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AndyMan

Hemets, etc,

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Yes, luckily he was wearing a helmet. That reminds me of the risks that people take by not wearing them! I sure understand that it is more confortable not to but... even if the odds of needing it are very small, why take that risk? And one could also discuss hard versus leather helmets but at least wear a helmet!!!



HISPA # 18 POPS # 8757

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8 hours before they found him? wow, he's lucky to have survived the wait. i can understand the plane heading for an emergency landing, but shouldn't another jumper have followed him down? maybe he was last out?
"Hang on a sec, the young'uns are throwin' beer cans at a golf cart."
MB4252 TDS699
killing threads since 2001

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This was a terrible accident on the sunset load. Jumper had premature deployment off the step causing his head to impact with the flap on the right wing of the aircraft. His parachute wrapped around the tail severely damaging the horizontal stabilizer. Miraculously his main remained intact enough for it to fly. Jumper appeared to be holding a vague pattern until approx 5,000 ft at which point his canopy turned down wind and remained so until he landed far from the DZ. This was at 8pm. Jumper was found over seven hours later at 3 am, after and extensive search and rescue involving two helicpoters and countless police on the ground. They found him minutes before they were about to call off the search until morning.

The last report I heard was that he is slowly improving. He suffered multiple broken bones and severe head trauma. His condition was still listed as serious the last I heard.

Please send out some good vibes to this jumper. He truly is a great guy and well loved by all who know him and don't forget his wife who was there at the time and was as strong as anyone could possibly be.

Blue skies!

Tony
The big difference between sex for money and sex for free is that sex for money usually costs a lot less.

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Good vibes to him nad his loved ones. Good he was wearing a brain bucket. Just shows you how important that is, though as far as I am concerned my Bonehead has a disclaimer stating that it is not designed to protect anybody from anything. How can we change that?
jraf

Me Jungleman! Me have large Babalui.
Muff #3275

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How can we change that?



You can't. It has to say that for legal reasons (so they don't get sued out of existence). In this instance, fortunately, it would appear that the helmet did make a difference.

Hope the guy regains consciousness and his condition keeps improving.

Will

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>"The damage to his head was done when he hit the back of the plane, not the
>ground. You should see his helmet," his wife said.

I just saw a helmet that had also taken a serious hit after a hook done too low(Moi Vesa!). If the damage had been taken by his head he'd probably have a good sized bald spot on the top of his head now. It was a Z1 fullface, so whatever is said about the general quality of them, they obviously are good for something...

Erno

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With respect to helmets, there is another side to their story. It is indeed great to hear the news of one saving soneone, but a poorly designed helmet also has the potential to injure. They can actually tranfer more energy to the brain than they absorb, especially in the case of frap hats, they can also cause disabling/fatal injuries to the neck and spine, and carbon fiber can shatter into knife-like shards. I'm not against the use of helmets, but I also am wary of jumping on a bandwagon and conferring a blanket endorsement on the basis of a few isolated incidents. I'm not posting this at kizzie92, but thought this might be a good place to throw my thoughts into this thread. Perhaps instead of putting so much emphasis on the helmet, we should be looking at why this happened. Personally, I think a good pin/gear check before exiting will help us avoid having to fall back on helmets/dytters/CYPRES's/ etc.. Maybe just being a little more careful and aware will do more to "save" us than all of the back-ups we use. Just a thought. Best wishes and hopes for the injured jumper, his family and friends.
alan

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Thanks, Alan, but I think one would be foolish to claim they don't jump with a helmet for fear of injury. Yes, we do need to make EVERY effort to avoid injury on our jumps, but I think (and I have no effort to back this up) that there are FAR more people have benefited from wearing helmets while skydiving than there are people who have suffered because of it.

Certainly some helments offer much more protection than others, and no helmet can be guaranteed to definitively prevent injuries, I believe it is wise to protect your noggan with something!



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Perhaps instead of putting so much emphasis on the helmet, we should be looking at why this happened.



I think so too, Alan. An open container on the step has the potential to cause the deaths of everyone on board. We'd be wiser to focus on what caused the premature deployment than on whether the guy was wearing a helmet, imo.

Does anyone have any information about the jumper's equipment?

Julie

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My post wasn't intended to endorse jumping either with or without a helmet, it was intended to provide some information that could be useful in making an informed decision (we should at least acknowledge the cons) and to try to get a few of us to look at what really happened in this incident. The issue of the premature opening, I think, is far more critical than the decision to wear protective head gear. The focus of this thread seemed to jump right to a rash of endorsements for helmets because of one comment and no one questioned the root cause of the accident or what may have been done to prevent it. I find that disheartening. There is an old saying, "An ounce of prvention is worth a pound of cure.", that was kinda my point and maybe it was a little foolish of me to try to point out that there even are any risks associated with something we all already know does more good than harm. My bad for even considering both sides of an issue.
alan

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>as far as I am concerned my Bonehead has a disclaimer stating that
> it is not designed to protect anybody from anything. How can we
> change that?

Buy a Protec. They are much cheaper and give much better protection than most other helmets out there, even if they are not as cool looking.

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i have to agree. a good helmet will break on impact or have some method of absorbing the force of a blow instead of transferring it to your head.

i used to white water kayak a lot and i used a Pro-tec (full face with metal grill ;)) and hit rocks upside down underwater a couple times with it pretty hard! It worked wonderful because of all the foam and the rubber bends a bit! I am almost totally certain that if I had been wearing a "bonehead" style 'indestructable' helmet all the force would have simply gone right into my skull possibly rendering me unconsicous resulting in a drowning fatality. The close fitting super stiff style helmets seem to offer no shock absorption.

