RiggerLee

Yes it was a thing. There were a few canopies that tried to use it. It doesn't work very well. The PC is in the burble of the canopy and provides inconsistent drag and the line burns up the canopy as it passes through. Solid sliders that block the wind into the canopy work much better. Good thought, but it turns out that it doesn't work well. Lee Lee lee@velocitysportswear.com www.velocitysportswear.com

I think nether. It was staging. The change to micro and ZP created staging issues. Packing practices that worked, or that we go away with, on dacron lined f-111 canopies would not work with the new materials. And although they came out together they were not necessarily used together. we saw f-111 with micro and ZP with dacron. Lee Lee lee@velocitysportswear.com www.velocitysportswear.com

Turning the riser into a fuse is basically what we are talking about. I'd say build lighter slinks but they are much more of a wear area. The riser leg is less of a wear and less prone to change over a reasonable life span. This problem has come in waves. Once we had good sliders and good staging the problems of hard openings was basically solved. Then as micro line and ZP showed up it reared it's head again. Now as fall rates pick up with free flying we are seeing it again. Lee Lee lee@velocitysportswear.com www.velocitysportswear.com

It wouldn't and it doesn't do so now. It shouldn't be too much to ask for people to replace their shit when it wears out. And yes that's a problem now as it is. I don't think the over all life span would change that much do to wear. The areas we are talking about are not the wear areas. There is much more wear around the three rings. All of the failures I've seen on third ring tapes and grommets have been on older risers. Interestingly, the risers I saw break above the junction were almost new. So in an asymmetric opening most of the load on the right front riser it failed the riser above the junction before it broke the three ring or grommet. So with a brand new riser, built properly, correct dimensions, I think the strength of the three ring is greater then that type 17. But as the three ring wears it drops below the strength of the riser and becomes the failure point. What I'm suggesting is that we build the riser such that the leg, which isn't the main wear point, would remain the weak link through out it's expected service life. Looked at from that perspective It wouldn't be that much weaker then a used riser. Lee lee@velocitysportswear.com www.velocitysportswear.com

That's valid. I think it's fair to say that these aberrant openings only happen when some thing goes wrong but there are a lot of things to go wrong. The quad was sit flying when he lost a main. Best if that never happened but... shit happens. Was it just the air speed? I think a riser got caught under his reserve tray and caused an out of sequence opening but that's just my theory. People are free flying all the time. Short of building 170 mph canopies I don't see a solution to that. Remember the video of the wing suter that sucked their canopy all the way back onto to their back on opening and then had basically a slider down opening on his main? I know a woman that I think that happened to. Almost destroyed her shoulder. I don't think it's a small canopy problem. Historically I've seen way more problems with small canopies then large ones. This is one of the reasons I am very skeptical about new goofy stowless bag designs. I think those things are asking for trouble. Lee Lee lee@velocitysportswear.com www.velocitysportswear.com

It's a real problem. I've known 3 people that died from hard openings on mains and one quadriplegic. A screamer or bungee would not work because there is not enough energy absorption. It's force over distance and the numbers are too high. I work with them in several designs, we have a screamer on our nose cone. Just built a system with a break tape followed by a large screemer for the attachment points for hover test of our air frame to protect the crane truck. And they are really bulky by the way. Snapping the riser is the way to go to limit the load. Lee Lee lee@velocitysportswear.com www.velocitysportswear.com

I would argue that we have this now in the form of mini risers. The problem with that is that we have RSL's. You could call the collens lanyard a fix for that problem but I see it as a fix for a fix and would argue that simplifying the system removing the RSL would be a cleaner way to go. Another thought is to reevaluate the way we are building risers. A riser where the break point would be above the RSL connection. I have seen mini risers break above the confluence point, front riser snapped, so we're not that far off. I think the problem is the internal stresses in the three ring. I've seen several tapes break on the third ring. If we went to an Aerodyne stile riser with an elongated second ring we might move the break point up above the release. Another thought is risers with a lower tinsel strength webbing. And you can have webbing woven to any speck. For example we had a tape woven for a raideal seam that was 1200 lb vs the normal 500. So if we built a lighter riser, with good reinforcing tape in the grommet, and an Icon ring we could move the failure point up above the junction. Pick the strength and set the limit to the load you want the jumper and harness to endure. And this isn't a speculative goofy discussion. People have died from opening shock. I've known several who ether died or might have died from opening shock and one that's paralised. And... remember the Racer that blew up? Broke all the stitching on the chest strap. I've seen several leg junctions blow partially or completely. Fortunately they were on rigs with redundant stitching. Or the russion rig that blew up at the upper junction. Or the base rig that blew up at the upper junction, built just like a skydiving reserve riser. Point is you can and we have broken shit. Both our harnesses and our selves. I don't consider this to be a theoretical discussion. Lee Lee lee@velocitysportswear.com www.velocitysportswear.com

