I have 53 jumps with MT-1X system in the early 1990s. Our systems were manufactured by Para Flite Inc.
Both the harness, main and reserve canopies have the stealth grey color. Trust me, it is really hard to spot it in the air at dawn.
I also had to open reserve chute and it’s reserve is a 5 cell RAM air wing chute. It is definitely not the same canopy as the main chute. The reserve is relatively smaller. However the reserve had much larger cells than the main canopy. Unlike its main canopy’s deployment bag (it had a white colored heavy duty cordura deployment bag) which is permanently attached to the canopy, the 5 cell reserve canopy separates from the olive drab colored (and it is made from the same parachute fabric) deployment bag during opening.
The harness is an odd one. It has similar 3 point fasteners as well as a belt that you should utilize. The front side of the harness has 4x D shaped equipment attachment points made of steel. The very bottom of the harness had another 1x steel equipment attachment point which you can utilize to suspend your weapons/equipment sack during flight. This was the most painful part of the system and often times a huge nuisance when you wanted to sit. It was simply at the very very wrong spot, but oh well. You could see all MT-1X pilots have to fix that attachment point to a safe position before they could sit in the aircraft...
Main canopy is a slow opening one if compared to the civilian chutes of early 90s. Sometimes it felt like it takes 5-6 seconds if you are slow. The slider always comes all the way down to your head flawlessly, so mostly it did not have much drama during opening. The main canopy is not very agile. You would give a command and the turn starts slowly, then the turn gets faster but cannot turn as fast as 90s civilian chutes like the 252 sqft North American Parafoil wing. It is quite hard to get the main canopy to a stall. Quite easy flying and quite safe but a boring chute for sure. However the glide ratio is not bad at all. I can somewhat recall it as 4/1 glide slope ratio. On 1/4 brakes the gliding is quite impressive. The final approach required relatively large landing area selection due to the relatively high glide ratio of the canopy. If it hits a thermal during final, it gets effected by it due to its sheer size. Prepare for a much longer glide before a touch down to be on the safe side. It can’t easily point land. Once you land, you can see it’s sheer size, it is a very large chute.
But it is a very cool chute for sure. Quite different by civilian standards.
