Staged Cutaway

There is a great amount of thrill in cutting away. When you have the opportunity to cutaway under controlled conditions, it is way cool!

A while back, a friend discovered a flaw in a canopy I loaned to him. The resulting deployment ripped a totally unacceptable hole in the parachute, basically totaling it. During a stretch of particularly bad weather I played rigger and worked on fixing the imperfections. The sewing store had some parachute-like material. I sat down at my wife's Kenmore sewing machine and made a few patches (about 18 square feet worth). I also built a cutaway harness so that I could jump with 3 canopies. The jump was phenomenal. We recovered the canopy and there wasn?t a stitch out of place. I totally could have landed it.



"Before" picture



Canopy on my wife's 35+ year old Kenmore



Top skin patch



Repaired canopy

Extraordinary Jumps


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