You could argue about some of the dimensions but the snatch is the first commercial effort to build a better PC. It's head and shoulders above the two flat plates that you get with most PC. Lee Lee lee@velocitysportswear.com www.velocitysportswear.com

Historically the well designed spring loaded pilot chutes did have a limiter. They were much better designs with better drag. The designs got compromised to make them easier to manufacture. Look at the MA-1. That was actually a well thought out design. The spring is enclosed in a tube preventing any thing from intangibility. A simple limiter tape would tend to get tangled around the coils when it was compressed. The MA-1 is in much better proportion then modern pilot chutes. A round canopy wants to inflate into a hemisphere. The out wards force has to balance the inward force of the lines. It really needs lines at least one diameter in length. So if a PC is 36 inches across it wants to have 36 inch long lines from base to edge. Longed is actually better but 1 D is about the point of diminishing returns. If you look at the MA-1 it has a long point way below the limited length of the spring. The spring does not actually define the shape of the PC in any way. If you want a semi modern example look at some of the older strong PC's... the Little grabber? As I recall it was basically the same design only with modern mesh. Could use a better spring but that's another story. Now look at most of the abortions that we build today. Every thing from hand deploys to most of the reserve pc. A lot of them are just two disks, one of fabric, one of mesh. So you can hot cut them together and just sew around the edge. This makes the "lines" about half the length they should be. Pulling down the apex helps but they still suck. The bottom line is that we didn't actually want some thing good. We wanted some thing easy. Some thing we could build. Some thing that would fold flat and roll up or pack small. And the truth is that in most cases we didn't need that much drag so any thing would do. Some of the earlier PC's had nice long springs like the 357 or strong tandem but then there seemed to be a movement towards smaller shorter springs and letting them act as a limiter. I've seen these stretched and mangled on high speed deployments. For example we tried using Power Racer PC once on a recovery system and blew them up. We wound up basically building mini MA-1 around that spring and they worked great. So the answer to your question is that good PC's do in fact have a limiter but it's usually in the form of a tube. Modern PC's don't have one because we are lazy and cheap. Lee Lee lee@velocitysportswear.com www.velocitysportswear.com

I'd say it would. I'm not sure if it's retroactive to older systems. The strong system as an example predates the TSO and just operated under a waver for decades. I'm not sure where it fits in the TSO. It's probable been tested under it and operates under it at this point. Regardless the tandem systems are so integral as a system that trying to substitute generic skydiving parts or build your own just doesn't make sense. Being out of country, I'm guessing that some one is cutting corners or asking you to. I realize that shipping things internationally is a pain but he wants to operate a tandem operation I recommend that you tell him to get serious, pony up and buy the parts he needs. If you're in the far corners of the would then you need to be proactive in stocking parts. It's not worth cutting corners on this. Notice that I'm saying this and I'm some one that is fully capable of building just about any thing. Lee Lee lee@velocitysportswear.com www.velocitysportswear.com

