RiggerLee

So if you find a harness, what are you going to use as a reserve? We set up a rig for a guy one time on an all round jump. It was a jumbo crossbow but the biggest challenge was the reserve system. We finely found him a 28 ft chest pack. Also, the only malfunction that I've seen on a PC was with a bag. It does pack up much smaller but I think there is some thing to be said for getting a round canopy to full extension of the canopy before the sleeve slides off. A bag gets it to line stretch but then it's just a dump and a lot of ugliness can happen before the canopy is extended and under tension. With larger systems a lot of work goes into getting the canopy to full extension and the apex under tension before the skirt starts to open, keeping tension on the apex, and controlling the fill and crown location. Over the years these ideas have been trickling down to smaller systems. It would be a shame to burn up a nice PC. Lee

It'll be fine. If you don't want it I'll take it. Ship it to me and it can sit in a truck for three more days. Lee

There is this guy in... Guatemala? or some place down there. I keep running into him over the years. He has a fetish for old gear and is out to jump every thing ever made. He borrowed my paradatctals to jump them. He's also trying to recreate all the old stunts and did that one a few years ago. Lee

In regards to line stowage. I do recall people just making two stows on the bag and coiling the remainder of the line in the container. I knew a guy that did this with an old crw canopy. There were two thoughts. First it was quicker and easier. Second, some people did it to try to avoid bag wobble and spin on the way to line stretch. Down side, the reason this fell out of favor is that sone times one of those lines that is streaming out of the container gets looped around a side flap and causes a nasty horse shoe malfunction. A guy died at our drop zone from such a mal, or at least that's our best guess. And he wasn't even coiling all the lines in his tray just maybe a little two much excess. So it can and does happen and leaving all that line in the tray is just asking for it. Packing with out a bag. Done a lot of this with various canopies doing CRW. I've jumped tail pockets, tail flaps, diapers of various types as well as bags. If you're having trouble packing with a bag you will not enjoy closing a container on a free packed canopy. Basically you are folding and packing the canopy at the same time that you are trying to close the container. It's also easier to damage the canopy when it is not protected by the bag. Splitting it up in to two steps, folding and controlling it with a bag, and closing that bag into a container as two separate steps is easier. In the end you can actually jump with out a bag just fine. It's all about getting the canopy to line stretch in good order with the line straight, slider up, and the breaks set. It can be done but a bag offers a far more positive staging method then a tail pocket. You could go with a diaper, they are almost as good but most people don't want to deal with the lose canopy closing the container. They prefer the canopy to be in that warm dark bag, out of sight out of mind. Generally speaking what we have always found is that staging is the most important factor in the opening of the canopy. If you look at the numbers more and better staging of the deployment translates to lower malfunction rates and more consistent openings. Lee

I couldn't find an actual clip. This is the best I could find. It's cropped and a terrible picture. Go to 1:45 Proof we have been working on the idea since the 1980's and it still isn't perfected. Lee

He actually has asked some legitimate questions. He's a newbe and has discovered that packing sucks. He will in time get better at it. The question of is their a better way is perfectly valid. He's asked if there is a better way to make stows. He has asked if you could build one that can be tightened after the stow is made. It's a perfectly good idea and strong in fact did this and still does on their tandem reserves. The idea had it's own problems and never spread. If he or any one else wanted to play with it any rigger could add the little bungee holders to your bag. He asked if stowless bags were better. Valid question. People are making and jumping them. There are real advantages to them but I see problems as well. I say the jury is still out. He asked if you could close the container losely and then post tighten it. We do that with the loop on some reserves. It can be made to work but we have also seen issues with it. I've never seen it on a main. I can't think of any modern equivalent of a pack opening band but we could use a strap running to say a buckle under the back pad to do some thing like that. I actually did some thing like that with compression straps on a back pack/base rig kind of thing. It was a monstrosity but it did work I jumped it on trips. Honestly if we really wanted to make packing easier all we would have to do is become a little more rational about how we size rigs. He hasn't come up with any thing new or revolutionary... yet. I keep waiting for some gem to fall out of his mouth that will revolutionize the world. It could happen. Monkies might reproduce Shakespear. It might take longer then the heat death of the universe, but it might happen tomorrow. You'll never know what will stick and you wont find out unless you throw it against the wall. Lee

