Friday Freakout: Crazy Skydive Entanglement Around Student's Foot & Instructor's Neck!

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WHAT HAPPENED

This AFF student was looking pretty good right up until pull time, then the intensity got turned up to 12 and the knob broke off. While she reached back to grab her pilot chute, she got a little wobbly and the pilot chute wrapped around her ankle. Her deployment bag left the container, but couldn't extract due to the snagged pilot chute, and the lines got entangled around her body. The instructor came in to help unwrap the bridle from her foot, but he wasn't able to untangle the mess and the lines ended up wrapping around his head/neck! 😳 As the instructor deployed her reserve, his helmet and neck were still caught in the lines, resulting in his head almost being ripped off! Fortunately, he remained conscious, landed safely, and the resulting injuries were limited to facial lacerations and bruising. Given his laugh at the end of the video, his sense of humor remained intact too!


WHY DID IT HAPPEN

Body Position

While this incident is crazy intense, the issue from which everything stemmed was simple: bad body position. The student was doing pretty well but when she went to pitch, she was kicking her legs. Her legs were bent really far in towards her butt, resulting in the pilot chute wrapping itself around her ankle.

Equipment Size

We touch on this pretty often — student/rental gear is never perfectly sized for the individual and this can create some sketchy situations. One AFF-I who reviewed this video noted that because the container was so huge on this student, that her pilot chute was incredibly far down her body and she was effectively forced to reach halfway down her butt crack to reach her pilot chute. This likely contributed both to her instability and the likelihood of her pilot chute snagging on her leg.


HOW COULD IT BE PREVENTED

The Basics

Again, this is a super simple issue which could have been prevented through very basic body position corrections. If the student had her legs out a little more and had she not been bent at the torso/head-low, this incident probably wouldn't have happened. A similar argument could be made about how, if her container had been smaller and more appropriate for someone of her size, this may not have gone down the way it did.



ADDITIONAL NOTES

Credit to the AFF-I

This instructor was pretty heads-up (no, that's not a pun about him almost being decapitated by the lines around his neck 😳). There's an argument that he should have been a little closer to the student, but she was doing pretty well. More importantly, when something went wrong, he was there immediately and pulled her reserve. Then, despite taking a pretty serious hit to the head and neck by her lines, he maintained altitude awareness and went directly to his reserve rather than deploy his main due to his low altitude. All in all, he saved his student, and then he saved himself. That's the job.

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