I'm not the best person to give you advise. I was looking at this more from a rigging/technology point of view then as a job. As I understand it there are two groups that run smoke jumper operations. I think one is the Forest Service and the other might be the Bureau of Land Management? Public lands in the US can be managed by any of a number of branches of the government or they might be tribal lands belonging to the native Americans. So there are two different groups administered by different parts of the government. I was looking more at the gear and I can tell you that one group jumps steerable rounds and the other jumps squares. Let me clarify that. They jump things like a Goliath 360 sq ft 7 cell. Think MC-1. Not a bad choice for what they are doing but I've jumped rounds that had a better turning speed. Point is that if you learned to skydive to help you with this goal you sort of wasted your time. Unless you specialized in jumping accuracy with a para foil then the skills wont really translate. I think one group static lines them just like a military jump. The other does drogue fall. It's an interesting system where you hang vertically under the drogue. You are basically part of the cargo load. I'm hard pressed to think of any similarities to sport skydiving. I don't think that's even a metric that they look at in selection. They can start from scratch just as easily. My understanding is that what they really look for is really good experienced fire fighters. That's what they really are. The jumping is just delivery to the site. They look for the best, strongest fire fighters they can find. I don't know what their experience requirements are but they are measured in years. They look for people capable of operating on their own with no back up or support in what is by definition very isolated areas. What's your story? I assume you're a fire fighter in Chile? Do you work for the government there? What are your goals? Are there smoke jumpers there or are you trying to establish a program? Being from out side of the country might actually open up some opportunities for you. They might be interested in a program of cross pollination? You might approach it as an exchange program between the two countries. If your respective bosses put their heads together they might sell it as a cross training program between our two nations. Lee Lee lee@velocitysportswear.com www.velocitysportswear.com

I've met and talked with them at PIA. If you really want to do this, that's cool. More power to you. But know what you're getting into. That is one of the hardest jobs I've ever seen. It's HARD work. They carry HEAVY packs. And it's about as far from glamorous as you can get. The jumping thing is like 5% of it and the jumping is not supper fun. I'm a base jumper and some of the things they do, conditions they jump in, places they land are kind of sketchy. Base is more fun, less dangerous, and less stressful then what they do. They need good men. And if you want to step into that breach good for you but it will probable be the hardest thing you've ever done in your life. And just to add, why are you asking around here? If you're qualified for this, with years of back woods fire fighting under your belt, I would think that you would already know who to talk to. Lee Lee lee@velocitysportswear.com www.velocitysportswear.com

I don't know if it had a specific name. Some times x shaped sliders like that were called spider sliders. It was just one of the various forms of pilot chute controlled reefing. Diapers are still around in CRW canopies. A good example is the Prodigy and Express canopies. The were built by Flight concepts and we used them during Diamond Quest. It was an effort to recruit people into a CRW big way project. In the course of that they used to go around doing a bunch of CRW camps promoting it. In any case it was a good diaper with a fair bit of control of the canopy if you packed it right. The nice thing was you could just hook up the main to their container. You didn't have to worry about bag shape or trying to use their bag. It made it much easier for them to put one of the demo canopies into their own rig. Down side, no one was used to packing it, the canopies were on the big end and a lot of the containers were too small, you wound up with some very ugle pack jobs. It became a running joke. Nothing wrong with the system. In fact as a CRW canopy it had some advantages. Not having a bag swinging around like a bollo on the top of the canopy was a real advantage. When a canopy collapses in a wrap the weight of a bag can pull the bridal back out of the retract system and swing around like a weight looking for some thing to entangle with. This is not theoretical it happens a lot. So it's been done. For that application there were advantages. It was always an up hill battle just because it was so alien to the students. And if the container is tight you can wind up with some of the ugliest pack jobs and rigs imaginable. It really did become a running joke that half the pack job was out side the container, although to be honest some times we did it just to fuck with people. A lot of our containers were just what ever we could find or they were swooping rigs pressed into service for monthly CRW training. One guy open the seams in the corners of his container with a seam ripper to fit a bigger canopy. There was one that I jumped were I would only close the top and bottom flaps. One guy had a pullout, we didn't bother taking the curved pin off the bridal it would get lost so some times it would fall down and dangle below the flaps. So he's trying to climb into the plane and the woman behind him sees it and freaks out. She's got him in a bear hug screaming "No, No!" as he's trying to climb up the ladder into the otter. He's like, "It's fine, it's fine." That's where the term dangling pin came from. Lee Lee lee@velocitysportswear.com www.velocitysportswear.com