Actually some of these things have been done. First off a lot of this difficulty is you using poor technique. Stowing lines. I'm trying to visualize and verbalize how I do it and it's been a long time since I even thought about it. I hold the bight folded in one hand with my thumb along it supporting the bight. I use that thumb to hook the rubber band that I'm wrapping around it with my other hand. I use that to wrap the band around and some how slip my thumb out in the process and have a nice neat double wrapped stow. Sorry I just do it and after 20 years they just come out perfect every time. You just need to practice more. It's not that stressful on the band. It's the pulling off that kills them. Strong used to use bungees to stow the lines on their tandems. You would stow the bight of line in the loop of bungee and then pull a plastic sleeve up to tighten that loop around the bight of line. Kind of a two stage process. Still on the freebag. It worked but it could be hard to find good quality bungee. They wore like any thing else. They went to an anti line dump flap. If you think about the pull up cord and flaps as pullies and pull in the right direction to use them as pullies and compress the opposite side with your knee so that your not doing all the work with your pull up cord all of a sudden you might find that the job is not so hard. If your packing a student rig right now you don't know tight. Try to make sure that you are wiggleing the bag down into that side and pulling the flap out, up, and around the side before you try to close it with the pull up cord. Some larger rigs, student rigs, use 1000 denere cordura for both the bag and the inside of the flap. Not slipery, does not slide well if you just try to close it with the cord too much friction. Pull the flap around first as far as you can before you try to close it. Use your knee to compress the bag. Then switch your knee to the out side to compress it towards the center as you pull it the rest of the way with the cord. I'm a base jumper and free stow pockets have their place in base and reserve bags for special conditions but they are not the most positive form of staging. The stowless bags are a fad going around right now. I don't know if they will indure. They can be fast and convenient but that doesn't necessarily make them the best design. And there have been containers where you closed them, loosely and then tightened them. Once apon a time there was some thing called a stow band. They were actually springs sewn into straps to tighten the flaps and pull them open. This was in the days on cones and pins. We found loops to be much better. I suppose you could also call Racer reserves or Reflex reserves kind of a two stage closure. You close it loosely and then tighten the loop. They work but you can bend pins, cause hard pulls, your uncertain how tight they now are, etc. But it's been done. You'll notice that all the containers just close, It's not that big a deal just learn how to do it. Lee

