RiggerLee

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Everything posted by RiggerLee

  1. You know there are a lot of facets to the sport. I've found my self drifting from one to the next over the years. skysurfing, freestyle, CRW, base jumping, rigging, manufacturing, now I'm working on rockets and it looks like we are going to get the money to expand it into an orbital system. I don't think I could have done any one of those things for thirty years. Life is really more about growth. Some time that means turning in a new direction but in the end you may find that all of these things are interconnected. What you do is informed by all that you have done before. Every thing you have learned will carry over into what ever you do next. Maybe you'll build a container next. Maybe a pilot rig. One with low pack volume fabric. A better smaller canopy for them. Don't want to deal with a TSO? Maybe build a base rig. Want to do some thing new? Maybe build a modern version of a Sorcerer for the wing suiters. They jump slider up all the time. Maybe it's time they started carring a reserve? Or if you want to stick with canopies, how about doing some thing commercial. High percesion cargo is a thing. Militaries are investing large amounts of money in it in all sizes. There is a contract for a powered one to extend cross range. How about a high altitude eye in the sky, an air deployed aero stat. High altitude balloon. You can shoot down a drone even a big one at 30,000 ft but it's a lot harder to hit some thing at 80,000 feet. Who know were life will take you. Right now I'm actually taking an on line course. Fundamentals of space vehicle guidance, control, and astrodynamics. It's been a while since I stretched my brain cells this hard. Loving it. Getting into math I'd never dived into before. The only real secret in life is to not allow your self to become stagnant. And I still say the solution to all of your problems is to take out an ad in Parachutest or what ever you have over there selling canopies. You are now "Manufacturer" and blow a big fat raspberry at them. They don't want to run your ad, fine put it in parachutist and sell them here. Let me know and I'll renew just to have a copy of your ad to frame. Lee
  2. It's a product of design choices made in the shape of the stabilizer and from that the slider stops. I'll give you some examples. Look at a specter from PD 7 cell. short stabs. The stab starts at the A comes up slightly to the B attachment point where the slider stop is. The grommets are fairly close to the A's and level. Slow opening canopy with good mechanical advantage to the slider. Compare with the PD reserve. Noticeable longer stabilizers, slider grommets farther down from the A attachment point, lower mechanical advantage, faster opening canopy. Look at the old Flight Concepts reserves. Long flares but no stabilizers The slider initially sets at a very steep angle with the difference being the difference between the A and C Line length. The "ideal" stab shape based on reducing tip vortexcies would be a very different shape then what would be most convenient to support the slider. So like all things it's a compromise of very different objectives. Lee
  3. A Master rigger can perform an approved alteration to a TSO'd container. A manufacturer or the FSDO can approve an alteration. I have an approval for the addition of rings for a third canopy on my harness. If you can develop an alteration for a container or a type of container. Submit a write up on it including drawings, numbers, and test data. Enough for them to approve the alteration. Like meeting the relevant testing requirements for the TSO. you can perform that alteration on your rig, and depending on how it's written maybe all rigs of that type. All you have to do is figure out how to do it, write it up, and convince them that it works. You might actually find the first to be the hardest problem. It looks simple but there is more to that system them meets the eye. Just look at the SB on it. some of those measurements are real specific. Making it work isn't as simple as it seems. Lee
  4. I don't know what your talking about. The micro raven 150 was a perfectly good canopy for a 95 lb girl. I did every thing with my Maverick. I loved it. I don't know why people diss F111 canopies. I think they have a lot to offer. It's only a problem if you ask them to be some thing they are not. I beleve you can fly any thing, history has proven this, You just have to respect it and fly it appropriately. Lee
  5. RiggerLee

    B-17

    Any one know what plane it was? https://www.foxnews.com/us/world-war-ii-era-aircraft-crashes-at-bradley-international-airport-in-connecticut-injuries-reported Lee
  6. I think he wants to really jump it not just put a jump on it. Hanging onto that bag while he free flys or wing suits will be a pain with all the risers and lines running to it. Lee
  7. Of course you can jump it as a main. It's a canopy. That's what it's for. A good F-111 canopy, depending on your wing loading, is good for hundreds of jumps. As it wears it gets more pores and can not land with as high of a wing loading as easily. That was why we jumped them at lower wing loading <1:1. You could get 600-700 jumps on one before it was a rag. Some reserve canopies have slightly different fabric and may not last as long. Some companies allow you to make X number of jumps on your reserve as a main before you pack it as a reserve. Precision built all their canopies as both mains and reserves. You could use them as ether. Once it was a main you could then not use it as a reserve to keep people from putting rags in there reserve tray. If you have to sew a bridle onto it... there are ways. To really do it right if you were going to copy the normal design would be a pain and probable not worth the bother. However there are ways to fake it just fine. You can sew a patch on the top skin and bring lines down to the line attachment points. You can do it with out opening any seems. Or you could just use a RDS attached to the slider. Problem solved. You got a nice little canopy, why would you just throw it away? Lee
