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From the Talk Back forum

'Minor adjustments' needed after parachute failed to open

A Chinese man was slightly injured after he jumped from a 180ft cliff to test his homemade parachute.

Qin Ning, 33, landed in a pool of water after his parachute failed to open.

He told the Beijing Star Daily that some minor adjustments were needed before it could be put on the market.

gotta bring the poplation down somehow i guess

Oh, those wacky Chinese! Their base parachutes aren't 100.000% successful even during the development phase like ours are!

Yeah, but I would like to think most BASE gear manufacturers do dummy drops on the prototypes first.

Oh, wait, he did do a "dummy" drop.

I have no idea what kind of testing this guy did. But I do know we'd have a somber, respectful discussion in Incidents if the story had read:

"An American woman was slightly injured after she jumped from a 180ft cliff in Moab to test her company's new parachute prototype."

Did they blame it on sudden gust of wind?

Go back and re-read the article. It said "homemade".

We're not talking about Anne Helliwell (sp?) here, just going off the article, we're talking about a home cooked parachute.

It would have been equally stupid if the guy had been from the US or anywhere else.

has been submitted before the "Darwin Award" committe, i'm sure he'll come in the top 100.

Can't be much worse than the infamous Aussie Pooster. . . and that was a commercially-manufactured canopy!

I wonder if the fellow was taking the freefall from 180. . . that's pretty low for gear testing.

Peace,

D-d0g

If that were the case, wouldn't she be a Brazilian woman?

And you know we'd be talking about her boobies.

Within the last 15 years, all BASE gear was "home cooked."

Exchange rates to China are so fearsome that I doubt any aspiring Chinese BASE jumpers could afford to purchase gear from the U.S.

And I really suspect that there's more to this story than we've read. Isn't that always the case with parachuting stories (of any kind) in the general media?

Imagine that a U.S. test jumper was injured doing tests on a new low freefall system. I'm certain that at least one Chinese newspaper would carry a story that sounded just as crazy as this one.

In any case, respect to Qin Ning for at least getting off the couch.