It's still around in different iterations. If you look at CRW and base canopies you will see variations of this. You'll see tail pockets, tail flaps, and diapers. The Prodigy as an example had a Diaper. As to why it fail out of favor. People wanted more positive staging and better control of the pack job as it was lifted to line stretch. Free fall speeds increased. Even before Free Fly speeds were picking up. Jump suits were getting tighter, weights etc. Canopies were becoming higher performance. A low aspect ratio seven cell, well you can just throw it out there and it would figure it self out. A modern elliptic is a bit more twitchy. Another issue was line control. A lot of people packed that way by just coiling the line in the bottom of the tray. This can actually work till it doesn't. Every once in a while you'll half hitch a line around a side flap and get a nasty horse shoe. So the practice of coiling lines with early diapers and bags with out stows went away. People wanted better line control and bags got extra stows beyond the locking stows. Rigs got tighter. If you do half the stuffing cramming it into a bag you can then crush it even more closing a tight container over it. Lee Lee lee@velocitysportswear.com www.velocitysportswear.com

We are not killing people but you will see scary things from time to time. I've seen choker diapers closed from the bottom and half stows closed with all the lines. I haven't seen the same equivalent errors in squares. I'm pretty sure all examples are attributable to lack of training, inability to read or more probable not having the instructions. Not making excuses for errors but you do see this. Even if you have the instructions some times they are vague. Pack in a standard long fold... etc. If you'd never seen a round before it would be confusing. Their is a not unreasonable assumption of preexisting knowledge. Talk to the guy from Butler. They see a lot of things coming back into their shop. But people are not dieing. PEP just don't get used that much. Their just are not that many saves so these errors slip by with out some one dieing. That doesn't make it ok. That doesn't mean that their isn't a problem. I see it as a decline in training. I think it's a product of the commercialization of rigging courses in which they try to train people in a couple of weeks what they would have once learned over a six month apprenticeship. It hasn't all been bad. It's opened it up to people who would never have been able to presue it before. It has allowed the growth of our sport but new graduates do not have the depth and breadth of knowledge that they once had. The technology is diverging and if you aren't going to have the training to cope with it then you should just divide the two before you really do kill some one. Lee Lee lee@velocitysportswear.com www.velocitysportswear.com

There are some differences in orientation and lay out that might confuse some one the first time but they are trivial in comparison between the differences between sport and round pilot rigs. A lot of sky diving riggers are completely unfamiliar with them. Dave DeWolf no longer teaches them in his rigging class unless you stay for some extra training. So in his class you can be trained as a rigger and be tested with out ever packing or being tested on a round. It's the sort of thing that can get people killed. Back in the day, I think it was para flight, that had a special "Square Certification". They at least reconsidered how radically different the technology was at the time. I wouldn't mind seeing the old system scrapped and rather go to Round, Square ratings. I think they do some thing like that in Canada? Lee Lee lee@velocitysportswear.com www.velocitysportswear.com

I'm fond of things like this. https://www.rei.com/product/783805/rei-co-op-trail-chair It's nice to be able to set up in your tent and when you're ready to crash you just pop the sides and it becomes a second ground pad. You can also get a cheep stadium seat kind of thing that is like this. It's more comfortable because it's more ridged but it can ware on the floor of your tent. It's nice to be able to hang out in your bug shelter. Lee Lee lee@velocitysportswear.com www.velocitysportswear.com

You can go with a house but I'm comfortable in some thing much smaller I'd recommend some this... https://www.cabelas.com/product/camping/tents-shelters/backpacking-expedition-tents/pc/104795280/c/104779080/sc/104303880/alps-mountaineering-hydrus-tent/2495809.uts?slotId=13 It's a cheep low end tent but it has some important things like a real vestibule that is high enough to cook in, if you plan on doing that. Most tents need a little work. I'd recommend adding extra tie downs around the skirt. An extra one in between on each gap. It lets you stretch it out better and improves your air flow. You can add as many extra guy lines as you want and your car makes a good wind break but the safest thing to do with any tent is to pull it down in a real storm. Pull the poles and drop it flat or at least pull the vestibule. There are even more options at wallmart for a third the price. Buy 2 and when one wears out just swap it. Lee Lee lee@velocitysportswear.com www.velocitysportswear.com