  8. It's an interesting idea. I see two questions, the first being how much would it help, the second being what down sides there might be. The friction from the loop of course plays some part in the pull force but I think a lot of it is from the bend in the cable as the loop tries to pull the cable through the grommet. It doesn't have to pull it all the way through. All it has to do is cause a small bend there at that point. As you try to pull the cable through that point your trying to pull it through a rather sharp bend. Pinch a cable between your fingers, pull. Not a problem. Take two fingers and your thumb and put a small sharp bend in the cable. Try to pull it through that with out relaxing your fingers, much harder. The sharper and greater that bend the harder it will be. In reality it's probable a high peak force followed by a more moderate but still high load from say a spinner. Cable gets a kink and although the loop can move it's now pulling on a point on the cable with a kink and it's harder to pull that bend past the grommet. I think a better solution might be to reexamine the end on the housing. I was really interested when Mirage came out with their housing ends. Why should we be stuck with #0 grommets. That hole could be smaller. At first they had sharp edges and there were some marks being left on cables, They radiused them and fixed that problem but that makes the hole "wider". I just think that hole could be smaller. Large enough for a twist in the line to pass through but smaller then we have now. If you put a lube or grease on the loop I'm worried that it will be more prone to pick up dirt and grit off the floor. They are a wear point. It would be an issue. I wonder if a "dry lube" Like some of the things we use for magazines in fire arms would be better. Generally you spay it on and it evaporates leaving behind a Teflon or some thing like that. Point is that it's a dry surface that does not attract dirt. I have not tried this. I am not advocating this. It's just an example that popped into my head as I was setting here typing. For all I know these things might eat nylon. Just tossing it out as a thought. This is an interesting idea but you should test it before we all go out and do this to our risers. Take a couple of really active teams, 1000 jump a year guys. Convince them to let you do this to ONE of their risers. All the left hand risers, not the right. Let them put a thousand jumps on those risers and at the end of the year, when they should be throughing them out any ways, evaluate them. Including pulling that loop to breaking on a test stand. Compare the two sides. Do this in a few places like Eloy where it's dusty and some place not. I'd like to see how the wear changes. Hell I could probable convince Phil to pull them for you. And to be fair you would need to convince the manufacturer to sew up some riser ends, at least the loops as a brand new base line. I haven't done this but I might bet that the new ones would break at the sewing and the old ones at the end or at a wear point over the ring. Lee
  9. RiggerLee

    Riser ring

    Looks like a Very poor forging that was never finished. Webbing is sensitive to the radius that it is bent over when you pull on it. Example, the problems we had with the old stile RW7 rings. That forging is causing a very small radius. All of the load on the riser pulls up there.If it's been jumped, I would be surprised if you didn't see damage there. You got to ditch those, like now. Further more you need to make a call to who ever made them. They need to be traced back to what ever batch of rings they came from. All manufacturers keep records of their Perches Order Numbers for all materials. They can be traced back to the original batch. and every one who has baught from that batch can be notified so they can do closer QC on every thing built from it or contact any one who has products from it. Where did that come from? Lee
  10. It wasn't finding a chest mount. It was finding a big chest mount. He was a big boy. In the end we found a 28' chest mount container with a C9 with a four line release kit. We thought about going with a 28 ft Phantom but he was a heavy boy and we went with the C9. Lee
  11. I do remember these but it was at the very beginning of my jumping so I can't say that I had full understanding of the issues at the time. Here is what I can put together from my current understanding crossed with my spotty memories of that time. Keep in mind that this was around the time of transition from F-111 to ZP canopies. It was not uncommon for people to still buy F-111 canopies at least as their first canopy. The saber had been out for a while. Precision was building the Monarch. I'm trying to remember if the Stiletto was out yet but I don't think so at least not where I was at. Glide path needed a new canopy. They had been playing with a design called Ariel in various forms. I knew a big cameraman guy from canada that had been doing some test jumping for them and still had one of the prototypes. The Nova was another design that they were playing with. Paragliders were getting better and I once heard that the air foil was based on one? Rumor. CFD was getting better and I heard that they had hired a consultant to help them with the new design. Rumor. What I actually know. One of our instructors went off to Quincy and jumped