Morning everyone,
I was going to try and write something meaningful to you all about the relationship between courtesy on the hill and flight safety after the mess on Milk Hill the other day, it always seems to be the beginning of the year when everyone is mega keen to get out flying, but I'll save that for later…. I also saw one of our pilots take off with their reserve handle hanging out and I thought I'd share a couple of events I'd witnessed over the last few years.
I don't know how often there are inadvertent reserve deployments after launch (please let me know if you've experienced one) but there must be a few as I've seen two in the short time I've been flying. Both ended without injury but in slightly different circumstances they could have been serious. The first was at a Spanish site where the pilot had pretty much flown through a bush on take-off, which then dragged his reserve handle, the second was purely as a result of not checking the security of the handle before launch. The reason why this can be a particularly dangerous scenario is because when your reserve deploys and you still have a perfectly functioning wing they set up together in a geometry that has a higher rate of descent than the reserve on its own. The wing literally drives you into the ground.
It's equally important that we can deploy our reserve when we need to, which brings me on to the Big Fat Repack. The BFR is a function or facility provided by the Club to give our members the opportunity to practice throwing their reserve and to get a supervised repack. Throwing your reserve does two things, it gives you a practice to ensure your technique is sound and it gives you confidence that your reserve actually does the job it's designed for. Each year we get one or two people who have difficulty throwing their reserve and they get some coaching and a second chance, always with a better result. Scarily we also always have about 20% of reserves with some sort of fault, and scarily there are always a few that either would not have deployed or would have failed on deployment. Most of the faults are elastic band based but I also saw some reserves with completely open maillons and one with a chute that was older than the owner!
We usually get 100 or so out of the 500 members who come along to the BFR, and I clearly hope that the other 400 are getting their reserve repacked elsewhere. This year promises to be better and slicker than ever. Waiting around time should be reduced with 2 zip lines operating in turn, and your repack itself should be more closely supervised with advice readily at hand from the BHPA's expert team of packers. There are still a few spaces left so please book up soon at www.bigfatrepack.org to guarantee your place. I almost forgot to mention, it's the Sunday after next, the 26th at the Rivermead Leisure Centre in Reading. I'll be there and look forward to seeing you there too.
Please don't forget you can see all my other e-mails and random rants at www.justparagliding.uk
| www.bigfatrepack.org Big Fat Repack 2017. The Big Fat Repack is coming to Rivermead Leisure Centre in Reading on 26th March 2017. Post code: RG1 8EQ. Start time: 9am. |
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