> No. There is way smaller chance that your reserve would not deploy, not even to M, but MM.
Thanks. Do you have a cite on this? I am pretty skeptical of any complicated mechanical system (including not just the packed suit, but also the calibrated altimeter, etc) having a 10^-6 malfunction rate. Like, I would consider having the altimeter mistakenly calibrated to lower elevation a case of “the reserve failing to deploy” even if it was packed perfectly or whatever. Likewise if your main deploys wonky, you cut it and get into a spin, and then reserve gets tangled as it comes out.
I mean maybe I overshoot a little with millions. But it is a known to have one cutaway (main malfunction) in around 1000 jumps. But giving the same for reserves is just not fair.
BASE canopies are packed the same way as Reserve canopies. And there are people with over 4500 BASE jumps in their lifetime. Reserve canopies are not the same as main, with different characteristics. Even opening them in a spin gets you a flying canopy that is hard to control, but probably will save your life. And there are also all depends on the type of your main canopy, if we talk about Tandem or Student canopies - those spins aren’t going to affect that much reserve opening. The high performance canopies will, but a lot of jumpers don’t jump with anything that can deploy their reserves automatically, preventing this issue of high spins and deployment of the reserve. And instead trying to stabilize the body position.
Unfortunately nobody has a data about how many reserve rides there are, and how many were unsuccessful. I mean it is possible to find recently unsuccessful, if there are any, guess how many jumps are there in general, and guess that every 1000 jumps there were at least one reserve ride. So some stats can be done on that. But based on your logic out of 3M jumps a year in USA we should have seen 3 fatalities caused by not opened reserve.
Also seems like you are combining reserve and aad into one system, which is not correct. The idea behind the reserves, that in most cases it will be manually deployed. And for the cases when the pilot is unconscious there is AAD the purpose of which purely try to save a life, with just one manufacturer it is known that it saved more than 5000 lives https://www.cypres.aero/info/saves/
Thanks. Do you have a cite on this? I am pretty skeptical of any complicated mechanical system (including not just the packed suit, but also the calibrated altimeter, etc) having a 10^-6 malfunction rate. Like, I would consider having the altimeter mistakenly calibrated to lower elevation a case of “the reserve failing to deploy” even if it was packed perfectly or whatever. Likewise if your main deploys wonky, you cut it and get into a spin, and then reserve gets tangled as it comes out.