Thursday, July 4, 2019

You are skydiving and both your parachutes fail. What can you do to survive? Dennis Lobban


Dennis Lobban

Happened to a friend of mine, and I watched it, I was there. It was a tandem jump. My friend was the tandem master, not the student. He had around 3,000 jumps. He had line twists on the reserve, cleared that to find he had a lineover on the reserve. He used a hookknife on the line causing the lineover. He guessed (correctly) that a steering line was to blame. At this point the reserve had a hole in it, a big hole, big enough to walk through, but he didnt know that. He only knew it was spiralling towards the ground. So he pulled on the brake as far as it would go, then grabbed the brake line and pulled that as far as it would go. Now the canopy flew straight. When he got close to the ground he let up the brake to reintroduce the spin, then pulled it again to esentially do a hook turn. (More airspeed equals more lift). He landed hard and was limping a bit for a couple of days, but he didnt break anything. His tandem student owes my friend his life, no question.
To answer the question as asked, depends. Giving up has a low chance of success, try something else.

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