Reexamining procedures and techniques is always a good exercise. But keep in mind that we have been doing this for a while. There are often reasons for every thing you see done but they may not be apparent. In asking these questions you may learn why these things are. Be careful about who you lessen to. Remember that the institutional in this sport is rather short. A lot of people only stay in it for a few years. So reasons for things get forgotten or things that had no reason become local dogma. Some one told them that once, they repeat it, then it becomes a rule. There is a lot of miss informed bullshit that is passed around as fact with limited understanding. What makes a good pack job... Lines straight. Slider up. Breaks set. Really it's about getting the canopy to line stretch in that configuration. That simple statement conceals the complexity of that task. The slider is a negative feed back control system for the opening of the canopy. The wind fights to keep the slider up, the canopy fights to open. The faster you go the harder the slider tries to stay up and control the canopy. As the canopy fills with air and the speed slows the canopy becomes dominant over the slider and starts to push it down and the canopy opens. That is a deceptively simple explanation. How hard the opening is is very dependent on how fast you are going when the canopy becomes dominant over the slider. If for any reason the slider is not dominant over the canopy in the early phases of the opening... google base jump and slider down to see the behavior of a canopy not controlled by a slider. At terminal, it's just a question of what will break first and unfortunately we tend to build our gear pretty tough. You might be the part that breaks and that's not rhetorical. Numerous fatalities and injuries from just hard openings. The heart tears lose inside the chest cavity and the aorta bleeds out into the chest and you die. See the same thing a lot in helicopter crashes with vertical impacts. The dominance of the slider depends on it being at the top of the lines. It's mechanical advantage depends on that. Just a few inches can make the canopy dominant and the slider fails to control the opening. Dynamic pressure goes up with the square of the velocity but it's worse then that because the fill rate of the canopy also goes up increasing the power of the canopy over the slider. The result can be an exponentially harder opening. The slider is also dependent on line tension. This sounds strange but if there is a pop where the lines briefly go slack the canopy can pull line through the slider as it tries to spread above the slider. Think of the canopy as a spring and the lines pulling the canopy down against the slider squeezing most of the cells together and closed at the grommets. The wind holds the slider up and the lines pull the canopy down against the slider keep it squeezed down. Sudden slack in the lines means that the canopy is lose to to expand above the slider and suddenly you get an explosively hard opening. How could that happen? Lets say you had a container with really tight riser covers, ether at the shoulders or the secondary covers alond the reserve tray that have become popular. There can actually be a lot of variation in the retention force of those covers based on, for instance, where it curves over your shoulder. Depending on how long the main lift web is on the container the cover might bend over your shoulder or be farther down your back with little curve. This is part of why many people are trying to move to magnetic covers, if done properly they can be less dependent on geometry. The real truth is that tuck tabs were a pain to build constantly and booth was looking for some thing easier. They had the side effect of actually, or at least potentially, being better covers. Every thing else is hype but they did turn out to be more reliable in there opening forces. But lets say that they stay closed, bag goes to line stretch, canopy comes out, slider spreads, then the risers pop causing a loss of tension in the lines. Hard opening. How might this happen? Lets say you had one of those cool new stowless bags. They have almost no tension on the lines as the lines just slide out of that pocket. The last two stows can be poped just by the inertia of the risers and lines and may not open a tight set of covers. Take the bag out of the container on the floor. If you hold it and walk upwards do the line stows have enough force to lift the risers and unstow the covers. Keep in mind that this happens fast so there is an inertia thing you are fighting as well. Those new bags, as cool as they are, are just not the most positive form of staging. Worse if one or both of the risers are caught under the corner of the reserve tray. The length can be over three feet. Or if one is caught the difference in length between the two sides will be over three feet. So one side of the canopy is pulling down one side of the slider very unsymmetrical The difference can be more then the width of the slider. So the other side of the slider the grommets are actually pulled down the lines allowing that side of the canopy to open above the slider with no control. And since the slider is not exactly making a lot of drag being pulled down by one edge rather then being flat to the wind the other side opens almost like a slider down canopy. Know a guy that was paralyzed by that. He's a quad now. I'm not trying to scare you. I'm just saying that there are some important things going on during the chaos of an opening. There has been some thought put into some of the things that we do. The reasons may not be clear and worse people may have a hard time articulating the why. A lot of the why gets lost in time when the average generation of a jumper is only about 5 years or less in some areas. It's just what they were told but they don't know the why. Keep asking questions. Lee

I think an aerostar/phantom would be the smallest. I remember once I was putting some old rigs together for a jump. I missed the opportunity to buy a chest mount. I don't recall what it was called. It was from the cone era but it used through loops. Loops of ungutted type 3 from the bottom to the top, canopy stacked on it's side, loops came through. Two pins. Can not for the life of me remember what it was called or who built it. I was told that it was the smallest at the time which was probable the case. Any clue what that was? Lee

You won't see a lot of them. Notice they talk about a pin being pulled. There were some early ejection seats where the parachute was still worn on the back separate from the seat, typically BA-22's, that had low altitude lanyards and others where they had AAD's that would go off a timer as well as altitude... This was kind of in the same vane. I think it was supposed to be simi compatible with some of these older systems or at least in the same vain. So when you separated from the seat it would turn on when the pin was pulled. Or you could walk around in it and pull the knob before you jump out. If he can't find the handle... I've only run into a few over the years but it's some thing you will see in an air crew rig like you might find on such a plane as this. Load masters that are working in the back of a plane doing air drops wear them. I've seen them used out in Eloy. It's a thing, you just don't see it in skydiving. Lee

There is a Air Crew Cypres. You find it in emergency rigs, single canopy rigs for pilots and flight crew, mostly military or contractors. http://www.ssk.us/EAC_20031202.pdf Lee

Is the guy that bought Jerry's TSO still building chest mounts? He had TSO's in all four categories. New guy is trying to make a real push to break into the pilot market. You might be able to get a custom rig from him. Lee

