question on incident at Monterey

[bill2 0]

Below is an article from the San Francisco Chronicle about an tandem jump gone bad. I'm curious as to how often reserve chutes don't work. In this case, it didn't fail, but it didn't work completely either.
_________________________________________

They were plunging to earth at 180 mph over Monterey County, the main chute useless, when skydiving instructor Stephen Rafferty pulled the reserve chute.

But instead of the normal braking jolt, the canopy above Rafferty and tandem-parachute client Cathy Smith began spinning wildly. The San Jose instructor looked up to see "several little tears and several broken lines" in the sky-blue back-up chute.

"That's a pretty sinking feeling, because you don't have a third chance. You only have two parachutes," Rafferty, 56, said Monday after he battled to control the spinning canopy during a heart-pumping, 8,000-foot drop until the pair crash-landed in a field.

Smith, 41, wound up with two broken legs. Rafferty walked away with a stiff neck and back and a wonderful sense of relief.

"I knew we were in trouble," Smith said by phone from San Jose Medical Center after undergoing surgery to have steel rods implanted in her broken thighbones. "It hurts like hell."

The $190 daredevil ride of a lifetime was a "golden" birthday present for Smith's 20-year-old daughter, Christina, who jumped ahead of her mother Sunday.

Cathy Smith, an Oshkosh, Wisc., hospital lab technician, had taken a couple of jumps with a skydiving club 20 years ago while serving in the Army in South Korea. Christina is also in the Army, attending the Defense Language Institute in Monterey.

It began routinely.

Cathy Smith -- with "tandem master" Rafferty strapped to her back -- leaped from a twin-engine Skydive Monterey Bay airplane at 15,000 feet just before 2: 30 p.m.

But the normal 60-second free fall stretched on when a four-foot wide "drogue" chute -- which is supposed to deploy first to prevent the combined weight of the two skydivers from zooming faster than 120 mph -- broke loose from its Kevlar cord. Without the drogue, the main chute couldn't deploy.

Rafferty said he quickly recognized the main chute's "total failure" as the duo began "picking up speed dramatically" to about 180 mph, but he wasn't alarmed. A seasoned 16-year veteran with 8,500 jumps, he's had to pull his reserve chute about two dozen times -- and it routinely "lands like a feather."

However, possibly because of their faster speed, the backup chute opened with tremendous force, tearing five attachment cords free from the canopy and ripping four dinner plate-sized holes in it. Instead of a gliding, rectangular, wing-like canopy, Rafferty looked up to see a spinning "misshapen" chute as the pair swung around at about 30 revolutions per minute.

Normally the chute can be steered with toggles, Rafferty said, but this time it was uncontrollable. They were falling at about 30 mph -- 10 mph faster than normal descent. The damage also prevented the instructor from pulling toggles that "flare" the canopy at the last second to cushion the touchdown.

"This was anything but routine," Rafferty said. He reached up to grab the remaining cords in a struggle to slow the spinning.

Smith was flying blind, the failed main chute pressed against her face and wrapped around her body. But she could hear Rafferty, speaking into her ear. He urged her to gather up the flapping nylon as best she could and raise her legs -- so he'd bear the brunt of impact.

They were falling so fast, Smith said, "I didn't realize the reserve was already open."

Throughout the twisting, two-minute drop, Rafferty said, Smith "was phenomenally controlled. She was unbelievably composed."

Smith said she never thought of death.

"I was just concentrating on bringing the (main) chute in, doing what I could do," she said.

Smith's daughter, who jumped first, later recounted to her mother how she had watched in fear as they spun to the ground -- a mile from the landing zone.

"About 40 or 50 feet from the ground," Rafferty said, "I stopped working (to slow the spinning) and just wrapped my arms around the woman's head and chest."

"All of a sudden -- boom! -- we hit the ground," Smith recalled. Swung sideways by the spinning, they landed on their sides in a planted field.

The soft field "absolutely helped us," Rafferty said. "It could have been power lines or a road."

"I'm just grateful it wasn't worse and grateful that she will fully recover, " he said.

Asked whether she'd ever skydive again, Smith -- groggy from painkillers -- summoned the moxie to reply: "Who knows?"

"If we're going to die, we're going to die, and if we're not, we're not."

E-mail Alan Gathright at agathright@sfchronicle.com.

[eddytheeagle 0]

More info on this incident in the incidents forum:

http://www.dropzone.com/cgi-bin/forum/gforum.cgi?post=453829;sb=post_latest_reply;so=ASC;forum_view=forum_view_collapsed;;page=unread#unread

With regard to your questions about reserves, you might have better luck in 'Gear & Rigging'

Don't underestimate your ability to screw up!