For not so spartan living... https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B01IQU7WY2/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o00_s01?ie=UTF8&psc=1 https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B00ME985E8/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o07_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1 https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B00R57LSXE/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o07_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1 https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B00A8NP090/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o05_s01?ie=UTF8&psc=1 https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B06WRRJZCN/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o04_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1 Good for several days of fan and light and multiple movies. Lee Lee lee@velocitysportswear.com www.velocitysportswear.com

I don't know how long you expect it to last. For UV polyester is better then nylon. I would advise draping a tarp over it during the day. Two person is more then big enough. I think you will be happier with a lighter two season tent. By that I mean one with more mesh and ventilation. You can stay warm but sweating is a bitch. Make your own ground cloth and leak seal the tent it. Pick the best high ground you can find. Nuke it for bugs. Beyond that I'd look for the cheapest thing I could find on sale. You probable won't have any problem setting guy lines So a cheaper non free standing is fine. One thing I really like in a tent is a large high ceiling vestibule that you can cook in. A back door so you don't have to go in and out through the vest is nice. Get a cheep camp chair that doubles as a second ground mat. It's nice to be able to set up and read or cook. Get a good solar light that you can hang above and have shine down to cook or read. You can get a five gallon paint bucket and screw on lids that make great bug proof pantries for food at home depot. Lee Lee lee@velocitysportswear.com www.velocitysportswear.com

You're not exactly a student. By now you should have learned to tell people to go fuck them selves. If you're not capable of that by now not only are you not qualified to jump a Katana you have no business skydiving at all. And whats wrong with a freaking Katana? Any one that does not reconise a perfectly good canopy like that has just become way too stuck up and snobbish. They also need to be kicked off the drop zone so they can go join some even more elitist sport where they can measure their dick size with the size of their wallet. Lee Lee lee@velocitysportswear.com www.velocitysportswear.com

Some of the base jumpers that are really serious about their wing suit flying have been jumping interments on pilons on their bellies. I think Yuori might have been behind it. You might try reaching him on basejumper.com. As I recall he was able to get actual glide and true airspeed data out of it. The problem with useing a GPS system is that it's earth frame. It doesn't give you true air speed or decent rate. For a canopy pilot where the speeds are high enough those errors from wind or thermals fade but if you're looking at doing canopy design and trying to verify design models it's a problem. Some people have been using a towed instrument. You lower it on a tail behind you like a towed sonar array on a sub. It's heavy enough that it rides below the wake from your body and gives you good data. The instrument it self is on a pivot and alines with the free stream to give true air speed and decent glide angle in straight flight. I think it uses a free spinning propeller like an anemometer rather then a Pito tube. I think the technology came out of the paragliding industry they are obsessive about their performance. Tried to track one down and had no luck finding it. I think it's some thing used in their development and testing internal to those companies. Lee Lee lee@velocitysportswear.com www.velocitysportswear.com

In regards to the testing. Most of the interesting points were actually side affects of our efforts to find ways to test other things. For example we were looking at using "super slinks" in some aplications. Big mongo sized kevlar slinks made from basically light kevlar rope. Found a number of issues. One being that slinks become less reliable as the diameter of the material they are made from increases. As the line or cord increases in diameter there is a rolling force trying to flip the ring through the knot. It tries to unlock it self. At the loads we were playing with it's an issue. Some of the hard ware problems showed up as Phil was trying to test the super slink. We built a 20,000 lb test stand with load cells and a hydrolic cylinder. The high speed video of the stretching and failure of the joints was very interesting. Phil was pulling all these weird things. I was building test samples for him. He was using any thing he could rig up to pull them. Like for example using RW-9 rings to try to break the supper slinks. On paper they were stronger then the slink but with the load concentrated on that little half inch space in the center of the ring he plucked a .5 inch bight out of the middle of the ring. And the RW-9 is actually a pretty beefy ring. Heavier gauge then the RW-10 that you see on most tandems. We started pulling some of the hard ware and risers that we were building and found that the rings needed to be loaded across a wider area to reach their tinsel strength. We were also looking at the strength of our big kevlar 4 ring risers and found failure points at the second ring where we would just bend and wrap the second ring around the first. It was difficult but we could sew kevlar risers that would not break but the limiting factor was the ring hardware. We wound up going with a different design. It was sort of like an old strong wrap with the end being held by a three ring. Finally in the end we just designed a strap cutter. Think big cypres cutter that cuts 15,000 lb kevlar webbing. It's field re loadable with smokeless powder and electronic igniters. That made all the problems go away. As to the results of the hard ware testing. Most of the failures that we generated were in trying to miss use it in some other way. As such I didn't really keep notes on it. We did find a bad ring that had some kind of fracture in it. They were left over RW-9s that we got from paragear. Might have even been seconds? They had been made by forge craft probable at the very end. I showed them to the guys from Borden Forge at the symposium. They said that the tooling was worn out when it was made. They had no problem diagnosing the fracture. They are the new maker of that ring and had had to make all new tooling for the contract. They were not surprised at all by some of the other failures like the rings with the half inch bites out of them. They were never intended to be loaded in that way and were not surprised at the numbers I quoted to them for the failure points. I don't remember them off the top of my head but 1/3 sticks in my memory. It was in interesting lessen in testing and the use and miss use of hard ware in ways that it was not designed for. Loaded properly Every thing did well, with the notable exception of that defective ring. Being miss used all bets are off. So when I see people for example a base rig manufacture using RW-8s for harness attachment points for base tandem rings I start jumping up and down pulling my hair out and screaming, "NO, NO, NO!" Lee Lee lee@velocitysportswear.com www.velocitysportswear.com

