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The BOC is something that evolved to become the skydiving industry standard in the mid 90´s.

How did this come to be skydiving standard?

In the early days after main ripcord was standard, the "belly band" was introduced. This was the PC pouch mounted across the jumpers front on the belly. Positives included being able to see handle and reach easily, negatives included pc being able to be wrapped around the body, if opening procedure not executed correctly.

The pouch was then moved to the right leg strap and named "leg strap throw away".
Positives included still being able to see handle. Negatives included the possibility to twist leg strap and lock bridle from pulling pins even when pc was deployed.

The pouch was then moved to the bottom of container and named BOC.
This system has proven to be extremely effective in the skydive environment with very little negative issues.
This system became skydive industry standard because it can be used accross all disiplines safely. So there is no need to change your personal technique to deploy your pc.

So as the base industry works very closely with skydive industry technology and manufactoring standards, BOC was adopted and is base standard and has really been a very reliable system across all disiplines of base jumping until now with the innovation of new, large, solid flying body wings.

The position of the BOC in addition to a large wingsuit puts the handle into the deepest possible corner of the suit, during pc deployment.

BOC was never designed with WS in mind.

I am sure with all the amazing minds we have in the wonderful sport/experience that we can solve this solution.

I do agree it would be nice to maintain a base industry standard with possible a slight relocation of the system we currently have. Possibly with the added option of pulling with either hand?

I am very interested to hear all constructive thoughts and idea?

Fly fast open high

What's the current view on PF's "BASE pouch"?

Do they still offer that? Is anyone actively using it?



In my view, Wingsuit flight is a separate activity from BASE jumping or skydiving that has some cross over (and pre-requisite skills) from other activities, especially in some applications.

I think we would be better served if we all had a mental shift to view Wingsuiting as a different thing, not a subset of either skydiving or BASE.

In that vein, perhaps what we are discovering is that BASE and skydiving rigs are not the best deployment/recovery/safety systems for this Wingsuit thing. Would wingsuiting be better off to go back to the drawing board and design a "way to end the wing suit flight safely" from scratch? Perhaps by creating something that is a component of the wing suit system, rather than the current practice of using a whole system from another activity?

If I recall correctly, at least Yves Rossy was using a spring loaded PC deployed with a rip cord on his hetman project. I would assume that the setups Vince and Fred are jumping now with jet engines and fixed carbon wings are equipped with similar systems? Those setups are purpose built from ground up and definitely categorised as large, solid, flying body wings. Maybe there is something there that the WS industry should look at? In a way the WTP is sort of rip cord system as the rip cord (the yellow cable pulled by the WTP handle) releases the PC from it´s pouch, only the PC is not spring loaded. Maybe we can mount the PC somewhere else on the suit to reduce the amount of bridle we need to route on the flying surface but we can route some kind of rip cord through / on the suit to release the PC? For example, mount the PC pouch to the outer edge of the wing somewhere around the height of the PF pc pouch (after the arm wing curves in and continues to the ankle) and build a rip cord housed through the suit that releases the pouch and is released by a handle mounted to the front of the suit around chest height?

What about a yellow-cable-cutaway for the BOC pouch? In case of a no pull find you have cutaway handle that releases the entire BOC puch.
Too problematic with the burble?

A Spring intergrated between two backplates made of cevlar composit material, realeased by knife loop cutter attached to a reserve handle in housing, trowing the whole packjob out if do not find pilot chute.

LOL.. what a fancy way to die from a horseshoe malfunction....

Well, just pack the pilot and bridle different. Stupid ideas can lead to some other ideas. Just kicking the ball.

Maybe we need to develop a system that does not deform our flying surfaces(wings) in order to deploy. What about a wing that stays inflated but your arm is not in the sleeve but on top of the wing. That way when reaching for the PC you are not having to deflate the wing.

Or how about a spring loaded pc that's bite switch activated? No arms needed.

Or maybe we just need to get rid of the PC and bridle all together and figure out a totally different way to get a canopy over our heads.

Rockets. Definitely rockets.

There was a handheld ripcord release system developed at one time. Cant remember where I saw it but probably in the history forum on dz.

Every solution I keep thinking of makes things more complicated than they currently are. People fuck up things like attaching the bridle, stowing toggles properly, leaving in clamps, leaving shit around the pilot chute. I can only imagine what would happen with a more complicated system. I hope someone invents something, but I don't see much of a problem with the current system. Longer containers put the boc very close to where it was during the pf pouch era. Is a new system going to hurt or help more jumpers? Same question I asked of the sorcerer. Good idea in theory, but in practice, do we really need something else?

