to the bulk. But the big thing is the sleeve. That's a heavy cotton "sock" that slides over the canopy from end to end -- so it is going to be 12 ft long or so. Instead of folding the canopy and then putting it into a bag as we now do, the canopy went in, then it was folded. To prevent nylon on nylon burns, the sleeve was cotton, and usually quite heavy. Have you ever seen one of the big, baggy, cotton freefly jumpsuits from the early days of the discipline, say the mid 1990s? Stuff that in your rig, and that's roughly how bulky a sleeve is. Reserves were much simpler in design, maybe with 3 open vents or meshed panels at the back for forward speed. And they didn't use a sleeve to slow the deployment. (Later ones would use a diaper that just wrapped the mouth of the round canopy until the lines were stretched out.) Another factor is that the main container had to be sized for quick packing in the field, while the reserve container could be super tight with the rigger sweating over it for a while! Old timers will know more, but I think that is a reasonable explanation why the "typical" skydiving rig with a belly mount reserve seemed to have so much bigger a main container.

The relationship between skydiving gear manufacturers, dealers, and customers has some additional issues. The Ford dealer probably didn't become a dealership just by buying one Ford for himself and selling a couple others to friends. Some dealers in skydiving gear do big volume and know a lot about the gear and perhaps what is going on at the factory, while others (through no fault of their own) sell the occasional item and can help with basic questions about the order form, but that's about all. As for the guy this thread is about, I don't know the kind of questions he had or his attitude on the phone, but I can see that he could be thinking that he got better service the last time he bought something worth $50 at a store. Who knows what the situation really was here, how it came to be that a conversation between a customer and manufacturer went so badly. Did he not get the answers he wanted from the dealer? Did the company suggest that the questions were basic enough that he should talk to his dealer again? Who knows. FYI, the skydivewings site says: That suggests that if you have a coupon, they'll talk to you, even if they like you to go through a dealer.

I guess some places use that? I'm at a CSPA DZ doing PFF where we do use the fist signal for pulling. It's not in my notes from taking PFF courses, and other places do things differently, but we must have gotten the idea from somewhere.

A fake clicky, that's just plain evil, a click-stealing trap for the unwary! That's far worse than no clicky!

Dorbie would never, ever, in a million billion years use sarcasm to make a point. But I just did. As he did. So yes, dorbie is saying the same thing as you, that zippers fail.

I'm sorry, I don't understand. Why are you comparing a momentary mental slip (that obviously doesn't relate to underlying lack of knowledge) to a fundamental lack of understanding of a particular technology? Politicians do have those fun slips from time to time; Bush #2 was particularly prone to them as I recall.