It's valid but there is also a point of diminishing returns. I've built PC's like that but I've also jumped for years with out them. Is it worth it? Maybe in base? It's certainly necessary in some of the systems I work on but that's so far out side the skydiving envelope that I question whether it's relevant. Lee

Leadingedgebase@hotmail.com Lee

That's also a high load area during opening. When the slider spreads that center cell is the only one open. All the other cells are basically squeezed together to the width of the grommet. So if your whole line set is made of as light a line as possible, bulk/drag, then you may need continuous lines on the center A, B lines. When they started offering light weight HMA lines as an option on some canopies those line sets were non cascaded. I've also seen line sets with special line trims built non cascaded, a competitor was sent a line set to tweek the trim and it was non cascaded. In some ways noncascaded sets are better. It's just a trade off between bulk/drag and the stability of the trim of the airfoil. Cascades... wiggle back and forth depending on the load distribution cord wise on the airfoil. Lee

There used to be a guy on here and on basejumper.com More active as a base jumper, you might have better luck reaching him there. He used to be a navel aviator, I think he flew f-14's. I'm trying to remember his screen name, I think it was flydive. Might be this guy. https://www.dropzone.com/profile/2795-flydive/ http://www.basejumper.com/cgi-bin/forum/gforum.cgi?username=flydive; He could give you some very good input on weather limitations for launching and recovering aircraft. I think they might be able to launch in much worse conditions then they could recover in. I don't it's implausible that a long flight to this location might result in them arriving in worsening weather and unable to land but that is some thing that they would be trying to avoid communicating in route as they pass possible alternates. A pilot would very much not want to box him self in to a forced landing with out fuel to reach an alternate landing site. the worsening weather might make that alternate more difficult to reach. He might now be bucking a head wind. Landing in the water is a scary thing. There is almost no steering with a non modified round. An experienced jumper can try to "slip it" Pulling on two risers, say the two right risers, to try to make it slip right. Limited effectiveness. Landing in the water even a short distance can be life threatening in even mildly cold weather. Yes people die that way. Round canopies can drag you in water just like they do on land. Some parachutes used in the navy have what is called water pockets on them. It's a peace of fabric sewn to every other goar, the triangle slices of the parachute between the lines. It's sewn on three edges leaving the top open like a big pocket. They catch in the water when you are being drug in the water in high winds. The bottom edge of the canopy is held and the air spills out as the canopy rolls out flat onto the water and deflates. So that is very plausible that the most experienced person would be blown into the water, land, be drug, have the canopy collapse, get cut away, barely make it to shore and be in very deep trouble with hypothermia. A dislocated shoulder is exactly the sort of injury that you would expect from a hard landing/dragging event. This could happen even to an experienced jumper and it's the sort of thing that you would expect to happen to some one untrained. Falling out of the plane is not a ridicules idea. Under normal circumstances I would say that that is stupid but in weather, even moderate turbulence, you can literally have any thing not strapped down, ex. people, bouncing off the ceiling. Particularly at the back of the plane away from the CG that tail can move all around. You could find your self bounced off the ceiling, swotted by the far wall and ejected out the door. I've seen pilots do it on purpose. Some one he does not like or wants to fuck with is lounging by the open door, best spot on a hot day. Push on the yoke to unload him, make him weightless, and a hard kick on the rudder and out he goes. Funny as shit especially if he is asleep. It's what passes for humor in skydiving. It's dangerous to fall asleep at the drop zone. With the almost complete lack of control of an unmodified round a tree landing makes perfect sense. Trees look soft and fluffy but they have these hard things hidden in them called branches. You really want to keep your legs together and cover your face with your arms keeping them in tight to protect your neck and arm pits. A basic course... Try to get them to exit with both hands on the silver handle. Count to three, they do this in about half a second, pull down and away to full arm length. Keep feet and legs together. If it were windy I would brief them on how the release worked. squeeze the feet and knees together on landing. Keep them slightly bent, do not lock them straight. Hold on to the risers, it will help to keep the from reaching out for the ground, good way to break or dislocate your arm. Once you hit the ground your whole focus should be on getting that riser lose. Open the cover. Hook that ring and pull. The reality is that they will not exit stable. They will be tumbling ass over teakettle. No point on focusing on any thing but getting that handle pulled and minimizing the parts of the body sticking out for the canopy to wrap around as they tumble. The second they exit they will be blind and disoriented. Rain at that speed is like being sand blasted. Once the canopy gets open every thing gets calm or would normally. You don't feel the wind you are just drifting with it, but wind gust can be violent. The guy in the book was in cloud but describes the violence of the turbulence. It may have been his vertigo but he thinks that at one point the canopy was beneath him. That was actually inside the storm. Normally it's not that bad. It's quiet, peaceful. Until the thunder which can be loud. But when you look down you will see the ground going by under you at an alarming rate. Gust feel like they are pulling the canopy to the side and then letting it go, causing you to swing and oscillate. The canopy osculates. As you land in high winds you're traveling sidewase. This actually helps your landing. It will take your feet out from under you and roll you out sidewase on the ground. I think PLF's are much easier under a round with a little wind. I generally turn sidewase to the wind to help with a nice right or left PLF. But with a canopy like this it's random. Face, ass, side roll the dice. And I like the idea of the one idiot coming away unscathed. That's very real. If you catch the right gust, hit at just the right point on the oscillation, you can almost stand it up. He'll fall over in this wind but there is always one guy like that. How high of winds? I don't think there is really a limit. I would not chose to jump a round in more then 12 mph, I like rounds, strange that way. This is not really recreational. It might be 30 mph now but 50 when the front hits. I think a better question is what wind and sea state can they not land in. It's a crazy plan to begin with, I assume they are being forced into this. Lee