My thoughts exactly. In a way the beauty of the existing system (BOC) is the simplicity of it, no additional routing of the bridle outside of the container etc. Really minimal amount of rigging required and quite hard (though of course not impossible) to fuck up. I guess if there would be an obvious solution to the issue the manufacturers would have already discovered it and we wouldn´t need to speculate around it on the internet. :)


This is a very valid and interesting point and my guess is that this is the direction where we will be heading. Evolving the containers more and more specific to each discipline of BASE jumping, possibly building even specific containers for certain specific models of WS where the BOC is in optimal place for that WS. Of course, this brings whole new possibility for people to fuck up by jumping a container not fitting their new suit properly...

Also, muscle memory is a real thing. If jumpers end up jumping radically different container designs for different jumps (tracking, wingsuit, sub-terminal), it can pose a problem when switching between systems.

For the last year I've been picturing in my mind a very small but powerful drone located on the top backpart of the container. It will house the pilot chute in a small freebag. With the push of a button the drone will eject and extract the pilot chute, pulling the bridle and popping the pins. Basically like a reserve deploying in the skydive environment, but for the pilot chute. The drone will of course follow its owner down to landing. Boom!

Now I'm an idiot and there are probably a hundred problems with my idea. But I like it. I've been quite impressed by what companies like Black Diamond equipment have been doing with their JetForce backpack. It's a battery powered, fan driven airbag backpacks (for avalanche survival). I think the technology of today (battery, powerful small drones, wireless activation etc) exists.

airbag charges!

on a serious note:
everybody agrees that anything deviating from BOC makes the thing more complicated. i guess its impossible to make it less complicated while at the same time move the PC stow off the rig somewhere else on the wingsuit, and that all other options with ripcords, spring loaded, rocket powered, drone powered, pilotchutes will also complicate things...

so, what if you could take that additional complexity and take it out of the jumpers hands for every packjob, move it somewhere else?
anybody guessing already where im going here?

reserves!

seriously, why not go back to that? doesnt necessarily mean im talking about a piggyback style. has anyone seen a lightweight paragliding reserve in the recent years? those are getting fricking small and light, wingsuit speeds arent that high either, and of course youre probably going to break a leg or two landing one of those, but its a live saving device.

build one of those into your hip / belly / chest region, if bulk is distributed well its not going to add more than a thicker jacket under your suit. the whole thing is packed inside the wingsuit, and theres just a single riser / lanyard that you have to clip in a tersh loop on your rig.
you can happily continue jumping all your loved rigs, the additional rigging for regular use is limited to clipping a carabiner when switching rigs on the wingsuit. even if you got a tension knot or lineover you cant clear you can still dump it as a speed break.
yes, its probably going to damage your rig and wingsuit when you have to use it, yes, youre probably going to break bones, but hey, its a live saving device!

You mean Yves Rossy for the Jetman project.
He also has/had a rocket/pyro propelled reserve at some point.

Correct, fixed the name in my post.

Looking at climbing, whenever something can not be made simpler and safer at the same time people usually add redundancy instead of changing something. I think this is also the route to go regarding the BOC.
Paragliding reserve being one such option or some sort of BOC cutaway, that releases the pilot chute.

I'm not enough of a rigger to say but would it be possible to use a system similar to the Skyhook with a second spring loaded pilot chute that you release via a chest mounted handle deploying the canopy but which slides off whenever you pull the normal PC via BOC?

The paragliding reserve, or just a small round reserve is an interesting thought,and I've thought about the reserve argument/why the sorcerer failed to catch on quite a lot. Here are my reasons I don't think reserves, which have many valid points for their use, ever really have, or will catch on.

1. Weight. Especially for wingsuit jumpers hiking for hours in the alps. How many people even jump full weight canopies anymore, let alone would hike up a second on they have an incredibly small chance of using.

2. Altitude. Even with a sky hook, on many jumps you'd be close to a cutaway hard deck by the time you would even be able to register the need to cutaway. We jump big docile square canopies that tend to not have a lot of malfunctions, and tend to deal with them quite well. Outside of spinning shitty tension knots at high altitude, I don't know that there are a lot of malfunctions I would chop without trying to fix instead. I've heard the stat that there was one cutaway from necessity ever on the sorcerer (please correct me if I'm wrong) and the guy didn't survive.

3. Necessity. How many people would a reserve system save a year, that otherwise would have been unpreventable in some other way? Wiolleta was an awesome human, and I'm stoked that the wingtip pouch is named for her and it always reminds me of her with a smile when her name comes up. Her no pull was not mysterious, she was in a suit that was too big for her (literal size, not ability) that she was actively trying to sell for just that reason. I'm sure we could go through the fatality list and find maybe 1-2 examples, but I'd argue just not flying a wingsuit would much more dramatically increase your chance of survival than adding a reserve would.


