florman@randvax.UUCP (Bruce Florman) (11/06/85)
> We are taught NEVER to try to cut away under any circumstances -- in fact > the instructor tries to avoid even having the students know where the > capewells (is that how you spell it?) are. > Recognizing that capewells are a relatively slow and tedious > way to cut away (two motions with both hands), and that serious malfunctions > on a T-10 are very rare, this procedure still worries me. Does anyone know > how safe it is to deploy a round reserve (with relatively short lines) while > under a Mae West on a T-10? How about a streamer? Although the equipment that you are using is becoming less common these days, it was pretty much the standard for twenty years. There was always some disagreement within the jumping community over training students to cut away or not. It is clear that hand deploying a reserve into a really violent malfunction is not terribly safe (I beleve that Gene Thacker's son was killed a few years back when he hand deployed his reserve into a malfunctioning PC). On the other hand, more than one student has decided to chop a canopy at only a couple hundred feet and not lived to regret it. At the DZ where I started jumping (Orange, VA) I saw three fairly bad malfunctions on T-10s over a four year period (there were a couple others that I didn't see). Two were Mae Wests and the third was just about indiscribable (a doubly inverted triple Mae West or something like that). All were handled successfully by students using the 'no cutaway/hand deploy' method, although the last caused some anxiety when the reserve hung up briefly in the lines of the main. I don't know how well the method would work on a streamer, but I do know a fellow who got away with hand deploying a pilotchuteless reserve on a total. I suspect that the controversy raged so long (perhaps still rages) because not cutting away seemed intuitively unsafe, but there was never much empirical evidence against the method, while there were documented cases of students cutting away too low to get a reserve out. As more and more DZs begin to train their students on ram-air canopies, the controversy is subsiding, since not cutting away a square may very well collapse the reserve. I do have a friend who managed to land a one man biplane when an AOD deployed his square reserve after his main was already out. However, neither he nor anyone else recommends that as a standard practice. Bruce Florman, D-9019 Manhattan Beach, CA