As to the type of parachute. Almost with out exception emergency bail out rigs are round canopies. Recently people have been putting large square canopies in some pilot rigs but this is almost always jump plane pilots at civilian drop zones who are them selves jumpers. Pilots and air crew are rarely jumpers unless it's a hobby for them. I'm not aware of any pilot/aircrew/bail out rigs in the military with square canopies, for good reason, round canopies do not require any input to land so untrained, non jumpers, or unconscious individuals can use them. A square canopy you have to actually unstow the breaks, stear the canopy, and flair it to land with out hurting your self. If you want to see the kinds of containers that might be used look up BA-22 parachute. That is a fairly standard bail out rig that some one might wear moving about in a plane. It's some what heavy and bulky. It can tolerate higher speed deployments. It uses a quarter bag as a kind of diaper holding the bottom half of the canopy closed till the lines are deployed. The canopy is a C-9, One of the toughest canopies ever built, the lines run continuously over the top of the canopy forming a net supporting the canopy. It's some thing you would see in early ejection seats before the parachute was built into the chair. On larger aircraft it allowed them to move around. Bad weather can be scary. We've all been there. In the US there is no wind regulation other then your judgement. We've all tried to get that last jump in before the front rolls in. Every one has at some point landed, even with a square, backing up in forty mph winds. Getting drug is actually very dangerous. It's especially dangerous under a round canopy. There are people that have been drug to death. People have been knocked unconscious on landing or while being drug. They can strike a object like a rock or tree stump and break their neck. Those are real events. The containers generally have releases on the risers. They are primarily there as anti drag devices or to get lose, like to get out of a tree. Look up, capewell parachute release, as an example. You open the cover and that loop of cable pops out where you can grab it. You put your thumb through the loop and pull forwards releasing a lever. As you pull forwards and down the lever moves a slide that locks the bottom of the capwell on the end of the riser into the peace on the harness it flips out ward releasing the hook on the top and that riser goes away. You only need to release one set of risers, on the right or left, to fully collapse the canopy and stop your self from being drug. I've landed, with a square, in 60 mph winds. It's scary. As it happens I did not have any form of release on that rig. I was drug for half a mile across the sea ice before I could get the canopy collapsed. Found it. The quality on You tube does not do it justice. I swear the wind wasn't that bad at the top. It's a weather thing up there where you get an out flow of air through the fiords It can be blowing 50+ at the bottom. At one point you see the corner of my canopy come down level with the horizon. That was not me making a turn. That was when I passed through the wind sheer and found out that I was in trouble. I tried to hide it but inside I was crying like a little girl. There is another even better video from Norway but I have no idea how to find it. It's an out side video of a guy having the same thing happen. Another famous historical event happened when a guy bailed out of a plane over a thunder storm. His parachute opened but he was sucked back up into the thunder storm. You should look it up if you want to know what jumping in a storm is like. I can tell you that rain stings, sleet fucking hurts, I don't know if you could survive hail. https://www.google.com/search?biw=1920&bih=937&tbm=isch&sa=1&ei=JmQ7XdKICsresAXwyb_wCw&q=ba-22+parachute&oq=ba-22+parachute&gs_l=img.3..35i39.10989.12020..12591...0.0..0.62.120.2......0....1..gws-wiz-img.......0i7i30.aiErpGMTluc&ved=0ahUKEwjSs53nt9PjAhVKL6wKHfDkD74Q4dUDCAY&uact=5 https://www.google.com/search?q=capewell+parachute+release&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjD-Kr2vtPjAhVLOKwKHV2JC_cQ_AUIEygD&biw=1920&bih=937 https://loa-shared.s3.amazonaws.com/static/pdf/Rankin_Man_Thunder.pdf Lee

