Mounting Parachute on Ultralight Trike

Video Transcript

"CHAD BASTIAN: Hi, this is Chad Bastian, welcome to Expert Village. We're here to talk about the trike buggy and PPG triking with paragliders. Alright, in this segment, we're going to talk about reserve parachutes. What is a reserve parachute? Basically, it's a round parachute that you would take out of the bag and throw if your main canopy has somehow failed or gotten tangled. Typically, we don't have that in powered paragliding because we fly when the air is nice, but there's really no penalty when you're in a trike to carrying a little extra weight and having that option, should you ever need it. So, it's just is a second chance or really a last chance if you're flying and everything goes wrong, you're able to throw the secondary parachute out and survive the fall. So, a lot of powered paraglider pilots do not fly with reserve parachutes. They're afraid it's going to come out of the bag and get into the propeller or they're going to accidentally deploy it when they're doing something. But, really, the bottom line is there's no good reason not to fly with a reserve parachute. On this trike, we attached the reserve parachute to the side of the trike where it's easy for us to get to it. While we're flying if we need it, we can take this, pull this out like this, and then throw it down and away from us to get the parachute out. We route the bridle from the parachute up. We have Velcro that hold it here and it comes up and attaches to the same carabineers that it would for the gliders. So, this is going to come up and attach to the same carabineers and set us down hanging exactly the same way. When you throw that, you'd probably want to reach up and get your B lines so that you can disable the main canopy and not have the two fighting with each other on your way down."