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pchapman

Should ParaCommanders be used only with cutaway systems?

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This is something I always wondered about and never got clear answers on.

In the older old days, one didn't cutaway in response to a mal but hand deployed the belly mount reserve. Eventually, along came 'high performance' rounds like the ParaCommander, that with their many slots, could spin quickly during a mal, making manual reserve deployment riskier.

Was manual reserve deployment considered acceptable or not with ParaCommanders? Was it something that people did initially but later decided was not acceptable, that one must cutaway (e.g with 1 1/2 shots) and use a reserve with a pilot chute? Was there a difference in what students were taught vs. experience jumpers, because we tend to simplify things for students even if this adds certain risks?

I was curious because one local school was one of the last holdouts with round canopies for students in fore-and-aft style gear, until I think the year 2000. Their basic students used T-10's I guess, and advanced students used ParaCommanders but weren't taught to cutaway and had no pilot chutes in the reserve. So I wondered how that system would be regarded by others.

There was one fatality to a student jumper at the DZ in 1993, who has about 21 jumps and was using a ParaCommander main, and had a main-reserve entanglement. I don't know whether one could blame the jumper's procedures or the equipment. For their time, the DZ trained a massive number of students, so even though the DZ was controversial, a fatality on the system isn't damning. (Edit: I don't know much about any possible student fatalities in prior decades.)

When I had 200 jumps in 1995 I did go make a jump with them, the old Parachute School of Toronto before the original owner retired. It was my first round / belly mount /ParaCommander jump. Actually a King Cobra canopy, more or less a PC copy.

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"back in the day' this was probably as controversial as pilotchute vs no pilotchute on the reserve.At our drop zone (Ripcord Para Center in NJ)i recall seeing 3 manual deployments of reserves under a P.C.(no cut away). 2 were not successful, tho there were no injuries.all the others cutaway and deployed their reserves successfully

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Hi Peter,

Quote

Was manual reserve deployment considered acceptable or not with ParaCommanders? Was it something that people did initially but later decided was not acceptable, that one must cutaway (e.g with 1 1/2 shots) and use a reserve with a pilot chute?



Well, since I was jumping back 'then,' I'll give you my thoughts.

Yes, it was still the 'norm' to use a non-pilot chute ( pc ) equipped gut pack reserve at first. Slightly before the ParaCommander came on the market in mid-'64, Security had released their CrossBow piggyback system. Of course, this req'd a cutaway. That sort of began the change in thinking; prior to then it was considered an absolute no-no to cutaway with a gut pack. And, virtually all gut packs were without a pc.

In late '64 ( I had just bought my ParaCommander ) I watched, from the ground, a fellow jumper go to about 300 ft ( a total on his main container ) and deploy a gut pack reserve with no pc. It opened OK & he landed just fine. Early the next year, I watched another fellow jumper, again from the ground, go to about 400 ft ( again a total on his main container ) and deploy a gut pack reserve with a pilot chute. It opened much faster & cleaner than the previous guy at 300 ft. This was two perfect events to compare to one another.

About that same time, SKYDIVER magazine published a series of three photos of a guy over Lancaster, CA unpacking a gut pack reserve, at terminal, with no pc in it. MJOSparky has posted those photos on here a number of years ago; you might find them with a SEARCH. That helped in changing people's minds. I know it did mine.

At that time I was still jumping a fore & aft rig. I put a pilot chute into my gut pack reserve & bought a set of OneShots from Security & had a local master rigger install them into my harness. OneShots were a revised Capewell riser release that made them release much faster than the 2-shot Capewells.

Most students, until much later ( see the other thread on this subject ), still used cheapo canopies with gut packs & no pilot chute.

I think that around '65-'66 is when pc's in gut packs started becoming the 'norm' for experienced jumpers.

Is that enough of an answer for you?

Jerry Baumchen

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What Jerry said.