It disturbes me when I hear people say stuff like their helmet fell off in freefall and was unharmed on the ground so it must be awesome. (except for pro-tecs since they bend and have tons of foam)

I use an oxygn a3 right now and wonder the same thing about it too... Will it absorb the shock properly? Do manufacturers test their products for safety AT ALL or just for looks and comfort, etc? Does anyone have any idea?

EDIT: This is the exact same principle as to why those supposedly safe old "super tanker tons of steel" cars are not really safer at all. Admittedly, sometimes all that protection would be better (impact with semi or something massive), but the fact is, modern cars are now designed to crumple in a controlled manner on impact in order to distribute the force over a longer period of time.

The old adage "it's not the fall that kills you, but the sudden stop at the end" hold so true here. Just a few more milli-seconds of decelleration time instead of stopping instantly can spell the difference between life and death in a car accident.(or falling, etc.) Same principle applies to shock absorption in helmets.

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Do manufacturers test their products for safety AT ALL


No. They don't. They'll gladly tell you that too. It's very likely that they never will. Testing would open them up for liability should a "tested and certified" helmet cause (or worsen) an injury or death. No skydiving equipment manufacturer is likely to open themselves up to even more possibility of a lawsuit than they already deal with.

Do you really want them to? We already whine about how expensive helmets are; any type of certification/testing procedure would instantly raise those prices.

Regarding Protecs - bet you didn't know that the manufacturer won't sell them to any company that specializes in skydiving equipment. Why? Liability, of course. The company I work for has to buy them through a distributor, and I've even seen invoices from the distributor that state quite clearly "these helmets not to be used for skydiving."

I agree with Alan. The helmet may even have contributed to the severity of the head injury. But imho that shouldn't be the point we're discussing. Instead how about considering what the injured jumper and/or those on the plane with him could have done differently to avoid the situation altogether.

My best wishes are going out to the injured jumper and his family and friends.

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I hope that Leon recovers completely. A good gear check might have been in order here. As for helmets, I am a fan. I smaked someone in the air one time, they had one, I didn't. I can't say that their helmet saved their life, but, I am sure that my head hurt worse than theirs did.

Bill

have fun, love life, be nice to the humans

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This is absolutely correct SkyDekker. There was no one that could possibly help him. He was under canopy at 10,500 ft and the tail section of the plane was wrecked.

Leon's condition has just been upgraded from critical to serious. Things are slowly starting to look better for him which is nothing short of a miracle when you considder that at one point they wanted to turn off his life support. Fingers crossed though. He's still not out of the woods.

Tony
The big difference between sex for money and sex for free is that sex for money usually costs a lot less.

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YESSSSSS!:)Coming back to brain buckets: I bought my Bonehead after a long discussion with the most experienced jumpers of my DZ. My primary concern is preventing unwanted head impacts on exit. I have exited the plane in larger groups only to find upon landing that I had huge bruises or cuts from hitting the door ledge. I would prefer not to have to have my Cypress open my canopy, so I wear a helmet.
As to the question of gear checks. We are involved in a sport for daring people. Some of us are more daring than the others. Nobody said we are stupid. A gear check is ELEMENTARY. I always ask for one before I enter the plane and before I exit it. I love skydiving and want to be able to do it for a long time;). Compare it to cleaning your gun. You always make sure it is empty. If you don't you are most likely to die! Don't be stupid, don't die CHECK YOUR GEAR! Humility is the sign of wisdom
jraf

Me Jungleman! Me have large Babalui.
Muff #3275

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I have seen an incident similar to this when a static line student had a premature deployment while hanging from the strut of a 182. Fortunately the jumper was not injured, but the starboard horizontal stabilizer was torn up pretty good. After the incident, the pilot and I discussed the pilot watching for a premature deployment and using quick rudder controls to move the tail away from the deploying parachute. Any thoughts on this from any pilots out there?

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Yes, on every climbout while flying aircraft that have a low horizontal stablizer I would be ready with some hard rudder. On the 182 and 206 I was primed for some hard right rudder. Not that it's a guarantee but it just might help minimize how much goes over the tail.
Chris Schindler
www.diverdriver.com
ATP/D-19012
FB #4125

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Chris,

Wouldn't adding a little bit of flaps (say 10-degrees) possibly help push the material under the tail of a Cessna 17x/18x/20x in case of a premature?

One of the "to the pilot" commands I was taught in my BIC when I got my IAD JM rating was, "Cut! 10-degrees flaps!" before telling the student to put their feet out. We were told to ask for the flaps in case of a premature.

Thanks,

Kris
Sky, Muff Bro, Rodriguez Bro, and
Bastion of Purity and Innocence!™

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I have flown 182s with IAD jumpers both flaps 10 and no flaps. We did a trial with no flaps and tossed some old PCs at the tail. It was tough for the PC to go over the tail. Certainly you can't hurt anything by using flaps 10 so it's a good idea. Just make sure your pilot doesn't forget to take the flaps out for decent or he'll be over speeding them and after a while of doing that you'll see little "s-bends" in the trailing edge of your flaps from overstressing. It's all about balance and knowing what your procedures are.

But prevention is ALWAYS the key when talking about premature deployments on the step. Avoid, avoid, avoid. That is the real lesson of this whole incident. Flaps Zero or Flaps 10 don't make a difference if you don't have a premature deployment.
Chris Schindler
www.diverdriver.com
ATP/D-19012
FB #4125

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