Some good news

So, perhaps a little lesson to be re-learned by all of us who wear an
emergency chute: DON'T HANG ON TO THE STUPID D-RING! Pull it, throw it
away, then concentrate on using BOTH hands to steer your chute.

...from what i understand though, there is no
steering the round chutes. you are basically gonna land where you land no
matter what, and the only thing you have control over is using the correct
touchdown procedure(knees bent, feet together, tuck and roll thing.


While I have no idea what manufacturers of round emergency 'chutes do these
days, in the days when used and ex-military ones were common in the glider
world (e.g '70's/'80's), an also-quite-common "four line release" modification
was routinely offered/performed by master riggers. It allowed - post-inflation
- the user to quickly release 2 risers on each rear side of the canopy,
thereby providing some measure of continual air-venting and, reportedly,
distinct forward motion along with some degree of steerability.

"Way back when," I had it done to my canopy, but can't speak for its
effectiveness.

Bob W.

P.S. Also, and probably showing the different influences between military and
sport-flying worlds ( :-) ), it was commonly held in the gliding world that
hanging onto the D-ring was preferred, to avoid the $15-or-so you'd be charged
for a new one if you ever had occasion to take your deployed 'chute in for
repacking! At the risk of triggering a burst of internet-enabled
expert-outrage and superciliousness, my brain imagines that inserting the loop
of a D-ring betwixt thumb and index finger thereby retaining same while also
retaining normal hand function, would be trivially easy to do while only
marginally increasing one's under-canopy risks.