Re: [460] Tailpocket, elastic stows
Line Stow/Tailpocket Evolution . . .
It's kind of interesting how we got from "there" to "here" regarding line stowage. When I started skydiving in the mid-70s we students were all dropped using military surplus gear. And this was the gear I first learned to pack. On the mains the round canopy was put into a "sleeve" with the lines stowed on the mouth (bottom) of sleeve and covered with an attached fabric flap. The reserves were packed into their front mounted containers without any kind of deployment device except the lines were rubber band stowed inside the container. The reason for the sleeve on the mains were twofold. First was for comfort as it generally slowed the opening and would assure you were first pulled upright for opening. The second is with the lines on the sleeve itself it assured the majority of the lines would be pulled away from an unstable or flailing jumper. (If you are going to get hung up in your lines it's better to have it happen close to the links rather than up by the skirt).
When it came to reserve deployment comfort wasn't as much of a concern. It was speed, or getting the reserve out their NOW, that was the thing. In both these cases protecting the canopies from deployment damage was a consideration but hindsight shows we were being way too paranoid. Compared to today these military canopies were about as bullet proof as bullet proof gets.
In the late 1970s the sport side of parachuting was getting into "lightweight" gear in a big way. Every advert of the time touted weight (or lack of it) almost before anything else. And after all gear was coming in at about the same weight the next big thing was "smallness." But lightweight and smallness came with a price. Now you could blow up your round sport canopies if they weren't deployed in a very controlled manner.
This was also a time of many reversals in thought that occurred in the 1980s. For instance its the time of the wing wars. With big baggy jumpsuits (with big underarm wings and swoop cords) jumpers were trying to freefall as slow as possible. And the biggest problem for newbie flyers was the dreaded act of going low. I can tell you from experience there was nothing worse than looking up at nine other people who were waiting on you. Several of who could be counted on to be giving you the finger.
Toward the end of the 1980s we realized how wrong we were and that going faster in freefall was better. Mainly because going slow meant all control movements needed to be exaggerated but going faster your movements could be smaller. Freefall control was now "crisp." So we went from a time when people removed coins from their pants pockets to reduce weight to actually strapping on lead weights to be heavier.
On the gear front ram-air canopies were slowly replacing rounds at least as far as mains. Invented in the early 1970s by 1980 most DZs were still a mix of rounds and squares. This was also around the time lightweight F-111 fabric was introduced. The problem now is we were already blowing up the preceding generation of round reserves in terminal freefall so this, I thought at the time was a step backwards. Just prior I had blown up a Tri-conical round reserve after a total on my brand new Wonderhog. What saved me was a long spot and crashing into the water of Lake Elsinore instead of hard ground.
So in the market for a new reserve I was talking with Dean Westguaard who would come to the DZ every weekend with his "gear van". This was before there was a gear store on every DZ. "I've got just what you need," he told me. "This is the new Super 22 from Pioneer."
It was made of F-111 (the first time I ever saw it) and I held up the fabric and said, "You're kidding right? I can fucking see through this stuff!" "Mark my words, Nick," he continued, "Someday soon every canopy built will be made of F-111."
I passed. I went and bought a surplus Navy Conical but it had something called "Inflation Pockets" sewn around the circumference of the skirt and in order to get it to fit into a small sport reserve container you had to cut them off. So I sat for a full Saturday picking the stitches out while everyone else was jumping. This was some years before I became a rigger and I was so ham-handed I was poking hole after hole in the canopy and getting frustrated. Sunday morning I said screw it and paid Westguaard the 300 bucks he wanted for the Super 22.
While I was at it I also replaced my Piglet round main canopy with a ram-air Strato Star. My first square. I can't let that pass without mention of what a revelation that was. As I was already a semi-experienced jumper it was an amazing experience. With students nowadays starting right out with squares we were the last generation to experience that. I remember popping the brakes for the first time and taking off thinking, "Wow, where's this been all my life."
The first turn I cranked a turn and actually felt the speed and the wind in my face, well, euphoric isn't a strong enough word. I felt God-like!