With the way you are flying it, it's probable not an issue yet. Conservative designs will still fly nicely even when noticeable out of trim. Most of the shrinkage is in the outer lines and the break lines. It gets towed down at the corners and the breaks start to get short. I would take a good look at the breaks the next time you jump it. They should bow behind the canopy and not pull the tail down at all in full flight. If it's getting tight I'd replace the middle break line to restore the length and call it good. $20 better then $200. Lee

Little bit of video from the third flight. For the record this is not what it is supposed to do. Let's just say that there was a slight control/guidance issue. It would have made a free flyer proud. It was more then a bit frightening to watch it go into a flat coning spin right above us. That's over 1,500 lb of fuel/lox ready to drop in the middle of us if the cone gets to flat and it stops accelerating upwards. It did get going and the fins finally did provide us with enough stability to clear the area. Appogy was about 13,000 ft. Engine shut down do to IIP, it was about to exceed it's 7 km circle. That translates to about 500 mph over the top. Nose cone fired shortly after that, a bit slower but not by much. Nose tears off. Ballute inflates and whips the rocket around. 10 sec delay till it releases the main. We were only going about 150 mph as it came out so not too bad. Sewing the lines into the risers ala security 150 worked well. I'm pleased with that. And the ballute and cutter system certainly proved them selves that day. One break did not unstow till the very end. But it seemed to be flying it's pattern about 1000 ft low. I think there might be an issue with the terrain soft ware. So it landed as it was turning to base with out flaring. Cracked the boat tail and broke lose one of the actuators for the engine. No biggy. Found the nose cone, broken. Spent three days in the dessert looking for the ballute, no joy. That's a bummer. https://youtu.be/GlgN1bJWO48 https://youtu.be/-cTNevdDCN4 https://youtu.be/2qYF-0SwM94 Remember, you can use the hand to move the view around on the 360 fly cameras. So you can look down or up better the 180 deg. If the guys at Dekunu can figure out how to up load the flight data to their cloud I'll share the flight path as well. We had a couple of their altimeters on there for fun. There little units did good. Lee

We just flew a pair of dekunu altimeters on our rocket. I couldn't be more pleased. They gave us instant access to a great deal of data. this was particularly important as the flight went to shit. We were able to pull key data points out of the unit. We had to kind of hack them to get them to record the flight as we were using them well out side of normal skydiving paramiters. So far I am very excited about these units. Lee

