Iâm reminded of the saying, âin an emergency you donât rise to the occasion - you sink to your level of training.â
Iâm going to speculate here given the lack of details in the article, and my own lack of experience (i.e. - zero) flying a glider. But as a former skydiver, I suspect the previous bailout practice on the ground involved opening the canopy, undoing the belts, then climbing (âfallingâ) out of the cockpit, followed by Look-Reach-Pull (âlook for the ripcord handle, reach for the handle, pull the handleâ).
Except during practice with your own rig you wonât actually pull the handle. Because that would deploy the parachute and require a rigger to repack it. So your practice involves just touching the handle. During an actual emergency, the stress of wind noise, ground rush, and no small amount of adrenaline may find oneself doing just as practiced - touch (but not pull) the handle.
It reminds me of an accident where a Piper ran out of fuel at low altitude and ditched in the Hudson River. The pilot said when the engine failed they ran through the mental checklist to switch tanks but to no avail. When the plane was recovered they found fuel in one tank, but the selector was pointed to the empty one. Further analysis found that during the pilotâs training for handling an engine-out emergency they would verbalize their actions (âboost pump on ⌠switch tanksâ) but wouldnât actually perform those actions. Instead, they would touch the boost pump switch, and touch the fuel-selector handle. Again, in an emergency they reverted to trained habit.
As Vince Lombardi wouldâve put it, practice doesnât make perfect. Only perfect practice makes perfect.
When someone brings their parachute to a rigger for its scheduled repack, itâs common for riggers to make the customer put it on, then look, reach, and actually PULL the ripcord. This in an effort to develop that âmuscle memoryâ of actually pulling the handle for real. In the case of the glider pilot in the above story the rig was out-of-date*, so it appears he didnât even have this bit of recent practice under his belt.
(I want to stress that Iâm not trying to blame the pilot. 1,000 feet AGL is a very low altitude to begin the bailout process. Assuming zero vertical velocity thatâs roughly ten seconds from impact. If the glider was already in a dive then the time drops dramatically. In that time one needs to find the canopy handle and jettison it, undo the seatbelts, then climb out, finally look-reach-pull⌠itâs quite possible that even if he did everything right he simply ran out of time and altitude before getting to the last step. It really sucks that in life sometimes a simple mistake is fatal).
Even though I recommend everyone try a skydive at least once (itâs fun!), I donât know that itâs necessary for bailout training. Instead, having a practice rig that allows one to actually pull the handle, and then regularly practice with that rig to help build a solid, reliable habit, would be a benefit.
- I agree with the CTSB that the rig being out-of-date was not a factor. Years ago when it was proposed to increase the reserve/emergency chute repack cycle from 120 to 180 days, there was concern about reliability and opening times from having a parachute tightly packed for 6 months. I recall some testing where parachutes packed for months (or years) were strapped to 180-lb test dummies and tossed out of planes with a static-cord. They found the opening times did increase slightly within the first few months. But after 6 months or so all parachutes opened within specifications, even one rig that had been packed for ten years! That being said, getting a piece of last-chance equipment regularly inspected is a good idea.