darryl ramm’s blog

It is just about the start of another soaring season so I’ve had my glider annual inspection performed and getting other things ready including having my emergency parachute repacked. While doing that I also dropped of some of BASA’s (my gliding club) parachutes for a repack.

Emergency parachutes have to be repacked every 120 days. This allows an inspection of the condition of the parachute and case, and internal items such a the rubber bands that hold the parachute lines in place. I have my parachute repacked by Allen Silver at Silver Parachute. Allen is a FAA master parachute rigger, an aerobatic pilot and specializes in repacks of parachutes for glider and aerobatic pilots. He has several thousand parachute jumps under his belt, I have none and will be happy to keep it that way.

Anybody who uses an emergency parachute should attend one of Allen’s talks on care and use of emergency parachutes, get your parachute harness adjusted properly by Allen and do an ‘executive repack’ where he walks through doing a repack on your chute while you are there. That way you’ll learn a lot about the parachute and whats inside the pack.

One thing that Allen encourages before a repack, and I always do, is to put your parachute on go though the steps of a simulated bail out (protect your face/head, eject canopy, release harness, fight your way out of the cockpit, head first over the side if possible, look for and grab the ripcord, keep your legs together if you can, pull the ripcord, throw away the ripcord handle, look up and grab the steering handles, etc…). You can see me pulling the ripcord in the top photo on the left. The coil spring loaded pilot chute is flying out of the pack. The other photos show Allen holding the pilot chute, the parachute steering handles (gold colored in this case), and the rubber bands holding the parachute risers in place in the pack.

Allen has several articles on emergency parachute use and care available here.

People often ask why glider pilots wear parachutes. In one word it is for saftey; it there was not a proven saftey reason for doing this we would not bother with parachutes! All of the pilots I fly with wear parachutes. More detailed reasons are –

Gliders often fly together in gaggles in thermals. There is nothing that will attract other gliders to one spot in the sky than a few other gliders turning tightly and climbing in a strong thermal. There is a risk of collision with other gliders while flying in these gaggles, good pilots will keep a vigilant lookout and fly very carefully but there are large blind spots where you just can’t see other gliders. Of course you may not survive a collision but if you do then having that parachute will seem like a good idea.

There are conditions that glider pilots try to avoid but sometimes nature just gets the better of us. These include being sucked into the base of convective clouds, or in mountain lee wave conditions there is a risk of violent rotor turbulence or accidentally being enveloped in lenticular clouds. Any of these conditions could lead to loss of control and structural failure of the glider.

To get good cross country glide range out of our gliders we will often climb to high altitudes, up to near the base of Class-A airspace at 18,000′ (above the performance ceiling of most general aviation light aircraft). Then fly fairly fast to the next source of lift. At these higher altitudes and airspeeds there is a slight but increased risk of a type of structural (aeroelastic) instability called flutter that could result in structural failure.

Parachutes are also required by most glider contest rules and legally required for doing aerobatics.