Сообщение от
Rolf Brombach
Recently a wingsuit-fatality happened in Hungary. A lot of rumors abounded and it was hard to get any reliable information. Meanwhile some facts seem to be certain:
The Skydiver used a very large wingsuit of the brand INTRUDAIR and had flown it about 50 times with a total of about 1200 jumps. Whether he received a wingsuit instruction from a certified instructor or not is not known. His exit weight on the day of the fatality was more than 100 kg, he made an uneventful flight out of FL 140.Main canopy: unknown (but not important for the accident, see below) reserve canopy: PdF TECHNO 128.His GoPro video is reported to show instability during the flight at a certain altitude, like it often occurs on unsuccessful attempts to deploy the pilot chute. The pilot chute wasn‘t pulled, it was found in the pouch on investigation of the accident location. While falling not stable (described as a headdown to the right) the skydiver activated his reserve canopy at low altitude (about 600 m, the last Dytter-alarm was allegedly heard in the GoPro video). It was a TECHNO (PdF) 128, which opened off heading due to the instable body position, was twisted and spiraled down. The Skydiver wasn‘t able to untwist the lines until impact. The impact was fatal.
my first, subjective conclusions: With wingsuits of this size, it is always hard to reach the handle / the pilot chute easily, even for experienced skydivers with big suits, (not even as big as this one, like Ghost 3 for instance).Altitude is safety and gives opportunity to stabilize and to make a 2nd, maybe successful attempt of opening the main. It is always a problem, if Skydivers try to learn wingsuiting by themselves, instead of taking an instruction and using the know how and the different training wingsuits of an experienced, licensed coach. Learning by doing can be fatal in this case. Another problem is, if wingsuit-flyers think they can handle the flight with their equipment, even if the equipment is not ideal for wingsuit-flying: bigger canopies are better than small ones, non-elliptic canopies are better than elliptic ones, 7-cell canopies are better than 9-cell canopies. A 128 sq ft reserve for a skydiver of more than 100 kgs exit weight is not ideal for sure. There are no indications, that the skydiver used the arm wing-quick-releases, instead of that he tried to open the arm-zippers to reach the risers of his twisted and spiraling reserve canopy. In such an emergency situation the quick release of the arm wings to handle the twisting of the reserve might have been better. But this procedure needs to and should be practiced regularly, also by experienced wingsuiters.