Wasn’t sure where to post this…but recall a thread a few weeks ago about the efficacy of using parachutes to exit skyscrapers in an emergency.
Apparently, it’s now being marketed as a “serious” product.
Comments?
(mods feel free to move this, if it’s not in the correct forum)
Base Jumpers have been doing it for years; it’s certainly a possibility. I would imagine that the difficulty would lie in training all tenants of a building how to properly execute an urban parachute jump, especially if many others are simultaneously aloft in the area.
I can see the lawsuits already.
“High rise hotel sued when guest gets drunk at xmas party and decides to use emergency chute to skydive and gets hurt”
“Owner of building sued when building catches fire and nobody can find the key to the locked up chutes”
“Maker of chutes sued when people jump to escape and chutes don’t open, tangle, get caught in updrafts, etc”.
“Man escapes burning death with chute, and breaks leg on curb before getting hit by arriving fire truck. Sues maker of chute for not providing better chute and city for not providing safe landing area”.
“300 lb man and 85 lb woman use chutes to escape. Big guy falls to fast and small woman doesn’t have enough weight to billow chute. Both sue for discrimination on lifesaving devices”.
“Wheelchair bound executive jumps to safety but cannot use legs to properly land. Sues everyone”.
I could be wrong but I smell a big hoax. The harness doesn’t look like it would safely hold someone and the chute size in one of the photos looks entirely too small. The photo of someone hanging from a chute looks as fake as the WTC rooftop photo and the canopy looks like it may only be 12 feet or so in diameter. A round reserve canopy would be more than twice that diameter. The price also seems unrealistically low. Any parachutists on the board to offer comments?
One skydiver here.
This looks to be a pretty effective device to me, and about perfect for their target market.
The price is about what I would expect. Round canopies are not that expensive to make, and the container is very simple.
Round is definitely the way to go for non skydivers, there is pretty much no need to learn anything except how to put the rig on and what to pull as you are exiting building… You land where you land.
I would expect quite a large percentage of broken leg/ankles if a bunch of people used these to escape a building. But, hmmm… let see… broken leg, or burned to death… (“cake or death… oh, cake please…”)
The are marketing it to individuals, so each person who bought one would have to see to it that they were properly trained in its use. And the beauty of a round canopy is that having alot of people in the air close together isn’t any real danger. Same reason they still use rounds for mass troop drops in the military.
Also, since it is sized to the persons weight, it isn’t like you could have a big closet of them somewhere and expect people to file by and just grab one off the shelf.
Maybe I’d be more convinced if I saw some photos that didn’t look fake. They do specify that the photo with the building isn’t a real jump. The Destiny Aircraft site makes it appear they could make a viable chute of this type but the Executivechute site is not as convincing. There is no evidence that human testing has ever been done with such a small canopy and the site states that traning is limitd to evaluating the site with only simulated jumps.
OTOH if I saw it in the Skymall catalog I’d be convincd 
Fact is it looks like a Sharper Image kind of thing to me Technology for people who don’t know any better. Or maybe Brookstone Technology for people who don’t know any better (in hunter green with oak trim)
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*Originally posted by scotth *
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The military also jumps one by one, in intervals, from a moving aircraft. Having a hundred or more basically untrained people, jumping to save their lives (most likely semi-panicked), stacked up on multiple platforms, say floors 15 to 40, lined up vertically in some wind and thermal drafts from fire, well… I’m pretty sure it would be pretty messy. Not saying that it’s not a bad idea, but if I were selling it or passing them out, I would have disclaimers signed in blood by anyone who got one. People will sue for anything. The Good Samaritan law is there for a reason. “You broke my ribs while saving my life using CPR… I’m suing”.
If the initial survivors of the WTC event, above the crash site, had access to paracutes… we would be talking perhaps upwards of 1000 people trying to parachute out of a building, all around the same time, in a very small space.
I think this would lead to more harm than good.
You can only get people out the windows so fast. Also, I imagine there would be quite a bit of staggering. Not everyone would get their rig on and be at the window at exactly the same time.
Still, if you killed even 20% of the people who had no choice but to jump or burn, that would be 1000’s more people alive today.
Of course, a lot of the people who did get out may not have if they thought they didn’t have to rush because there was always the execuchute in their desk drawer. That being said, I think that the cost benefit ratio of this would be very, very low, but why the hell not? People buy much stupider items all the time.
Off to IMHO.
Ok, my boss actually had one of these. It was in her office: 64th floor, Two World Trade Center, window office. She was stuck on the Path train.
(Everyone who was on that floor was safely evacuated via the stairs).
This really puts the spin on the ‘What color is you parachute?’ question.