There are many ways that this has been done. Legally it's much simpler to add an attachment point for a main or test canopy. You would like to put the cutaway canopy in the chest mount or at least the secondary main. It's harder to make the argument that that attachment point is for a reserve. It hasn't been TSO drop tested. At the very least you would have to do paperwork on it through the FSDO. Been there done that. But if it's just for a cutaway canopy then it's just a toy you're playing with in the air and as long as it doesn't compromise the TSO'd system... fair game? In any case you can generally get away with it. Ways to do this have been discussed before. Some better then others. The example shown strikes me as a good way to get bitch slapped by that B-12 and it does not lend it self to being cut away so not well suited as a main. Could put 3 rings on it but it could still whack you. If you're making a test canopy cut away, better to put a separable three ring on there below that ring so that it would be less prone to whipping around. What he's showing you there was probable used in TSOing that pilot rig. Probable never regularly deployed. If he did have to use it he would probable be hand deploying it past a may west or torn up canopy from an inversion as the "main" was not designed to be cutaway. It's a suitable solution for that purpose. If you ever really needed to use it in anger, like a total on the "main", a broken orbital in your eye socket would be to least of your worries. But do you want to risk loseing an eye or getting a concussion on every opening? No offence to his attachment point but you can do better. Also just as a note. RW-8's not the best ring to attach a snap to. It's not designed for that concentrated load from the thin snap. I've broken them that way. They beak at about 1/3 the normal point of failure. And yes I've built kevlar risers heavy enough to beak rings. If you look at snap rings you'll see they are much thicker or pointed to load at a small radius to match the snap. And use the heavier snaps designed for reserves. They're rated for higher loads. It's assumed that one may come lose. And cross connectors. If you're going to build risers for a belly mount reserve don't forget them and build it in a non pealing way that could survive an opening on one snap. Lee Lee lee@velocitysportswear.com www.velocitysportswear.com

How much of this is a bad thing. Yes animals can become entangled and killed and it looks like shit. But on the other hand it can become it's own ecosystem. Trash on the sea floor becomes reefs. One popular way of disposing of old boats now is to sink them. I saw where they did this with a big military boat... was it an aircraft carrier? Turned it into an instant reef that was soon colonized with all kinds of growth and animals. The huge patches of floating trash, really areas of scattered debree, form floating colonies in areas that were barren before. The open ocean is less populated then the dessert, but if there is some thing floating there all kinds of life will congregate to it. Any thing floating becomes an island in this vast emptiness and to have multiple patches within striking distance of each other, now you have a whole new ecology. It's a floating reef. Feel free to hate my. I think trash look like shit. I'm offended by it. I'm just saying that it's not the end of the planet. Life adapts and often takes advantage of the opportunities it is given. Lee Lee lee@velocitysportswear.com www.velocitysportswear.com