Summary
Every free flier, feathered or otherwise, eventually has to arrive. Phase III looks at what happens when the arrival is not the planned one.
What are we studying and why?
An emergency parachute is the piece of equipment a pilot most hopes never to use, buys largely on faith, and understands least well. Phase I and Phase II asked what the body and the mind do during ordinary flight. Phase III asks what happens at the point where ordinary flight has already failed: the seconds around a reserve deployment, and the injuries that follow the landing.
Three questions frame the work:
- What does a real deployment do to a pilot? Descent rates, oscillation, the shock of opening and the attitude in which a pilot arrives at the ground are all measurable, and all of them shape the injury pattern.
- What stops pilots from throwing? A great many incident reports describe a pilot who had time to deploy and did not. That is a cognitive and behavioural question, not a mechanical one, and it follows directly from what Phase II found about decision-making under load.
- What injuries actually occur, and could equipment change them? Spinal compression, pelvic and lower limb injuries dominate the accident record. If descent rate, harness geometry and back protection change those outcomes measurably, that is information manufacturers and pilots can act on.
How are we approaching it?
The obvious experiment — instrument pilots and have them throw reserves in anger — is neither ethical nor possible. Phase III therefore works from three directions at once.
Instrumented deployments in controlled conditions. Over-water SIV courses are the one setting where reserve deployments happen deliberately, repeatedly and comparatively safely. Accelerometry and heart rate recorded across a planned deployment give us the opening shock, the descent profile and the physiological response, in a context where a bad outcome means a wet pilot rather than an injured one.
Incident and injury records. National associations, clubs and rescue teams hold a great deal of accident data that has never been analysed with a physiological question in mind. Aggregated and anonymised, it lets us look for patterns linking the circumstances of a deployment to the injuries that resulted.
Simulation. The flight environment simulator built for Phase II lets us put pilots under cold, hypoxia and workload and then present them with a decision to deploy. That will not tell us what a pilot does in a real emergency, but it does tell us how the decision degrades as the load rises — which is the part of the problem no amount of equipment testing will solve.
What we expect to be difficult
Deployments are rare, which makes samples small. Deployments on an SIV course are planned, over water, at a chosen altitude, by a pilot who is expecting them — almost the opposite of a real emergency in every respect that matters. Accident records are inconsistently collected and heavily skewed towards incidents that produced an injury serious enough to report. None of these problems is fatal to the work, but all of them limit how far the conclusions can be pushed, and we will say so plainly when we publish, as we did for our Phase I limitations.
What pilots can do now
The single most useful thing a pilot can contribute is an honest account of a deployment — including the ones where nothing went wrong, and especially the ones where the pilot chose not to throw. Height, attitude, time, what the wing was doing, what the pilot was thinking, and what the landing was like. Anonymised near-miss reports are worth as much to this work as injury statistics, and they are far rarer.
In the meantime, the practical advice has not changed and does not depend on our results: know where your handle is without looking, check it on every pre-flight, repack on schedule, practise the throw on a hang test, and decide your personal deployment height before you are in the air rather than during the incident. Every one of those is free, and every one of them is supported by the accident record as it already stands.
If you are running a club safety evening on reserves, the incident simulation pack pairs well with it: a group that has just talked through deployment heights is unusually receptive to the question of what they would actually do once someone was on the ground.