a bunch of their demos that year. He came back to Texas and we got a couple in that he and others were jumping. For Glide path they were supposed to be the hot new canopy better then the Saber. I don't think I jumped any of them. They were out side my skill set at the time. But I remember that Scot liked them. I packed them for him and he had good openings then one bad one. It of course happened when he was shooting video Which was a lot more chalenging back then when the cameras weighed over 7 lb. I'm trying to remember if he bought one but he got sick with ball cancer and quit jumping. No one considered them to be bad canopies. There were no problems with them around here. Then there were a couple of incidents. High profile very public incidents, I think in FL but I don't recall which drop zone. Collapse on approach to landing, possible turbulence. Suddenly people started to get gun shy of them. Glide Path went into panic mode and recalled them. I'm not sure if they ever really came to a conclusion as to the root cause of the issues on those canopies. And I don't think it was wide spread. There were not a lot of them out there but they were out there and people liked them and were not dieing. They didn't have flares like most of there canopies. I heard that the tape they put in the bottom seam to spread the load was shrinking and distorting the airfoil. Rumor. Line shrinkage was not a widely known concept at the time and I have heard since then that the collapses were caused by them going out of trim. Rumor. I don't recall it having a nose on it like you see on many canopies today. PD had some kind of patent on how they sewed their nose lip, I recall that later Flight Concepts was trying to work around that in their construction on newer canopies. I've heard theories that the issues were with how the canopy pitched front to back, when a canopy surges forwards it loses lift on the front of the canopy and the front can roll under. I herd that this was a product of the airfoil, the max thickness being farther back then on other canopies. Rumor. None of it really mattered. They pulled the cutaway handle. I don't know if there was a lawsuit or just the fear of one but Mike Furry got out. He was done. Some of the other people there went on to buy him out and start over with a, legally, unrelated company, Flight Concepts. They went on to build many good canopies including CRW canopies. They have kind of fallen off the stage as far as sky diving is concerned which is a shame. I don't think there was any thing special about the Nova. It was just another of the post Saber ZP nine cells. It was an early attempt at a "high performance canopy" and it seemed to be a good canopy but I don't think it would be any thing to write home about to day except for the mystique that has grown up around it. I wound up with one years later. A 170 or maybe a 190 I think. Too big for me never jumped it. I was surprised how many people were interested in it. Gave it to a CRW guy that was smart enough not to jump it in turbulence and he never had a problem with it. I think he sold it to his DZO, lost track of it sense then. I think people blow them out of proportion both their porformance and there problems. If you want to jump it, I'd say do it. I'd advise you to play with it up high testing it's stability. I'd advise against jumping it on a turbulent day. But if it behaved up high I would probable land it. See what the fuss is about but I think I think that you will find that there is no fuss and if you a sencable about where and when you jump it I don't think you will be in any real danger. Lee
  12. Look around the loft. There will be a bin of scrap line from the last few relines that your rigger has done. Ask him if you can have some scrap line. There will be enough 750 and 1000 lb line there for 10 life times of loops. If you don't know how to finger trap, learn, or just look for loop ends that are still good where they took them off the links. Their are up to 24 pre made closing loops in every line set. Or borrow a fid and make hundreds of your own. Each will last 100 times longer then the ones made from gutted type 3 that you are using now. Lee
  13. What are you making the loops out of? It's not a fix for other existing problems but if you go to a heavier loop, like a spectra it may last a lot longer. Lee
  14. It took a great deal of effort to avoid busting out laughing in the middle of the shop reading this. But then I stopped and thought about it and there are some very successful DZ owners. I am not one of them. This is just my perspective from observing this for close to thirty years. There seems to be a formula for being successful in this industry. Oddly it seems to be to not try to make money running a DZ. As far as I can tell most of the real money is made in other side operations. Running, leasing, buying, and selling aircraft for example. And even then unless you are very smart about it you can lose your ass. It's hard for me to imagination a busyness plan that you could walk into a bank with that would not make them cringe. Such people are extremely risk adverse, and I'm just talking about finance. I can't imagine how they would react to the liability. I'd try to couch it in the form of a aircraft deal supplying services to another company with whom you have a signed contract... etc. And it's hard for me to imagine being successful with the payments for a busyness loan hanging over your head. People finance aircraft and the payments kill them. Banks want a lot of insurance on some thing like an aircraft. Insurance companies ether will not let you use them for skydiving, or want a good/expensive pilot, or want a lot of money. Some people self insure which basically means you don't