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skydiverkeith

Apex WLO toggles for skydiving

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markovwgti

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Dude I dont even use WLO toggles for slider up BASE jumping. If I see someone with giant WLOs hooked up to they're skydiving rig, I would laugh in their face. Are you scared of cutting away or something?



Yes, I am afraid of cutting away. Right now, if I were to have a line over, I would use my hook knife to cut it just above the toggle and land with rear risers.



Do you have any idea how a canopy flies with no pressure on the tail? I have seen people hurt themselves very badly landing canopies ranging from 240sq ft to 303 sq ft on their rear risers due to losing a toggle or both..I took a water landing once when i lost a toggle and it hurt like hell!!..Try to do that on a 150 and i guarantee you wont be walking back to the packing mat! Guarantee!!! Are you also willing to risk breaking your back and legs just because you didnt want to spend 60 bucks on a reserve repack? Have fun buying a new line set which will cost you a few hundred bucks at the end of the whole deal!!!!!



NOT guaranteed. I lost a toggle on a 245 recently, ditched the other one, flared on the rears with the tail fluttering and PLF'd. I could have stood it up and been fine but I didn't need to add that risk. At the UK AirgameZ some people were practising ditching their toggles and landing on rears with the tail fluttering and there were no injuries. I think your comment was intended to point out that a canopy will fly very differently when the tail is not under tension so you have effectively 25% of the usable surface are is very valid, and practising rear landings with the toggles at the stop does not prepare you well for a rear landing with no toggles at all, and that I agree with. The stall characterists change quite dramatically.
Rich M

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Quite the thread resurrection from 2010.

The sub-topic is still interesting: To what degree the tail of a canopy might flip up when rear riser flaring, when one or more brake lines are detached, compared to the normal situation.

Plenty of people clearly have landed canopies on rears with a broken or lost brake line or two, yet sometimes there have been problems with the tail flipping up from lack of support.

Whatever the arguments back and forth in this thread, at least when you are faced with the problem on a skydive, you can test it out yourself with a few hard rear riser flares! Then you can make the decision to chop or not.

I wonder if a large, slower speed canopy with less inflation pressure might actually be more susceptible to the unrestrained tail starting to 'flip up'. And the trailing edge on a large canopy will be further behind the D lines.

(I've only done it once, on a Parafoil 260 that blew a brake line on opening. Rear riser flare was fine but sensitive -- collapsed it in a stall just as I touched down. Perfect.)

Also, on smaller skydiving canopies one may sometimes have a lot of slack in the brake lines -- such as for front risering)... so the tail is already nearly unsupported... yet one can rear riser flare without the tail trying to flip up.

(Although someone could argue whether just having just normal drag on the brake lines is enough to add a little tension to the tail to reduce flip up chances.)

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Why in the world would you toss the other toggle.

Keep the toggle whether or not you use it to flare with. You can also flare using one toggle and one rear with far greater power.

This Skydiving website doesn't need this 6 year old thread resurrection. WLO toggles are a specialty item that is only appropriate for a few handfuls of people.

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