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What year did this happen? Not a hundred percent sure. Sometime during the early part of this decade.

I often wondered the same thing and am sure it has to do with time (about a 4 sec window to react on an 800’ jump)/something is better than nothing. Personally, I kind of like the idea rather than pulling the handle and probably having to pull the chute out of the container and throw it myself while tumbling rapidly through 500’. As much confidence as I have in my ability to handle pressure, I’d rather take my chances with the pilot chute entangling with the main. I know they experimented several years ago with the reserve in the main container and an RSL, but it never worked out. It’s a shame as that definitely seems like the way to go from a safety standpoint. I think I read it was just too much of an issue for rear PLFs, kinda of like falling over backwards onto a log, but I gotta believe that some enterprising person could have solved this problem. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=93G27U_HdZY Have ya’ll seen this? Pretty good. Note: The C-17 has an extra big jump platform – about a foot longer than the C130/141. Sometimes this is forgotten, resulting in some of the issues in the video. Ol' Sicily DZ is prominently featured.

Things do actually change in the army airborne community albeit slower than macroevolution. I know that keeping a one arm interval with the jumper in front of you is much more strongly stressed now than it was back in the day if it was at all. This has probably increased the time needed for a pass and increased the red light chances. It’s a big deal when you are trying to get your night assistant jumpmaster duty done to get your star and there is only going to be one pass. I only jumped a 141 in airborne school, and I’ve heard, though I’ve never confirmed or completely believed, that the vortices were far less thereby decreasing the likelihood of high altitude entanglements and making it possible to jump right on top of the guy in front of you. Not sure if I’d stake my life on that. Me, I was always scared to death of a collision, and was probably more scared in general due to having a skydiving background before I ever started army jumping where you can plainly see people waving to you from their backyards on jump run. It was a great relief when I became a jumpmaster making it possible to go out last and avoid the swarm of 19 year old dirt darts flailing around in the dark with 60lb rucks, machineguns, tripods, mortar base plates, etc. Even as the assistant, I would wait till the PJ’s door was done before I went, usually with a good ‘2 count’ beforehand. You gotta love how the army deals with accidents – mostly by making sure as few people as possible know about it. As some have already mentioned, the safety focus in the skydiving world is a wonderful thing where incidents have always been published, instantaneously now on the internet, and there is commercial incentive to improve gear. Not long ago there was a legendary accident at Bragg involving a jumpmaster student. As I’m sure you all know, the reserve ripcord was on the right side of the pack. Now it’s in the middle with the handle pointing up. This particular student was executing a clear to the rear, and the side mounted handle caught on the door, activated his reserve, and pulled him up and out of the bird decapitating him in the process. So someone comes up with this $.10 plastic insert that goes underneath the handle when you’re doing a jumpmaster duty and supposedly makes it resistant to that kind of pressure. Problem solved! We can all sleep easy now! Incidentally, the handle is now in the middle in the event your right hand is pinned or immobilized, and they added a spring operated pilot chute eliminating a lot of the old heroics required to operate it. Good ideas but should it have taken 50 years to come up with them? You’d have to be one bad mo-fo to be going in with a spinning or total malfunction under 800’ and be able to beat on your reserve, perhaps throw it in the proper direction, and god forbid, reel it back in for another attempt!! Also, the metal grommets that used to close the reserve have been replaced with a ‘soft loop’ system greatly reducing the likelihood of it jamming shut. You know, stuff that has been on civilian rigs since who knows when. And then there was the whole inversion thing. How many people bit it over that? So they add a few inches of ‘anti-inversion netting’ to the bottom of the canopy. Good to go.

The MC1-1B (frequently called the dash one bravo) is still in use, but you can only exit one door at a time with it due the high collision potential presented by the forward movement. Consequently, T-10s are still the norm for a mass tacs in any unit. They were used in every Afghanistan/Iraq mass jump by Ranger Regiment, the 173rd, and Eighty Deuce (yes, a platoon plus did jump into Afghanistan and someone claims to have seen a tracer so they got their mustard stain). At Bragg, whenever the general would come along, he, his adjutant, RTO, etc. always had to jump the MC1-1Bs, so we could only exit one door till all of them got out. You can guess how much fun that created. The potential for stopping a stick at Bragg is very high contrary to what an earlier poster said. Sicily, the biggest drop zone, gives 54 seconds of green light assuming no tail wind. Most of the DZs are closer to 30. The generic math is one jumper per door per second. Soooo, if you have 60 jumpers on a C130, then you need 30 seconds of green light to get everyone out assuming that all goes perfectly in the plane. More often than not, if you aren’t jumping Sicily, you’re doing more than one pass. This is usually built into the plan. In a C17 with a 100 jumpers – no option. Current policy is for the jumpmaster to sound off repeatedly with ‘RED LIGHT!’ and put his hand up where the jumpers can see it. No physical effort is made to stop someone probably because of that incident that the OP described. Sorry for rambling. Former 82nd jumpmaster/air operations planner.