Vigil misfire

[sundevil777 93]

The other "normal" activations can be while a main is deployed low, as others have said, and they can also be from a low cutaway, where the jumper pulled their own reserve, but went through the activation altitude during the reserve deployment - therefore no save is credited to the AAD.

I would think the the Vigil folks would be smart to at least say that they are considering what might be done to prevent the misfires. To simply slam the door in the face of possible improvements is no good.

People are sick and tired of being told that ordinary and decent people are fed up in this country with being sick and tired. I’m certainly not, and I’m sick and tired of being told that I am

[dorbie 0]

I think it's a bit unreasonable comparing one AAD to another and demanding exactly the same behavior.

When you compare the Vigil to jumping without an AAD it's still an easy decision. I jump a Cypres 2 but Vigil is getting beaten up unfairly here and banning is a bold move. It seems that Vigil did detect a pressure change in that instance.

It seems clear that Vigils are twitchier than other AAD's but that's part of a philosophy, they've made design decisions that by their estimation has given them two additional saves.

Think about that, there are two skydivers walking around today (or maybe they're bowlers now) that might not be here had Vigil set their parameters to avoid some of the pressurized flight activations and the hangar (wind gust?) activation etc.

I'm not saying their right, but I don't think it's anyone's place to dictate where the limits should be. No system is perfect, people should relax and pick their AAD based on where they want to draw their threshold for activation (among other criteria). And if you want to risk a fire when you open your sun-roof on the drive back from the DZ, or can't jump the jet with it for your added margin of safety sobeit. Maybe it's worth the cutter and repack to you in the unlikely event that you induce a fire.

[billvon 2,400]

>Think about that, there are two skydivers walking around today
> (or maybe they're bowlers now) that might not be here had Vigil set their
>parameters to avoid some of the pressurized flight activations and the
>hangar (wind gust?) activation etc.

That's an unjustified claim. No one knows if a cypres or a cypres-2 would have fired, and unless Vigil can download the pressure data, reproduce it in a chamber, and show that the Vigil fires but the cypres does not I would treat it as some advertising fluff.

That being said, I think the Vigil might indeed be a good choice for someone who will never jump an aircraft that can be pressurized (or is OK with the chances of a misfire if they do.) Since many beginning skydivers never jump such aircraft, it might well be a good alternative for an Airtec AAD.

[dorbie 0]

Well they can look at the recoded firing parameters and/or reported information and determine whether it would have happened with alternative AADs based on documented claims. It's not really my claim it's theirs and I took it at face value, it doesn't seem like much of a stretch to me.

I'm not necessarily saying that there aren't another set of parameters that would have given you the best of both worlds, but as a philosophy it can (and they claim has) lead to saves in some circumstances where cautious settings wouldn't and it should be up to jumpers to determine where they want to draw the line. But cherry picking parameters erodes the margins and the philosophy, it moves the tradeoff and it looks OK with hindsight, but it says nothing about future saves the circumstances of which might happen in the margin.

In my view this has similarities to student cypres vs expert cypres. We don't get DZs banning student cypres because of fires riding the load down when someone forgets to deactivate, primarily because everyone totally understands the explicit design choice that leads to the product difference and uses it intentionally for the added margin of safety for novice jumpers, and follows the different operating instructions.

It seems the Vigil issues are a bit less explicit and they should spend some effort educating their customers around their product design philosophy and issues, that has to include acknowledging the problems with some types of jumps.