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PD Factory Team: Our hearts are heavy with sadness. We lost our teammate Gage Galle in a base jumping accident in Norway earlier today. We are beyond devastated. We don't have many details other than he is gone and we are all reeling. Please be there to support each other and his family, as we are here. Gage was the epitome of a talented extreme athlete - he blazed his own trail with a beaming smile, and we are all lucky to have been a part of his journey.

Does anyone know what kind of trouble he had with the suit? Those Tube3's can be deadly in the wrong hands.

I've had several friends who struggled with them, with the main problem being stability. It seems they like to be flown at a much steeper angle than say a PTS or regular PF suit. If you aren't particularly strong with your legs you one minute you might have a wicked glide and the next you are in a sharp turn or super unstable. I've met maybe 3-4 people who loved it and were super consistent.

Thanks! Interesting; so does it seem to be a design flaw that makes it so touchy or is it a suit that requires more skill and experience to handle than other models?

i really dont know what this has to do with this fatality and why this discussion about a specific outdated suit is now happening in this thread. split?

in older / pre-tube/PTS generation tracksuits you would just suck and go same distance as slick if you didnt do your homework and practice and skydive it. the tube3 was one of the first high volume / high power tracksuits, and same as with all next generation high volume tracksuits there was a paradigm shift, if you didnt do your homework you would probably perform worse than going slick. back when the tube3 came out, people were surprised by this, with a wingsuit it was pretty clear to everyone that youre supposed to skydive it and youll not fly like a god right away, but everybody expected from a tracksuit back then to at least perform as good as in his previous tracksuit. hence its reputation.
by now i think it became clear to most people that those high performance tracksuits need practice, youre supposed to skydive it same like if you get a new wingsuit.

i think this is where the bad reputation of the tube3 is coming from, if the PTS or the sumo (or whatever suit) would have been the first of this kind, i think it would have ended up with the same bad reputation. the generation of tracksuits after that were slightly (but only slightly) easier to handle but people kind of got it that you have to practice.

the tube3 was for its time an awesome suit, and still is if you put the effort in and do some training jumps. and i cannot confirm what BigfcknG says that theres only that few people out there that could handle it. knowing and seeing a lot of people in that suit it just showed to me that everybody that went and did a 10-20 skydives in it and then some jumps of brento or similar got it going reasonably well and consistent.

the main lesson from this fatality is that its not 2005 anymore where you just got any tracksuit and go base it right away, but the learning curve on all new generation high performance suits can be compared with a beginner wingsuit. so no matter how skygod you are, if youve never jumped any high performance / high volume tracksuit and you find yourself on an exit in one, your skipping steps, and its going to be sketchy.

i really dont know what this has to do with this fatality and why this discussion about a specific outdated suit is now happening in this thread. split?

It is a little surprising to hear of someone at the level of the PD Factory Team going in tracking at Katthammeran.

Loss of stability at pull time has taken experienced guys in the past, Darcy springs to mind. While I agree that it does seem crazy, it has happened before and will probably happen again.
P.S. Not saying this is what actually happened to Gage.