So time marched on and slowly even round reserves fell by the wayside in favor of square reserves. Which brings us to the first time I ever saw what we now call a tail pocket. It was at the DZ and it was about 1985 or so. (Don't hold me to these dates as I'm writing this on the fly).
Anyway, around this time some jumpers were doing something new, it was called free packing. They were taking off the the deployment bags and just coiling the lines in the bottom of the main container and laying the folded canopy on top. The point? I'm not sure. I think now it was just an attempt to be different. In those days it was always important to separate yourself from the herd.
There were even some who went as far as removing the pilot chute and bridle. They sewed a pud to the center cell on the nose of the canopy and that's what they reached back and deployed. I saw many of those deployments and they were ugly as sin, but still worked most of the time.
Then I ran into a friend who said, "Hey Nick, check this out." His canopy was laid out on its side. And there sewn to the middle bottom of the stabilizer was a tailpocket. Since it wasn't on the tail he wasn't calling it a tailpocket but it was the same almost exact thing. And it worked fine. Most people at the time either flat packed their mains or roll packed them. There was no pro packing at the time but there were a few people who "trash packed." A trash pack was simply running the slider up the lines, shaking out the canopy, and stuffing it into the container! But for those of us who sweated over every pleat and fold, that was a bit too much for me.
Then in the mid-80s I started B.A.S.E jumping. In those days you knew a guy who survived a few BASE jumps and he taught you. My guy was Mark Hewitt and I think he had about 20 BASE jumps at the time. We were jumping the crap out of a local 700-foot AM tower and I packed up for them just like at the DZ. Roll packed with a deployment bag. The only concession we made to B.A.S.E. was a larger pilot chute, but at first I was still using a shorter skydiving bridle. And no line mod either, even though we were going slider down, simply because Mark Hewitt hadn't invented the line-mod yet.
A couple of months later Mark experienced a line-over on a building jump and wound up impaling himself on a wrought iron fence. It was like we hit a wall and we all realized it. If we couldn't figure out a way to beat the line over problem B.A.S.E was dead in the water. It would no longer be viable, it would be little more than a crap shoot.
Some months later I met up with Mark again after he recovered. We were in a alley way behind a movie theater were we would pack up for the tower. "Hey, check this out," he said. And he showed me his idea for the line-mod. He'd already tried it a few times but I wasn't convinced. "You go first," I remember telling him.
But of course he was right and really, the biggest hurdle to repeatable slider down B.A.S.E had been licked. Soon after the idea of not only fixing a line over, but preventing them in the first place came to the fore. Enter the tail-pocket.
Right before that we'd already ditched the deployment bags in favor of free packing (bags gave you line twists) and also most of us were now using single container Velcro closed B.A.S.E. rigs. I think, for overall parachute reliability, the most important aspect is line control. And at the time we were stowing the lines in rubber bands in the container. As we were now able to use to use video (because the cameras weren't $3000 anymore) we started to see how sloppy those deployments really were.
The first tailpocket for B.A.S.E. I ever saw Todd Shoebotham showed me in about 1988. At the time there were no real B.A.S.E equipment manufactures. There were guys selling B.A.S.E pilot chutes and longer bridles but no one-stop B.A.S.E. shops like today. In fact the first two B.A.S.E companies started at roughly the same time. Todd and his brother Troy started TNT Rigging in Southern California and Adam Filipino started Consolidated Rigging in Northern California. For a while there was controversies over who was first, but today it's generally considered they both came about at the same time. This was in about 1992. Of course TNT Rigging became Basic Research and later Apex B.A.S.E.
So now if you had a line over we had the line mod. But we also thought we solved the line over problem with the tail pocket. But then, since we thought tail pockets prevented line overs than the line over mod wasn't needed anymore (does that sound familiar) but Todd's brother Troy had a nasty line-over that put him into the rocks off a 340-foot bridge. And it almost killed him. The joke for the next year was walking into a bar and ordering a line-over on the rocks . . .
Long story short is that's how Todd came up with the Tailgate. Like the tailpocket it went a long ways in preventing line overs but it doesn't totally prevent them. And even today we see jumpers having line-overs without the line mod because they didn't belive line overs happened anymore.
In some ways we never learn . . .
NickD
That's awesome.