Main chute did not open!!
On June 4 my girlfriend and I both did a tandem skydive at 10,000 ft for her 40th birthday. This was our first jump for both of us so neither of us knew what to expect. We were in the second group of three groups to jump. The plane goes up, people jump, plane lands, repeat. When it was our turn to jump my girlfriend went first, I went second. Falling through the sky everything was great, exactly as I imagined. I knew the main chute was supposed to deploy somewhere around 5,000 ft. As we dropped, I was in the moment, I didn't really realize how low we had gotten. Finally, a chute deployed and we quickly descended. We came down pretty hard in a weed filled area close to the runway of the airport, but neither of us, myself nor the tandem jump instructor, were seriously injured, just some abrasions and scratches. We were nowhere near where we were supposed to land, the parachute time was less than 20 seconds and was supposed to be more like 2 or so minutes and we came down fast and hard so I knew something went wrong. I asked my instructor and he explained what had happened. The main chute didn't open. The reserve chute deployed when the reserve chute's automatic activation device (AAD) deployed the reserve. He was rattled and his hands were shaking. Keep in mind, this is a very seasoned instructor. My impression is that he'd performed thousands of jumps. He said he'd had several "cut aways" in his life, but nothing quite like this. It wasn't until the next couple of days after doing my research I fully grasped what happened. Main chutes fail 1 in 1000, reserve chutes almost never fail. Statistically, I was never in much danger, but I still don't know, nor may I ever, why the AAD had to deploy the reserve and it wasn't deployed manually. I suspect the reserve ripcord wasn't working either, but I can't confirm. I'm thankful for the AAD though, it saved our lives.
You would think this would be the end of my review. It's not. What happened above was only the beginning.
The worst part was how myself, the tandem jump instructor and my girlfriend were treated afterward by the Skydown Skydiving owners. After we landed in the weed filled area about 10 minutes later the pilot landed the plane and he drove over to us in his truck. His first and only question was, "Where's my chute?" He was referring to the main chute that cut away when the reserve deployed. The skydive instructor replied, "I don't know" and the pilot yelled, "Fu$k!" called the instructor an amateur and some other colorful words and immediately drove off, I guess to look for his chute. Later, the wife of the pilot (the other owner) drove up to collect us. She was nice and asked about us, but basically acted like nothing out of the ordinary just happened. After we got back to the hangar I felt I deserved some sort of refund or compensation for my skydive not going according to plan to say the least. Long story short, the pilot was up in the face of my girlfriend, wagging his finger at her yelling obscenities. The wife of the pilot, although very off in her affect, stayed calm. We tried to work with them, but all they would do is refund our videography. That's fine, we didn't want it anyway.
I believe there is a fundamental safety issue with Skydown Skydiving. If you google them you'll find they are being sued for how they employ their team of skydive instructors and chute packers. I could write pages on this, but I believe this employment structure is the root cause of the safety concern. Packers, are paid by the chute. Chutes are reused between groups. If they are busy, they are hurrying. Mistakes are made. I believe my main chute didn't open because the packers made a mistake hurrying to repack the first group's chute. Quality control is seriously lagging.
If you do decide to give Skydown Skydiving a chance, I implore you, don't go when they are busy. If something goes wrong, and you do live through it, don't bother to expect anything like good customer service. As rare as these events are, even for Skydown, you'd expect them to realize they should treat people well when things don't go well, but they don't. I do hope they read this review and make changes to how they employ their chute packers and tandem jump instructors and get some better quality control in place, before someone dies.