I'm going to disagree. I'm a little out of touch by about a generation in terms of the current designs but in the past certain types of collapse seemed to be a recurring theme. I would not dismiss it as a danger. Other forms of collapse seem to become even more common as canopies improve in performance so I don't think this issue will ever go away completely. The first guy I ever watched die was a leading edge collapse. I didn't fully understand what I was looking at at the time. It was on a Pintale. I'm going to name names here, I don't think there is any way around it, please don't take it as shiting on any manufacturer. It's just history. Later we got a bunch of Conquest, I think that was the name, in from PISA. They had interesting behaviors in front risers. You could watch the dimple roll abound and change as you pulled on the front risers till it reached a point where the top skin would just bedsheet and it would just fall. Later I bought one of the first Extremes in the US from Gyro in Newzeland. Great canopy. Then he came out with his FX. We bought a couple of those. fucking death traps. When you turned one side of the canopy would collapse, it would spin, then the other side would roll under. Quote a ride. Cross flow through the canopy? Leaky seems? There were lots of theories. In the end he backed off on the nose a bit. It was just to close to the edge. Later the first of the Cross fires came out. I remember seeing them at Quincy and I thought, here we go again. Then I watched Mandys Velocity collapse in the middle of a swoop. And then later I watched that VX collapse over that plowed field. OMG I can't believe I forgot about the Novas in all is this but I think that was a slightly different issue. But these are my memories of nose collapses. I also remember people having canopies spin up on them. Like the guy that died when his saber one 210 turned into line twist leaving his body behind. He tried to do a shashay, the canopy unloaded and turned with out him the lines were twisted with the toggle down and he spiraled in. Later I remember a Safire. One side stalled and back spun during a hard turn, cuttaway. I remember when a lot of people were jumping large Triathlons. Then they bought Spectors. Suddenly they couldn't land there canopies at the end of the day. The dynamics of the canopy were different, they surged much worse dropping into that still air. One guy wound up with a severe brain injury from that. Point is that I've seen these things come up time and again. Some of them aren't even design defects. Some of these are a direct result of building a "Better" canopy. And they were fundamentally better. That guy with the saber died because it was a better canopy then he was used to. It made more lift. At that low wing loading you could unload your self easily. Charles almost died because his Spector flew better then his triathlon. I hope we are learning lessons but I don't think that these problems will ever fully go away because they are linked to our desire to build better higher performance canopies. I don't think you are going to covence me that all problems with canopies are behind us. I think as we continue to strive to build better canopies we will continue to bump into the edges of the envelope and will continue to see problems with each new generation. Lee

I might also point out that there is no force spreading, pealing them apart till the slider descends bellow the cascade. By then you are past the worst of the opening shock. All the real force is in straight shear. Lee

All the canopies that I can think of that were made that way were lined with the wide flat dacron. You could really sew the hell out of it. It was also harder to fingertrap with that tighter weave. I doubt it was as strong as a proper fingertrap. I think you would have needed about twice the stitching that they had in it to get to the same percent of strength that you can get with a finger trap, at least with a modern loser weave line. Lee

I think there are factors affecting the perception of this. On the whole I think skydiving has gotten safer over the years that I was involved in it. It seems like accidents and even more so injuries have come in waves. It seems that we go through cycles where some thing new is introduced to the sport and the malfunction, injury, fatality rates spike for a time till we adapt. Having lived through those lessens I would have to say that the equipment and sky diving has gotten safer. But there are other factors that affect the perception of it's safety. It would be interesting to corrolate the attitudes expressed here with the age of the jumpers in the sport. The longer you stay in the sport the more likely you are to bairy a friend. It's a reality check when you watch some one die. I think average time in the sport has gotten shorter. We used to say that the average time was 5 years. A few years ago some one told me that it was down to three before they wondered off and... took up golf. If you stay in the sport long enough statistics catch up with you and you have to attend a funeral. So I think there is a disconnect between lifers and average jumpers in terms of the perception of the dangers in the sport. And I think that difference is growing larger with the lower average time in the sport. So I would say that there is a difference in perspective between older jumpers and the average. It's both from Lifers having lived through times that were actually more dangerous and the average jumper not having been bitch slapped with reality yet primarily do to the lower average time in the sport. I remember when a well liked local jumper died. For a number of that generation it was the first close friend that they had lost and it really affected them. Some of them stopped jumping after that. It was a big reality check. Lee

It will be easy to pack. Canopies that live there do have shorter life spans. The lines need to be replaced more often. But it's only 50 jumps. That's like one good long boogie. If he hasn't gotten it real dusty it wont be bad at all. I wouldn't worry that much about it. Even if you baught a brand new canopy you should make trip to Eloy for the Christmas New Years Eve boogie any way. And then it will have 50 desert jumps on it any way. And then you should take it to South Padre and then it will have beach jumps on it. And then you should do water jumps with it... Lee