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Comment by primodemus | Hacker News Reader

"The chute deploying? Not so much! (If you're ever planning this do not wear jeans)." Why not?

I've done a few skydives so I can speak from experience - the rig that your canopy / emergency reserve is attached to resembles a giant backpack with a chest strap, and two straps that go around your thighs, and when you deploy the main canopy, you will feel the rig exerting a braking force on your chest, shoulders, and thighs. It's a lot like slamming on the brakes in your car at 60mph+. If your jeans are too tight-fitting you may get a rash, or it may just be really uncomfortable.

You're right. When the parachute deployed the jerk was unlike anything I ever experienced. The straps around my thighs rammed the loose-fit jeans against my thighs and the thicker stiched part of the jeans made for a few blue "souveneers" on my skin.

I can tell you that's not the usual experience. I don't have a whole lot of experience, but I do have nearly 300 jumps and I'm still yet to experience a hard opening. Much more like coming to a slow, graceful stop in the car. People sometimes have a "slammer" but they're rare and can usually be attributed to some reason (bad packing, bad body position at deploy time etc).

At 13 jumps I have even less experience :)

The parent may have been doing a tandem jump; in my experience, the openings on those first few were much harder than most solo jumps I've done.

Edit: from reading the parent's other posts, perhaps not. Maybe it was a hard opening on a day he/she happened to be wearing denim. Who knows :)

Yes I did! I'm the guy with he black hair. Jumping with the No1 jumper from Holland. http://i.imgur.com/3beyM.jpg Everybody should do it at least once! It is incredibly cool.

Yep, and if not tandem could have been rental gear. Although I've never had a hard opening on any gear, the rental gear I jumped as a student was a lot less comfortable than my rig that's sized perfectly for me.

Congrats on the 13 jumps! Where do you jump at?

Sorry, I just saw your post! HN really needs a notification system a la Reddit :)

I jump out of Crosskeys in Williamstown, NJ, USA. The airport code is 17N. How about yourself?

"I don't have a whole lot of experience, but I do have nearly 300 jumps"

300? I take my hat of for you sir! I must of had a bad day. It was very cloudy and the plane we jumped from ended up above the wrong island. We found out in time, corrected, found a hole in the clouds and went for it.

Opening speeds vary a lot, some are very hard and some are very soft. It's dependent on a lot of variables, with a lot of randomness thrown in. You probably just had the fortune of having a hard one. :)

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