Whether you cut away or not really had nothing to do with the type of main canopy you were using. It had only to do with whether or not the reserve parachute had a spring loaded pilot chute.

No pilot chute? No cut-away and hand deploy reserve.
Pilot chute? Cut-away and pull reserve ripcord.

And it just so happened that Paracommanders were becoming popular about the same time that pilot chutes started being put in reserves. So the two things can appear to be linked, but really weren't.

That's my understanding...

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Part of the conversion was decent military-surplus pilot-chutes for reserves.
As late as 1986, the West German Army was still using umbrella pilot-chutes in (belly mounted) reserves for static-liners. By then even the Heer admitted that umbrella pilot-chutes were obsolete and they were frantically test-jumping a replacement S/L system.

Decent, military-surplus, MA-1 pilot-chutes were available during the 1960s. Why skydiving students didn't get them confused me?????

I started skydiving in 1977 with modified military-surplus S/L rounds, etc. the only updates were slots and the occasional AAD.
I resumed jumping during 1979 at Parachute School of Toronto. FJC still jumped C-9s and T-10 canopies.
Late that summer, Lloyd bought a few Crossbows for freefall students. I was one of the first to jump a Crossbow. During my second Crossbow jump, the stabilizers entangled (probably a packing error by one of the other freefall students). It streams red and descended almost as fast as freefall! I pulled the reserve ripcord and started hand-feeding the reserve canopy out I to the wind. Wind grabbed the reserve canopy and pulled it out of my hands. I heaved a huge sigh of relief seeing that (un-steerable) 24 flat overhead!
I never touched the Capewells because I had been trained how to cutaway. They were probably rusted shut anyways.
The following weekend I watched a jump-master refuse another freefall student wearing a Crossbow.
Crossbows without training cutaways was a "subject of debate" .....

During the 1980s, most Canadian schools (Gananocque (?), Waterville, Moncton, Claresholm, etc.) taught students to cutaway from malfunctioning Para-Commanders.

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Hi Peter,

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How about student operations?



OK, this is one of those 'you had to have been there' things.

Back in the 60's, students were considered expendable. They were commonly put out without use of a wind indicator; heck, 'they' were the wind indicator.

Pilot chutes in their reserves, why waste a good $2.00 pilot chute on a student?

If you got through your student days, you were better than the average person; you had to be.

:P

Jerry Baumchen

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Hi Short,

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No pilot chute? No cut-away and hand deploy reserve.



Well, there was this one guy who . . . .

Back in late '64 this local jumper, Jack King was his name and was he ever a character, who bought a CrossBow canopy. He was jumping it with a gut pack on a harness with the old ( and as Rob says, 'rusted' ) 2-shot Capewells.

He had a malfunction and was spinning pretty good. He figured that to hand-deploy his no-pilot chute reserve would just tangle up with the main. So he put his left arm through the crotch in the left riser & grabbed the right riser. Then he used his right hand to release the left riser & then the right riser. When the right riser released, he let go of the risers and then fired his reserve.

It was sort of crazy but it worked out OK.

Later that evening down at the old watering hole, after 1 or 2 too many, one other guy decided that what Jack had done was really stupid. More guys got in on the argument and a fight broke out. Everyone got thrown out of the tavern and were told to never return. That was not an unusual result to our 'discussions' back in those days.

Ah, the days of my youth,

Jerry Baumchen

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My first jump in 1974 was on a PC, I was the first student in the country to jump one, I was told it caused a fair bit of discussion at a National Federation meeting about whether it was a good idea, the thinking being a PC was too hot to handle for students!!!

AFAIK, jumping a Paracommander, you had to cutaway the main.

Everyone else was jumping C9s, but by then everyone had modified their rigs to one and a half shots, cutaway and pilot shot reserves, which is what I was trained to do.

The thinking with hand deploying reserves was that a PC malfunction would wind up too fast to allow the reserve to clear it cleanly.

