Skydiving Incidents & Safety Lost Throwaway

Throw away in pocket this can be a scary experience, it’s one of those things that can catch you out as a beginner or as happened to me after more than 250 skydives.

I was on a high load doing a formation skydive dive (FS). I had checked the location of my throwaway both on the ground & again shortly before exit. The skydive went really well & we broke off at 4,500 feet, when I went in for the pull I could not locate the throwaway toggle. I quickly tried again still no toggle, a stupid thought flashed through my mind (you are going to look so stupid, feel the spandex pocket)

I grabbed my reserve handle & at the same time made a last attempt to locate the main toggle, only this time I felt for the spandex pocket instead of the toggle.

“Bingo” I immediately realized that the toggle had some how been pushed right into the pocket instead of hanging just outside of it. I squeezed the pocket behind the toggle & it popped out enough to let me get a finger through the hole in the toggle & deploy my main. At this point I was now a little head down but stable & my main deployed without any further problems. I was under a fully deployed canopy just over 2,000 feet.

I knew that I had a few seconds on my side to have a couple of attempts at the pull because a few months earlier I had started going for the pull at 3,500 and pulling at 3,000. The reason for pulling at this higher altitude was I had been watching the French national team doing so on their training jumps, & asked them why they were opening at that altitude.

The reply was it is much safer especially with modern high performance parachutes & it gives you that precious amount of extra time in an emergency. I thought if it’s good enough for them it’s good for me.

During the same weekend the same thing happened to a young lady skydiver called Alison. She was unable to locate her toggle despite a couple of attempts. She made a safe landing under her reserve.

What went wrong? Well I tried to figure it out and at first I drew a blank, I knew who was in the aircraft & where they were seated but I did not get the answer for a few weeks. I was on another high load & had done all my checks & double checked the toggle location on the way up, all was ok. Then we got a call to move down the aircraft a little to let the tandem masters tighten up their passenger straps, I was aware of something pushing me on the bottom right of my pack I looked around to see a foot pushing against my pack