If anyone wants to jump a base rig with a reserve, go get the Jeb Corliss mirage rig. Holds a 220 base canopy, sky hook to a reserve. Is that not exactly what we are talking about?

the sorcerer was way ahead of its time (even compared to a skydive rig), and that was also part of why it died. when everyone was jumping on board the velcro train, because pin rigs were deemed black death... it pretty much came out at the wrong point in time.


for me the only real issue there to sell a system like this. but right now were talking 1kg of additional weight. people still jump gargoyles, people carry the same weight in gopros up the mountain. i think theres some pilots that would be willing to carry that 1kg more up the mountain.


try to think outside the skydiving box and all the rigs with reserves you know. i never mentioned cutaways. fuck cutaways, the only way to go here is the paragliding approach, just dump a round to get some (or more) fabric above your head. as i already made clear above, its not about having a good time under your reserve and swooping the landing area, its just there to slow you down enough to make the impact/landing survivable.
looking at wingsuit opening heights, there is enough time to deploy a round in case of nothing out, or deploy it in case of a tension knot from hell.


yes, thats right, that was in lauterbrunnen on the low waterfall jump.


well, yeah, looking at it from that side, every base fatality would have been preventable, nobodys putting a gun to your head and forcing you to jump. and still we all choose to do so on a regular basis. and the same thing with the wingsuits.
so based on your line of argument above, when jumping wingsuits, theres no point in using WLOs because the wingsuit is anyways more likely to kill me in some other way? if theres a chance to make it all so slightly safer, why not go for it?


nope.

forget that crappy setup, that was just to get through a loophole to allow for legal terrain flights out of the helicopter. who in the right mind would opt for a 100sqft reserve in a base environment, and as stated above, forget about those cutaways, if theres one thing to learn from the sorcerer, its more likely to kill people...

anyways, nobodies trying to convince someone else that they have to jump a reserve, i dont know why im actually arguing about this. if i would be seriously interested in jumping a setup like this, i would have already made one. i just think it in the wake of this thread where people search for crazy solutions, it would be the most practical, doable, and robust way.
i guess that sometime within the next handful of years, someones going to build it, and someones going to buy it, and maybe its picked up by more people.
the main problem i see if that happens, that were going to see bill booths #2 law in action and people would pack sloppier and mitigate the effect.

Fatality # 31 Xavier Bongard sorcerer cutaway at angel falls
Having said at.... I have two in my closet :)

If I wasn't clear, I wasn't trying to say "this is why we shouldn't have reserves", more of "this is why I think they haven't caught on/why there isn't a mass produced base rig with reserve". I veru much agree with all the arguments for why they would be good, I just don't think you'll find more than a few jumpers who would readily adopt it.

Sorcerer was definitely ahead of its time, that's why someone copied the technology and called it a sky hook :)

I agree, the small paragliding style round is probably the best approach. Small, lightweight, and doesn't need to be controlled. The question is a system to get it out fast by the time you're in the "oh shit I need a reserve" scenario.

The Wings student rigs at my DZ have a cutaway BOC with a rigid loop style handle on the reserve side. I think it's totally worth having as a second option for something easy to grab/snag in panic mode, but it would entail jumpers developing another muscle memory for their deployment sequence. The only EP's BASE jumpers "practice" is object avoidance and accurate, fast heading corrections. Maybe practicing reaching with both hands is a worthwhile time investment?

What goes around... from 2004.

http://www.basejumper.com/cgi-bin/forum/gforum.cgi?post=1294243

I know of at least one case in which the sorcerer reserve was used in a real emergency (line over).

I think that emergency could have been handled in other ways, especially with modern gear, but I don't think it's true that a sorcerer reserve has never been used in an emergency.

If we are throwing around ideas:

pilot chute is attached to the tail at the rear between the feet and always partially pressurized via a special vent. cutaway cable releases it into the fast flow. bridle runs up the back of the leg wing.

advantages:

- pilot chute is never inverted during deployment
- failure means deployment
- pilot chute is at rear of airflow, like in skydiving

disadvantages:

- failure means deployment
- complexity
- many more I haven't thought of


disclaimer: I don't know what I am talking about

PG reserves (supposedly) take 50 feet to deploy. There's all kinds of videos out there of low tosses (i.e. this one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQOUjCTCtAk at around 3:00)

My wife's PG reserve is the size of a grapefruit packed and weighs less. If that's what's stopping you from hiking up to your exit point, remember to take a shit before you go on your hike and you'll compensate for the extra weight.

I don't know if it'll hold up to a terminal deployment though.