Stuffed toys = DANGER

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Video Information:

Submitted by SkydiveMO   
Date: 2008-03-08
Modified: 2008-04-01
Video by: Jason Papke
Video ID: 374

Bored of editing only RW and Freefly footage I came up with the brilliant idea to ask jumpers for their old plush toys so we could take them out for some skydives. Things were going great with the small toys but then we thought we’d step it up a notch. On our last dive we took the largest of the stuffed animals we had collected. John jumped the large monkey which put him in a pretty good spin so he dropped it around 6,000ft and opened with no problem. I took out a large dog which I couldn’t sit fly with as planned but was able to belly fly near pull time. I thought I was plenty stable but didn’t realize the dogs butt was sticking up so high that my main bag would strike it when I deployed. The canopy twisted up and put me in a spin. I tried kicking out but the dog was between my legs. At this point I had planed to let the toy go and move on with emergency procedures but the spin caused the stuffed dog to stay in my legs. After cutting away, the dog remained pinned to me as I rolled over and regained stability. I wasn’t able to clear the %&$# dog until after reserve deployment. We planned to break and pull high but as you can see from the video things happened fast. I pulled at 3.5 rather than the intended 4.5 and this didn’t leave me time to free the dog before pulling the reserve. Lesson learned- have a plan for every type of skydive and realize there are serious risks involved with jumping with toys, boards, cameras, etc.

Video Tags

malfunction videocontest01 stuffed toys archway skydiving