Spent a wet weekend trying out the hand deploy system in a hanging harness, (must have done 20 or more deployments) didn't think much of it, especially with the way a normal reserve was packed.

S folded into the container, when you grabbed it to throw out, invariably you ended up with the apex and skirt in your hands as the rest of the canopy fell out - very messy. We tried roll packing the reserve (rolling it up like a toilet roll from the apex) and this gave a much firmer grip, and cleaner deployment.

Still didn't convince me that hand deploying was better.

Only round jump I did was on a 35 footer on jump 20, it was a big, slow, slug.

Later, when all students were jumping PCs, the stabilisers were cut off, as the thinking was most malfunctions were caused by stabiliser hang ups. Didn't really affect the performance of the PCs at all. We did seem to have fewer malfunctions.

All static line jumps were via direct bag, as the "California" system was regarded as a problem due to the pilot chute being something else a student could tangle with...in fact I saw a SL student go in because he went unstable on exit and grabbed the pilot chute, then got entangled with it...reserve didn't tangle but just streamered and didn't inflate, possibly due to the turbulence caused by the main.

Once the Strato Star came out, most experienced jumpers switched to ramair, which meant a lot more Paracommanders were available for students, and most student operations switched to them and phased out the C9s. This would have been late 70's.
My computer beat me at chess, It was no match for me at kickboxing....

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I started skydiving in 1977 with modified military-surplus S/L rounds, etc. the only updates were slots and the occasional AAD.



I started in 73 at Port Severn Ontario (later moved to Coldwater) It had been standard then for some time to cut away from the C9 or T-10 Canopies we had as student mains.
Pack in comfy old B4 containers of course.
Watch my video Fat Women
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eRWkEky8GoI

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In both areas where I jumped in the 70's, the conventional wisdom was that if you had a high-performance main, you needed to expect to cut away from malfunctions. And where I started (Houston, 1975), we had cutaways on our first-jump cheapos as well. Fortunately I took the long class, because I actually understood how it worked, too.

Wendy P.
There is nothing more dangerous than breaking a basic safety rule and getting away with it. It removes fear of the consequences and builds false confidence. (tbrown)

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Hi Jerry,

Thanks for that explanation.

I was jumping back then myself, and what I remember thinking about this was that we required students to do five static line jumps with the last couple having a dummy ripcord pull. This was because there was concern whether a confused student on one of their first few jumps would panic and not remember to pull a ripcord. This concern extended to emergency procedures and we didn't teach cutaways out of concern that a noob might not pull the reserve. Whatever he had up there was going to be better than nothing.

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In 1965, after 27 jumps on 1.1's, I got my first PC. For the next 41 jumps I continued to use my 28' belly wart with NO pilot chute. Then I visited DeLand for the first time. Talking to Gary Dupuis at the bar one night, convinced me to add a pilot chute. The next day he put an MA-1 in my reserve container, hung me up in a suspended harness, and taught me how to cutaway.

On my very next jump, my 69th, I experience a bad spinning malfunction and got to practice my newly learned emergency procedures in real life. If I had tried a non-breakaway, pull and punch reserve deployment, I believe I would have died, and skydiving gear might look a lot different today. Thank you Gary.

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billbooth

In 1965, after 27 jumps on 1.1's, I got my first PC. For the next 41 jumps I continued to use my 28' belly wart with NO pilot chute. Then I visited DeLand for the first time. Talking to Gary Dupuis at the bar one night, convinced me to add a pilot chute. The next day he put an MA-1 in my reserve container, hung me up in a suspended harness, and taught me how to cutaway.

On my very next jump, my 69th, I experience a bad spinning malfunction and got to practice my newly learned emergency procedures in real life. If I had tried a non-breakaway, pull and punch reserve deployment, I believe I would have died, and skydiving gear might look a lot different today. Thank you Gary.



That is one helluva story Bill! Makes one think.
Propblast

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