Chad Zielinski
| Date | Location | Category | Age | # Jumps | AAD?/RSL? | Dropzone.com Report | Dropzone.com Discussion | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 16/02/2006 | Belize | NOP | 45 | 3000 | N/N | 176 | #2081487 | |
| DropZone.com Description: "Jumper had removed his AAD in preperations for water landings. On this jump he was flying a wingsuit and had issues pulling his main. He was seen in freefall ""potato chipping"". When found his pilot chute no longer had a hackey. It is not known if the hackey came off when he tried to pull or later." | ||||||||
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| USPA Description: This jumper participated in a 2-way wingsuit skydive from 13,000 feet over the ocean at a beach boogie. He didn’t deploy either his main or reserve parachute. He hit the water and died on impact. | ||||||||
| USPA Conclusions:The jumper had approximately 100 wingsuit jumps. However, this was his second jump on a new wingsuit model, and he had complained that he did not like the fit. He said the wingsuit shifted his parachute container into a position he was not used to. The jumper was observed to have stability problems on exit and during freefall. Damage to the right side of the container suggests that he was flying right-side low. He may have lost altitude awareness while trying to locate his main parachute deployment handle, or his depth perception could have been distorted due to the water. The impact dislodged the reserve ripcord handle. The investigation found the equipment in good working order prior to impact. He wore a wrist-mounted visual altimeter but did not have an audible altimeter. He was not equipped with an automatic activation device. Section 6-9 of the Skydiver’s Information Manual recommends that experienced wingsuit jumpers initiate main canopy deployment by 3,000 feet and first-time wingsuit jumpers do so by 5,000 feet. SIM Section 5-1 recommends that if a jumper has difficulty locating or pulling the main pilot chute, he make no more than two attempts to deploy the main canopy, altitude permitting, before deploying the reserve. Wingsuits add complications to the deployment sequence, and in this case, the fit of the suit may have caused the jumper difficulty in locating the main and reserve handles. Also, an AAD may have changed the outcome of this incident. | ||||||||
| Name |
Chad Zielinski |
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