need a loan to begin with. If you want to look at an example, look into how Roger Nellson started his Chicago drop zone after he got out of jail. If he was still around he would straight up tell you how to do it. Maybe his family will tell you the story. If I was going to try to make money in that field... I wouldn't do it, not directly. I'd buy a plane. I'd start an independent aviation service supplying service to drop zones. Be careful with you contracts. If they can't make the payments or supply the busyness move some where else. Be a snow bird. I would fly the plane my self, or hire a very good pilot. I'd self insure. And I would not take out a lone. If you can't do that, buy a smaller plane or don't do it at all. You need to be a pilot, A+P, I. Why on earth would you want to buy a dropzone? Is it making so much money, are the books so good that it is actually attractive as an investment? There have got to be way better investment opportunities out there with better and more certain ROI then a dropzone. This smells passion motivated. If that's the case, then if you don't have the money to do it then you don't have the money that you will lose supporting it. No loan for you. Lee
  15. So if you find a harness, what are you going to use as a reserve? We set up a rig for a guy one time on an all round jump. It was a jumbo crossbow but the biggest challenge was the reserve system. We finely found him a 28 ft chest pack. Also, the only malfunction that I've seen on a PC was with a bag. It does pack up much smaller but I think there is some thing to be said for getting a round canopy to full extension of the canopy before the sleeve slides off. A bag gets it to line stretch but then it's just a dump and a lot of ugliness can happen before the canopy is extended and under tension. With larger systems a lot of work goes into getting the canopy to full extension and the apex under tension before the skirt starts to open, keeping tension on the apex, and controlling the fill and crown location. Over the years these ideas have been trickling down to smaller systems. It would be a shame to burn up a nice PC. Lee
  16. It'll be fine. If you don't want it I'll take it. Ship it to me and it can sit in a truck for three more days. Lee
  17. There is this guy in... Guatemala? or some place down there. I keep running into him over the years. He has a fetish for old gear and is out to jump every thing ever made. He borrowed my paradatctals to jump them. He's also trying to recreate all the old stunts and did that one a few years ago. Lee
  18. In regards to line stowage. I do recall people just making two stows on the bag and coiling the remainder of the line in the container. I knew a guy that did this with an old crw canopy. There were two thoughts. First it was quicker and easier. Second, some people did it to try to avoid bag wobble and spin on the way to line stretch. Down side, the reason this fell out of favor is that sone times one of those lines that is streaming out of the container gets looped around a side flap and causes a nasty horse shoe malfunction. A guy died at our drop zone from such a mal, or at least that's our best guess. And he wasn't even coiling all the lines in his tray just maybe a little two much excess. So it can and does happen and leaving all that line in the tray is just asking for it. Packing with out a bag. Done a lot of this with various canopies doing CRW. I've jumped tail pockets, tail flaps, diapers of various types as well as bags. If you're having trouble packing with a bag you will not enjoy closing a container on a free packed canopy. Basically you are folding and packing the canopy at the same time that you are trying to close the container. It's also easier to damage the canopy when it is not protected by the bag. Splitting it up in to two steps, folding and controlling it with a bag, and closing that bag into a container as two separate steps is easier. In the end you can actually jump with out a bag just fine. It's all about getting the canopy to line stretch in good order with the line straight, slider up, and the breaks set. It can be done but a bag offers a far more positive staging method then a tail pocket. You could go with a diaper, they are almost as good but most people don't want to deal with the lose canopy closing the container. They prefer the canopy to be in that warm dark bag, out of sight out of mind. Generally speaking what we have always found is that staging is the most important factor in the opening of the canopy. If you look at the numbers more and better staging of the deployment translates to lower malfunction rates and more consistent openings. Lee
  19. I couldn't find an actual clip. This is the best I could find. It's cropped and a terrible picture. Go to 1:45 Proof we have been working on the idea since the 1980's and it still isn't perfected. Lee
  20. He actually has asked some legitimate questions. He's a newbe and has discovered that packing sucks. He will in time get better at it. The question of is their a better way is perfectly valid. He's asked if there is a better way to make stows. He has asked if you could build one that can be tightened after the stow is made. It's a perfectly good idea and strong in fact did this and still does on their tandem reserves. The idea had it's own problems and never spread. If he or any one else wanted to play with it any rigger could add the little bungee holders to your bag. He asked if stowless bags were better. Valid question. People are making and jumping them. There are real advantages to them but I see problems as well. I say the jury is still out. He asked if you could close the container losely and then post tighten it. We do that with the loop on some reserves. It