wingsuit zipper blowout

[web]

How tight is your suit? Can you comfortably wear a sweater under it?
Did the zipper open while pulled tight across the front of your torso during the gainer? Thanx for the report and any information you can add. That could really suck on a low-ish BASE-flight...not that i'd be considering aerobatic exits from 300m or anything similar:+

[eyespyeye]

I can comfortably wear a sweater underneath the wingsuit. The gainer was quite relaxed and slow with my hands almost together in front of my body and my feet together. The zipper opened pretty much as soon as I opened my wings.

[groundzero]

Zipper blowouts happened quite frequently on the oldest suits...

Seems there was a problem with the older tangs... didn't quite mate the zipper.

No problem on newer suits. If you're flying a suit and a zipper gives, simply fly... close the wings and do as normal, no biggie. It is most important that you can feel comfortable on the suit prior to taking it base.

If you have a blowout base, doh! Should have seen it coming with your skydiving practice.

Have fun, be careful.

Chris

[eyespyeye]

Just thought this might be interesting for other wingsuit flyers. I was jumping a Skyflyer (it had less than 10 jumps total at this stage) out of a plane and I had a chest zipper blowout, the exit involved a gainer out of a skyvan. Obviously this caused some serious stability issues and raised some other questions. What if this had happened on a BASE jump? How could it be avoided? Has this happened to anyone else? Just keen to hear some thoughts.

Rob