TM Poll: How many Reserve rides and Why?

[stateofnature 0]

EX 425's came with 6 grommet sliders for a time, then they were optionally switched back (not all), they are a pain in the ass with tension knots, and trying to wrap up the lines to carry the chute back to the hanger. They tend to have higher tension knot malfunction rates. I'm not sure, but I believe they were made to reduce line wear when accompanied by the sacrificial line.

[AggieDave 6]

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I'm not sure, but I believe they were made to reduce line wear when accompanied by the sacrificial line.

My understanding was the 6-grommet slider was used to keep from having slider up malfunctions, due to the line size and number of lines from the rear riser going through a single grommet.

--"When I die, may I be surrounded by scattered chrome and burning gasoline."

[Andrewwhyte 1]

One in five hundred tandems(Strong). Reason #1 careless packing (mine). It was a misrouted bridal so reason #2 careless prejump inspection.
It was the first jump of the season and when my spider senses were tingling during the prejump I interpreted it as uncurrency. The truth is my rusty brain was telling me that the picture was wrong.
The flat spin in drogue fall was sort of under control when I pulled the student handle. When I got nothing I went immediately to the reserve and had the handle out when I remembered procedure and pulled the other two handles and then pulled the reserve. During this time the flat spin accelerated so that when I looked up I was greeted with the sight of my bridal fouled in my reserve lines. I had about four line twists with my drogue trailing behind the twists.
I'm afraid I didn't react all that well vis a vis my passenger. As I handed her my handles I said "Things aren't going well, you hold these." Nothing like taking care of business while the customer is kept oblivious.
I then got rid of the line twists while pulling in the drogue and handing it to the passenger after ensuring a bit of slack.

[johnw 0]

Ditto..590tandemns..0 reserve rides

[usskydiver 0]

Approximately 700 tandems (Vector, Strong, and Sigma). One malfunction on a PdF BT-80. Tension knot in steering line that required more than 50% opposite toggle to fly straight. Cut it away and opened the 360. Be careful as the brakes are set really deep on the 360 and it's kind of a "rock and roll" almost to the point of stall until the brakes are released. Time the release when the canopy is in front of you (time/alt permitting).

Tim T.
Team Paraclete

[mtpohl 0]

0 in about 500.

Great gear, awesome packers, and I am very rigorous in pre-flighting the equipment. (Only one issue ever in 500+ jumps that I needed the packer to fix while still being on the ground.)

Tandems are fun, I still truly love doing them!

[usedtajump 1]

Six reserve rides out of about 2300 tandems:

Four steering line entanglements.

One pilot chute in tow. (Pre drouge days, OUCH!!!!)

One drouge in tow.

The older I get the less I care who I piss off.

[tandembrent 0]

i have only had 1 reserve ride out of almost 700 tandems, it was due to a line over. i have had however experienced 5 other malfunctions that could of (maybe should have) ended up with a ride.

they were- 2 minor line-overs that i was able to clear with plenty of altitude to spare ( i happen to believe in deploying at 5000ft AGL)

- 2 LOST drouges, the first one caought me completely by suprise. after a nice tandem w/ video i waved and dumped the handle on the DZ's vectors w/ 384's i continued to fall through the trap door with-out feeling deployment. the videographers face confirmed that i had a problem, i turned my head up to see WTF was happening and this action (head turn) was enough to disturb the burble and allowed the bag to lift off my back and allow the main to deploy. after getting to the ground and watching the vid all we could tell was that the drouge bridle seemed to vanish when i dumped the handle. after inspecting the canopy and wondering why the bag also was gone it was determined that the keeper stich on the bridle that keeps the bridle from looping down over the box weave webbing which attaches to the main center cell had failed. allowing the bridle to "saw" through the box weave. during drouge-fall the 3-ring had the drouge, but when i dumped all the force was transfered to the box weave and failed, resulting in a continuous trap-door until disturbing the burble which allowed the bag to lift.

