Is there an 100% realible AAD?

[DanG 1]

Do you realize that Precision Rigging doesn't make the Cypres? That ad you've quoted is misleading (actually it's downright bad) but it wasn't created by Airtec. Airtec ads seem to be much more sophisticated and accurate.

- Dan G

[sundevil777 93]

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So who are the other to people of questionable intelligence that voted yes? Come on lets hear your defense.

Probably just wanting to mess with 'ya. There will likely be more such responses now that it has been discussed.

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

[piisfish 135]

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I don't like the purple color they're using either. I did like the "cow sniffing the freebag" ad they did some years back.

I prefer a competitor's orange+blue, their pullupcords and winter jackets...
The cow was a great one, the Formula1 ad is ugly.
Vigil washers are very good looking but very rare.
Argus washers are a pale copy.
Cypres "smiley" washers are great too

scissors beat paper, paper beat rock, rock beat wingsuit - KarlM

[nt8us 0]

years ago Bill Booth made a statement about the bridle stow on the wonderhog. it went something like " because it exists ,it can fail" i tend to apply that statement in this situation also.

[DeeBeeGee 0]

depends on your rounding..
they all work over perfectly over 99 times out of 100
like those odds?

[AlexV 0]

This is a bit off topic. SSK Industries is the official Cypres distributor (or similar) for the USA. They own the domain www.cypres-2.com and there I found this two statements:
"CYPRES has never failed to activate and cut the loop when the conditions were met"
"Three times as powerful as other cutter systems"
I doubt this is true. Since it's a safety device shouldn't they be more careful with this type of add? It's not like saying "guaranteed to whiten your teeth in 14 days of use".
I've heard of at least 10 (ten) incidents when the Cypres failed to activate or when it has activated on the ground.
This types of incidents are hard to verify but when you investigate them you should assume it can happen under certain circumstances. Airtec wants 100% proof which is hard to get when the user is dead and no data is stored by the device.
What kind of tests did they perform to claim their cutter is 3 times more powerful? And comparing it with what competitor? What test setup do you use to find out which one is more powerful?

The first statement should be rephrased like this:
"No living person has recently brought 100% undoubtable evidence that a Cypres device had failed to fire under factory preset conditions for barometric measurements." Instead of the standard "CYPRES has never failed to activate and cut the loop when the conditions were met"

[piisfish 135]

if you have 10 cases, please give us say at least 2 cases where either the parameters were met and it didn't fire, or when it fired that the loop was not cut (besides the case where the loop was not routed through the cutter)

I am not defending Airtec, I am interested to read that.

Ground firings also bother me.

scissors beat paper, paper beat rock, rock beat wingsuit - KarlM

[AlexV 0]

I did not witness any of them. I said I've "heard" of at least 10. I'm not going to refer any of them, it's not my point to discuss individual cases.
I'm just saying, if some people died wearing a Cypres and if others claim they saw with their own eyes Cypres activations after the skydiver bounced shouldn't Airtec at least consider the possibility of a Cypres malfunction?
Airtec might be right, maybe none of the incidents were caused by a malfunction but they cannot prove it, they just assume their product is fail-safe and that riggers are lieing about what they have witnessed.

piisfish, the incidents are disused in the specific section, you can find them there. Taken individually they can be considered speculations but taken as a whole they give us reasons to doubt many claims made by the manufacturer.
I see this as a campaign of misinforming buyers.

[piisfish 135]

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the incidents are disused in the specific section, you can find them there.

please provide me links to the discussions.
I can not remember of cases of Cypres NOT firing when parameters were met
I can not remember of cases of uncut loops when the cutter had fired

I am not implying Cypres is perfect, it certainly has its flaws. Some people prefer fire/nofire parameters of other AAD's.

scissors beat paper, paper beat rock, rock beat wingsuit - KarlM

[pchapman 261]

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I can not remember of cases of Cypres NOT firing when parameters were met

I agree that there haven't been proven cases. To add to the discussion, I'm guessing he's thinking of those cases where the Cypres fired but the guy bounced and people swear they didn't see a reserve until a couple hundred feet.

(Like the cases in that conspiracy theory pdf document on zoho that keeps getting linked to, or the Brooke Baum accident for example. Some of the stuff in the document is crap but it at least it enumerates some AAD-fired-but-died cases.)

What were the reasons: Tight container? Long loop? PC in burble? PC caught around tumbling jumper?

Those were the traditional explanations but some ask whether low AAD activations could have been factors too. As much as I like Airtec, it would be interesting to see the pressure graphs from jumps like those, to see if they are consistent with their statements that the AAD fired on time.

The problem always is that there's no independent sensor evidence to try to confirm what an AAD is sensing. The Cypres says it fired at a pressure equivalent to 750' over the ground, so Airtec says it fired at 750', and that's it.

But there is a chance of teasing some additional data out of the pressure graphs, to see whether the interpreted speeds are consistent. If, say, an AAD did somehow get confused and fire at 300', thinking it was 750+, there could be some evidence in the pressure graphs (both raw & filtered) to show something odd going on, before, during, and after activation.

All the AAD companies seem to agree that the normal burble difference is only 250-300' between front and back, and that's already accounted for, so it is hard to see what would fool the AAD to fire hundreds of feet lower. One might look at Cypres' more complex algorithms, that are less hair trigger than those for the Vigil. Still, it seems unlikely that it would take an extra 2+ seconds for a Cypres to make up its mind.

We don't really have good answers for the fired-but-died cases, beyond vague accusations of AAD coverups and poor rigging and containers built too tight. So we continue to speculate.

[Frankyspanky 0]

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I can not remember of cases of Cypres NOT firing when parameters were met

I agree that there haven't been proven cases.

But there are documeted and clarified by Airtec; cases of cypres2 units firing when they should not have.

One of these was (well) after deployment and before landing.

What poses more risk?

Back a hundred years ago, especially around Woodrow Wilson, what happened in this country is we took freedom and we chopped it into pieces.
Ron Paul

[pchapman 261]

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I agree that there haven't been proven cases.

But there are documeted and clarified by Airtec; cases of cypres2 units firing when they should not have.

[kallend 1,632]

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The most reliable AAD is probably yourself.

You constantly monitor altitude, speed and circumstance.

A lot of dead people from no/low pull prove that to be incorrect.

...

The only sure way to survive a canopy collision is not to have one.

[Divalent 89]

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The most reliable AAD is probably yourself.

You constantly monitor altitude, speed and circumstance.

A lot of dead people from no/low pull prove that to be incorrect.

Actually, in terms of reliability, I suspect he's right: each year there are what?, ~2 million skydives world wide? And at least 99.999% of the time the jumper pulls at sufficient altitude to avoid a fatality. We only wish our AADs were as reliable as that (and didn't have the downside of creating additional risks when they fire when not needed).