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Hi

I have heard accounts of a new kind of malfunction, which almost resulted in a fatality on a recent deathcamp.

I would love to hear from the people involved, first hand accounts of what happened, as my understanding from what I have heard is that this happened on an assisted TARD type deployment and basically resulted in a total mal of sorts, made surviveable only by a water landing, 150ft exit altitude and some luck.

I don't want to rehash the whole 'putting the death in deathcamp' debate or sling blame here.

I want awareness of this possibility out in the base community, especially as unpacked jumps are on the increase and practiced by people with lower levels of experience everyday.

let's share knowledge here to help keep all our brothers and sisters out there safe!!

also, a speedy recovery to the deathcamper involved

thanks
sam

 
I don't want to rehash the whole 'putting the death in deathcamp' debate or sling blame here.

But you are doing exactly that by calling it a "Death" camp. Which it was not. A Death Camp is when you throw a totally unexperienced parachuter off a fixed object. A Base Camp or course is when the person has plenty of skydiving experience. This was more like Retardation Camp. Kind of inbetween since the jumper is a skydiver. The jumper healed up from his bruises in a couple weeks.
You all can view this brilliant example of what not to do in Jimmy's new movie "Keen and Able". As potentially devastating as this accident could have been and with more and more people doing unpacked jumps nowadays and since the number of unpacked accidents lately is growing and because I was very involved with the development of these unpacked jumps i will give an explanation of what happened. Hopefully this will prevent it from happening again.

It was a total malfunction with a tard. A tard was thrown for another person off of a 135 foot bridge over lake water. When you throw a tard or cwad for someone else generally you would always stand about 10ish feet away from them. This allows for all the lines not to have to be s folded in a hand. It basically eliminates a bit more of the deployment process and makes things safer. This was not done on this jump and this is entirely the reason for the mal. The jumper wanted to throw his own tard on the next jump after so to buid up to that he was allowed to hold his own s folded lines while the tard was thrown for him. This put the two people too close together. When he jumped and the tard was thrown the action of his jumping away from the bridge yanked the tard out of the throwers hand before it could complete the full inversion of the canopy. This caused all the lines to wrap over the top (would actually be the bottom) of the whole upside down canopy before it had any chance at all of spreading out. Kind of like a net. He towed a brick of canopy all the way to his back. Had it been done exactly the same but a cwad was thrown instead then it would have opened fine since cwads are already inverted before you jump and the lines wouln't have had a chance wrap over any canopy. If anyone is going to throw someone else a tard instead of a cwad then it is important to walk several feet away from the jumper so that the lines are almost tight. This will force the lines to pull on the canopy from the bottom. You could also just give them a cwad but there are other dangers associated with cwads too. Basically as every base manufacturer says, we are all test jumpers. Don't forget that!

thanks for posting the details

I'm sorry for mistakenly referring to it as a deathcamp, I only posted the little info I had heard.

thanks for sharing some of your experience with unpacked jumps

Unpacked Jumps? Hmmmm..... you mean like Paragliding?

BASE jumping involves a closed parachute in a container Sam... How many times do I need to explain this to you... :) LOL.

Tom

was there a tail gate on the canopy?