- this exact thing happened about a week later, no vid but i was tuned to this mal and simply pushed over forward slightly head down and the bag again lifted off and the main deployed. the stich is now checked regularly.

- the 5th was a shreded center cell ( hard opening) i believe was the result of line dump. (small stow's and shitty bands) i lande this canopy in little to no wind or else i would have chopped it.

the moral........ anything can and will probably happen. stay alert and check the gear thourghally and never back down from a packer that is not packing as the manufacture and the DZ's rigger mandates! they more than likely don't do tandems anyway, it's your life and your responsibility to your student to ensure safety!!!!!!!!!!!

brent

***

~~~~Green grass and high clouds forever~~~~
no matter where you go, there you are!

[crutch 0]

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after getting to the ground and watching the vid all we could tell was that the drouge bridle seemed to vanish when i dumped the handle.

There is actually a nice picture of one of these hanging up in the building at Skydive Palatka. What made me mad about mine is that the canopy had just come back from the manufacturer after being rlined and to have a few holes patched. They also replaced the attachment point of the canopy fo the bridle. This is where mine seperated, when the drogue was released, it pulled the bag, off my bag, but then the bridle seperated from the canopy. To make matters worse, it was a brand new drogue and bridle. Luckily, everything worked out okay, but I still refuse to have the manufacturer do any work on my gear!

blue skies,

art

[tspillers 0]

Sorry... I voted wrong. Didn't read the fine print. I put 5...

I only have 3 tandem rides. One exploded canopy...old canopy, maybe packing.

Line over

Walk through. Couldn't release brakes.

I am not totally useless, I can be used as a bad example.

[SkymonkeyONE 3]

Just had my first tandem reserve ride. It was a total which I fought for several thousand feet before finally blousing my reserve at just under 3k. It sucked incredibly badly to not be able to pull either drogue release nor my cutaway due to the way my drogue attachment 3-ring malfunctioned. I attribute it to my own stowage error. Firing my reserve into my inflated, unreleasable drogue-in-tow sucked, but everything worked out fine. My passenger had no idea that anything had happened.

[DaGimp 0]

i was on video, the passenger said that "the ride was over so quick he didnt have a chance to have fun"

While SM1 was behiend his back saying he owed beer.

"Professor of Pimpology"~~~Bolas

[skydiver30960 0]

Hey MonoUno, glad everything worked out OK! Tell your student you had enough "fun" for the both of you...

Elvisio "200 tandems and no reserve rides YET" Rodriguez

[JJohnson 0]

What did you do? Route a cable through the three ring? What system? Please explain.

JJ

"Call me Darth Balls"

[pajarito 0]

After all that talk about that brand new spiffy Racer Tandem rig? ...Glad you're ok.

[Shark 0]

Dude,

That's f'n crazy! How many tandems do you have?

Shark out.

[bodypilot1 0]

2 reserve rides out of 3000+ tandems.
Same rig 4 days apart.
1st was a line over. I have had many that I have worked free, but this one was not going anywhere and had us spinning on our back.
2nd was a stuck slider with the stablizer material through the groumets. After pumping the toggles until my arms almost fell off, I chopped it.
Both times I made the student cross their arms again and arch for a short freefall and both times the students said, "can we do that again?
Both went and bought the bottle for the rigger too, which was cool.

-

www.WestCoastWingsuits.com
www.PrecisionSkydiving.com

[skydiverton 0]

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Absolutely! Suspension lines that are old (dirty and fuzzy) tend to stick together and knot more than new lines. That's why we recommend line replacement at 300 jumps. We learned this by the analysis of tens of thousands of tandem jump reports from the waiver period. Malfunction rates on canopies with over 300 jumps on a line set are nearly double those on canopies with line sets under 300 jumps.

Thank you, this might be the solution for one of our tandemmains (BT80). The canopy already has several 100 jumps on it. About 1 in 10 jumps the slider stays stuck about 5ft under the canopy. I could clear this 3 times. Other TM could not and this has resulted in 2 chops this year (only 2 tandem-chops till now at the DZ)

