Well sorted rescue lines at the basis of your disaster recovery plan (Part 1)

In IT you need to have good backup and disaster recovery plan. You need to design them. You need to review them regularly. And finally you need to trigger them at a given frequency to make sure they are still effective. If you have a data backup strategy but you cannot recover a file or if you have a backup connectivity line not taking over when your primary line goes down, your plan is useless !

(If you are an experienced paraglider pilot you might want to skip directly to the second part of this post)

The point is more or less the same in paragliding. On top of the main canopy, the pilot harness is equipped with a rescue parachute manually activated by the pilot when things goes wrong. Most pilot will never be forced to use this second chance parachute but we don’t count the number of live it has saved. This rescue is designed to offer a stable and relatively slow descent in presence of the non-functionnal main glider. It is installed inside the pilot harness. Activating the rescue happens in 3 steps:

• You extract the folded/packed parachute from its storing container
• You throw it in the best direction to avoid interference with the main glider
• The parachute gets out of its “pod” (a sort of packing bag) and opens itself.

This procedure can be tested:

• statically, by extracting and throwing the rescue in a large room (this will validate the installation, the extraction and part of the deployement)
• dynamically using a “tyrolienne” (this will also validate the deployment)
• simulated in near real life condition in a controlled and safe environement, over a lake under the presence of a resuce boat (this is the “ultimate” test close from real life situation)

If you want to see how it works with a tyrolienne … and more precisely in this case a sample of what could go wrong and the importance to test your backup plan you can have a look to the following video

There is no shame for those guys and it reminds all of us to stay humble in front of our certainties !

The fully functional parachute can save lives even if it is thrown as low as 30m above the ground. To ensure a fast opening, the rescue parachute needs to be repacked on a regular basis (min. once per year)

You can see how a properly installed and well repacked rescue will operate in the following video

The part 2 of this post will discuss how to build a board to help you perfectly repack your rescue lines, more precisely help you make nice “S” to organize them inside the POD (parachute opening device)