can be made to work but we have also seen issues with it. I've never seen it on a main. I can't think of any modern equivalent of a pack opening band but we could use a strap running to say a buckle under the back pad to do some thing like that. I actually did some thing like that with compression straps on a back pack/base rig kind of thing. It was a monstrosity but it did work I jumped it on trips. Honestly if we really wanted to make packing easier all we would have to do is become a little more rational about how we size rigs. He hasn't come up with any thing new or revolutionary... yet. I keep waiting for some gem to fall out of his mouth that will revolutionize the world. It could happen. Monkies might reproduce Shakespear. It might take longer then the heat death of the universe, but it might happen tomorrow. You'll never know what will stick and you wont find out unless you throw it against the wall. Lee
  21. Actually some of these things have been done. First off a lot of this difficulty is you using poor technique. Stowing lines. I'm trying to visualize and verbalize how I do it and it's been a long time since I even thought about it. I hold the bight folded in one hand with my thumb along it supporting the bight. I use that thumb to hook the rubber band that I'm wrapping around it with my other hand. I use that to wrap the band around and some how slip my thumb out in the process and have a nice neat double wrapped stow. Sorry I just do it and after 20 years they just come out perfect every time. You just need to practice more. It's not that stressful on the band. It's the pulling off that kills them. Strong used to use bungees to stow the lines on their tandems. You would stow the bight of line in the loop of bungee and then pull a plastic sleeve up to tighten that loop around the bight of line. Kind of a two stage process. Still on the freebag. It worked but it could be hard to find good quality bungee. They wore like any thing else. They went to an anti line dump flap. If you think about the pull up cord and flaps as pullies and pull in the right direction to use them as pullies and compress the opposite side with your knee so that your not doing all the work with your pull up cord all of a sudden you might find that the job is not so hard. If your packing a student rig right now you don't know tight. Try to make sure that you are wiggleing the bag down into that side and pulling the flap out, up, and around the side before you try to close it with the pull up cord. Some larger rigs, student rigs, use 1000 denere cordura for both the bag and the inside of the flap. Not slipery, does not slide well if you just try to close it with the cord too much friction. Pull the flap around first as far as you can before you try to close it. Use your knee to compress the bag. Then switch your knee to the out side to compress it towards the center as you pull it the rest of the way with the cord. I'm a base jumper and free stow pockets have their place in base and reserve bags for special conditions but they are not the most positive form of staging. The stowless bags are a fad going around right now. I don't know if they will indure. They can be fast and convenient but that doesn't necessarily make them the best design. And there have been containers where you closed them, loosely and then tightened them. Once apon a time there was some thing called a stow band. They were actually springs sewn into straps to tighten the flaps and pull them open. This was in the days on cones and pins. We found loops to be much better. I suppose you could also call Racer reserves or Reflex reserves kind of a two stage closure. You close it loosely and then tighten the loop. They work but you can bend pins, cause hard pulls, your uncertain how tight they now are, etc. But it's been done. You'll notice that all the containers just close, It's not that big a deal just learn how to do it. Lee
  22. Reexamining procedures and techniques is always a good exercise. But keep in mind that we have been doing this for a while. There are often reasons for every thing you see done but they may not be apparent. In asking these questions you may learn why these things are. Be careful about who you lessen to. Remember that the institutional in this sport is rather short. A lot of people only stay in it for a few years. So reasons for things get forgotten or things that had no reason become local dogma. Some one told them that once, they repeat it, then it becomes a rule. There is a lot of miss informed bullshit that is passed around as fact with limited understanding. What makes a good pack job... Lines straight. Slider up. Breaks set. Really it's about getting the canopy to line stretch in that configuration. That simple statement conceals the complexity of that task. The slider is a negative feed back control system for the opening of the canopy. The wind fights to keep the slider up, the canopy fights to open. The faster you go the harder the slider tries to stay up and control the canopy. As the canopy fills with air and the speed slows the canopy becomes dominant over the slider and starts to push it down and the canopy opens. That is a deceptively simple explanation. How hard the opening is is very dependent on how fast you are going when the canopy becomes dominant over the slider. If for any reason the slider is not dominant over the canopy in the early phases of the opening... google base jump and slider down to see the behavior of a canopy not controlled by a slider. At terminal, it's just a question of what will break first and unfortunately we tend to build our gear pretty tough. You might be the part that breaks and that's not rhetorical. Numerous fatalities and injuries from just hard