Greetings

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Using your droque to gain stability is a bad habit,
Especially when you are jumping a sport rig

[lewmonst 0]

monkey chucker!!

glad it worked out! can you go into detail about how you mis-stowed it?
At least firing the reserve didn't knock open the main into it... eek.

more importantly, jake, did you get the mal on video? or did you get scared and track away?

peace
lew

http://www.exitshot.com

[DaGimp 0]

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more importantly, jake, did you get the mal on video? or did you get scared and track away?

I dumped about 3k, and continued to watch him as i was deploying and through his deployment......we ended up about the same lv once both open....i was a bit lower of course as i snivel more.

But when i realized that he was having a problem i sunk out a little more then i usally would and at 4k started to back track away to give him room when i deploy.

"Professor of Pimpology"~~~Bolas

[SkymonkeyONE 3]

You could have mis-stowed any drogue 3-ring on any rig if you laid it in there like I did. Everyone knows that to get it to lay in there flat you lay it one way then counterfold the mechanism the other way, as a unit. On a Racer with "stock" drogue releases which you must hang onto(like a Vector II, Eclipse, etc) , many Racer rig owners lay the mechanism so that the three release cables (two drogue release and one drogue cutaway) stick out to the side, out from under the main pin flap. This, so that if your drogue releases work their way out on you, you can simply tug them back into place as the ends are visible. I have done this since right after we bought my rig and it worked great. Anyway, with the new retractable drogue release handles on my rig (like a Sigma), there is simply no reason whatsoever to put your system together so that the cable ends are showing. Well, on the jump in question, I layed my drogue 3-ring in there the way I had been doing it out of habit, but unfortunately I layed the large ring over in the opposite direction of my other two. On drogue deployment the initial "set" snatch pull force was directed not into the fold of the drogue bridle, but on the opposite side, toward the smallest ring. Yes, my system was properly assembled, but it was not layed into the channel in it's "straight" configuration. The force of the drogue set onto the wrong side of the bridle caused every one of the three cables to be pulled through the grommets.

I have 550 tandem jumps and generally always pack my own rig. I had no reason whatsoever to lay my release system in there that way, but now know that it is very possible to have a total with inflated drogue in tow should you do so. After examining all the other types of rigs we had laying around, I can promise you that I could replicate the "pulling the cables through the grommet" deal on all of them that had 3-ring releases at the drogue. Lesson learned.

[JohnMitchell 14]

Thanks for the lesson. Our DZ still has a few Vectors mixed in with the Sigmas. I'll keep an eye out for that happening. Bet you wish you'd been jumping your Sigma, huh? They're my favorite.

[birddog 0]

3 reserve rides in 2700 tandems in the last 3 years.none packed by my self.

Deal with it

[AggieDave 6]

Update:

1 ride due to a turbo-fucked tention knot in the left side's control lines and a couple of D lines.

I've had tention knots on a tandem's control lines before, a good hard yank on the toggles cleared it, but this time the canopy quickly folded up and started spinning, so I chopped it. The fun part was that the slider had just come down when it happened instead of the slider being up.

That was jump 1296 and tandem 395.


Oh, I thought the tandem reserve flies really well, reminded me a lot of an EZ-384, it aint too hard to stand up the landing with the reserve either.

--"When I die, may I be surrounded by scattered chrome and burning gasoline."

[skydived19006 4]

Mark and I do all the tandems at my little Kansas DZ. I have just less than 600 tandems and Mark over 500. We use Eclipse rigs, and Icarus/Precision mains, between the two of us we have 0 chops. We do almost all the packing ourselves, pro packed every time. We do use a rubber band on the center D line attachment (right and left) to tie the steering lines into the center of the canopy, may have saved us a line over, I guess we’ll never know.

Experience is what you get when you thought you were going to get something else.

AC DZ