I started pre square in 1973…a barely steerable round. Early squares had a 1 in 10 malfunction rate. Para commanders were for advanced jumpers only. Our boots had 3 inch rubber souls. Having watched a few videos of late the cutaway and associated reserve deployment system is as great a development as the square. It’s so exciting that these old bones are sorely tempted to give it another go.
Neat, but I'd consider explaining the role of the Collins lanyard next time, particularly because that's one of the parts of the system that are exposed to the user, when they remove the cutaway cables to lubricate them for instance.
So it's always attached to your reserve ,what happens when when your primary puts you in a spin and cut away , I seen one video and as predicted he was spun around and reserve just spun them lines ,lucky enough he recovered. With reality of twisted lines your already setting to open your reserve without recovering stable position first.also sky hook name was already in use as it was for a personal recovery for aircraft in flight .
Looks like a good idea but bad engineering to me. The huge force he had to apply to pull the pin on that reserve would frighten me. I jumped in the mid to late 80's when we still used round canopies and the reserve was mounted on the belly. If you needed to deploy the reserve there was no cutaway procedure, you simply pulled the reserve handle and if the main was still deployed you would come down under two canopies. Yes, you could release the risers but on my first jump I was told the only occasion you would do that was if you had a hang up - although the Royal Marine Commando training us explicitly told us not to do this as then he would be able to carabiner down the line, cut us free, pull our reserve, pull his own main and a few weeks later get a medal for bravery.
The amount of drag that the pilot chutes provide will far exceed the average strength of any person. Also, that amount of pin tension prevents premature reserve openings. You must consider that sport jumpers can perform hundreds of jumps before a reserve repack is required. Also, the pin tension is a result of fully compressing the spring loaded pilot chute. If the closing loop is too long, then the resulting launch force of the reserve pilot chute is not strong enough, and reduces the effectiveness of the reserve deployment. Blue skies, friend!
Not sure about the UK, but the USPA C and D license holders can have a planned deployment altitude of 2,500ft AGL. It can be waived to 2,000ft AGL for a series of jumps if necessary. However, in my experience, most jumpers are comfortable pulling around 3,500ft and don't see any reason to pull lower under normal circumstances.
The Skyhook is configured in such a way that if the main parachute is providing more drag than the reserve pilot chute, the hook will engage and use your main canopy as a big pilot chute to deploy the reserve. This has been shown to provide much faster reserve openings with less altitude loss.
