Parachute - Safety

Safety

A parachute is carefully folded, or "packed" to ensure that it will open reliably. If a parachute is not packed properly it can result in death because the main parachute might fail to deploy correctly or fully. In the U.S. and many developed countries, emergency and reserve parachutes are packed by "riggers" who must be trained and certified according to legal standards. Sport skydivers are always trained to pack their own primary "main" parachutes.

Parachutes can malfunction in several ways. Malfunctions can range from minor problems that can be corrected in-flight and still be landed, to catastrophic malfunctions that require the main parachute to be cut away using a modern 3-ring release system, and the reserve be deployed. Most skydivers also equip themselves with small barometric computers (known as an AAD or automatic activation device like Cypres, FXC or Vigil) that will automatically activate the reserve parachute if the skydiver himself has not deployed a parachute to reduce his rate of descent by a preset altitude.

Exact numbers are difficult to estimate, but approximately one in a thousand sports main parachute openings malfunction, and must be cut away, although some skydivers have many hundreds of jumps and never cut away. Reserve parachutes are packed and deployed differently. They are also designed more conservatively, and are built and tested to more exacting standards, making them more reliable than main parachutes. However, the primary safety advantage of a reserve chute comes from the probability of an unlikely main malfunction being multiplied by the even less likely probability of a reserve malfunction. This yields an even smaller probability of a double malfunction, although the possibility of a main malfunction that cannot be cut away causing a reserve malfunction is a very real risk. In the U.S., the average fatality rate is considered to be about 1 in 80,000 jumps. Most injuries and fatalities in sport skydiving occur under a fully functional main parachute because the skydiver made an error in judgment while flying the canopy—resulting in high-speed impact with the ground, impact with a hazard on the ground that might otherwise have been avoided, or collision with another skydiver under canopy.