openings. The heart tears lose inside the chest cavity and the aorta bleeds out into the chest and you die. See the same thing a lot in helicopter crashes with vertical impacts. The dominance of the slider depends on it being at the top of the lines. It's mechanical advantage depends on that. Just a few inches can make the canopy dominant and the slider fails to control the opening. Dynamic pressure goes up with the square of the velocity but it's worse then that because the fill rate of the canopy also goes up increasing the power of the canopy over the slider. The result can be an exponentially harder opening. The slider is also dependent on line tension. This sounds strange but if there is a pop where the lines briefly go slack the canopy can pull line through the slider as it tries to spread above the slider. Think of the canopy as a spring and the lines pulling the canopy down against the slider squeezing most of the cells together and closed at the grommets. The wind holds the slider up and the lines pull the canopy down against the slider keep it squeezed down. Sudden slack in the lines means that the canopy is lose to to expand above the slider and suddenly you get an explosively hard opening. How could that happen? Lets say you had a container with really tight riser covers, ether at the shoulders or the secondary covers alond the reserve tray that have become popular. There can actually be a lot of variation in the retention force of those covers based on, for instance, where it curves over your shoulder. Depending on how long the main lift web is on the container the cover might bend over your shoulder or be farther down your back with little curve. This is part of why many people are trying to move to magnetic covers, if done properly they can be less dependent on geometry. The real truth is that tuck tabs were a pain to build constantly and booth was looking for some thing easier. They had the side effect of actually, or at least potentially, being better covers. Every thing else is hype but they did turn out to be more reliable in there opening forces. But lets say that they stay closed, bag goes to line stretch, canopy comes out, slider spreads, then the risers pop causing a loss of tension in the lines. Hard opening. How might this happen? Lets say you had one of those cool new stowless bags. They have almost no tension on the lines as the lines just slide out of that pocket. The last two stows can be poped just by the inertia of the risers and lines and may not open a tight set of covers. Take the bag out of the container on the floor. If you hold it and walk upwards do the line stows have enough force to lift the risers and unstow the covers. Keep in mind that this happens fast so there is an inertia thing you are fighting as well. Those new bags, as cool as they are, are just not the most positive form of staging. Worse if one or both of the risers are caught under the corner of the reserve tray. The length can be over three feet. Or if one is caught the difference in length between the two sides will be over three feet. So one side of the canopy is pulling down one side of the slider very unsymmetrical The difference can be more then the width of the slider. So the other side of the slider the grommets are actually pulled down the lines allowing that side of the canopy to open above the slider with no control. And since the slider is not exactly making a lot of drag being pulled down by one edge rather then being flat to the wind the other side opens almost like a slider down canopy. Know a guy that was paralyzed by that. He's a quad now. I'm not trying to scare you. I'm just saying that there are some important things going on during the chaos of an opening. There has been some thought put into some of the things that we do. The reasons may not be clear and worse people may have a hard time articulating the why. A lot of the why gets lost in time when the average generation of a jumper is only about 5 years or less in some areas. It's just what they were told but they don't know the why. Keep asking questions. Lee
  23. I think an aerostar/phantom would be the smallest. I remember once I was putting some old rigs together for a jump. I missed the opportunity to buy a chest mount. I don't recall what it was called. It was from the cone era but it used through loops. Loops of ungutted type 3 from the bottom to the top, canopy stacked on it's side, loops came through. Two pins. Can not for the life of me remember what it was called or who built it. I was told that it was the smallest at the time which was probable the case. Any clue what that was? Lee
  24. You won't see a lot of them. Notice they talk about a pin being pulled. There were some early ejection seats where the parachute was still worn on the back separate from the seat, typically BA-22's, that had low altitude lanyards and others where they had AAD's that would go off a timer as well as altitude... This was kind of in the same vane. I think it was supposed to be simi compatible with some of these older systems or at least in the same vain. So when you separated from the seat it would turn on when the pin was pulled. Or you could walk around in it and pull the knob before you jump out. If he can't find the handle... I've only run into a few over the years but it's some thing you will see in an air crew rig like you might find on such a plane as this. Load masters that are working in the back of a plane doing air drops wear them. I've seen them used out in Eloy. It's a thing, you just don't see it in skydiving. Lee
  25. There is a Air Crew Cypres. You find it in emergency rigs, single canopy rigs for pilots and flight crew, mostly military or contractors. http://www.ssk.us/EAC_20031202.pdf Lee