Do you think that you will never need a rescue?

CYPRES could save your life, as well

A quick look in our incident reports will explain how important safety really is in skydiving. The list of rescue reports shows clearly, that the CYPRES turns out to be the reliable life saver in many different emergency situations.

CYPRES saves lives - day after day

CYPRES saves list

Below are a few examples of extraordinary CYPRES saves. These skydivers are alive today due to the legendary reliability only CYPRES guarantee's.

All of the posted rescue reports here are based on messages that we have received from skydivers from all corners of the world. Even though we don't hear of all the other rescue situations, we are still very proud of the estimated number of more than 2,000 skydivers who have been saved by CYPRES.

16th November 2009 (save information received) - USA
Skydive the Ranch
Student CYPRES

The first words that were yelled aloud as I came plummeting into the woods behind the dropzone at Skydive the Ranch, in Gardiner, New York were "CYPRES works!", from a very concerned long time skydiver who thought along with the rest of us that this would be my final flight in the sky. As I impacted the ground, I couldn't imagine that anyone could experience that much pain and still survive, but was thanking every lucky star and god I could name that I had. It was my repeat Level 5 and had done just about the worst thing possible in a sport I had quickly fallen in love with- I forgot to pull.

Being a bartender at the local watering hole up the street that had been the favorite skydiver hang out for the past fifty years, I had grown incredibly fond of the tight knit community at the Ranch, and once I had finally been talked into making a jump, I couldn't imagine living the rest of my life without doing it on every fine blue skied day. The one piece of advice everyone had to offer was to pull. No matter what happens, pull. Billy Richards, owner of Skydive the Ranch, had come to have a drink just the night before and looked at me to say, "Rita, you have 45 seconds during which you can really do whatever you please. As long as you have an open parachute above your head at 4,500 feet, that's really all that matters." And yet somehow I lost sight of that.

I had become so obsessed with remaining stable in the sky, which I was having a hard time with, that I completely and dangerously lost altitude awareness in the sky. My instructor had even docked on to me from the front, grabbed my hands and yelled "pull", but I took the communication to be something else, and never stopped free fall. I had reached about 1,000 feet before I had even bothered to look at the ground to notice that I was well below pull altitude, and at that point I had panicked. I went into a flat spin and completely lost control and just about lost my mind as I calculated how quickly it would take for me to impact and how long it would take for my main chute to inflate if I had pulled. I reached to pull my main, then utterly blanked. And yet, somehow, at 750 feet there was an open parachute above my head.As I laid on the ground in the clearing the woods for which I had beenresponsible, I turned around to see a white parachute laying behindme. Once the chute had opened, because I had been in a flat spin, it came out with some serious line twists. It took until Andre had found me with another couple of people from the dropzone that I hadcome to realize what had happened. "You didn't pull. CYPRES did," he uttered to me gently, in his thick Russian accent.

At that point I broke down. I had come so close to losing it all, and thanks to a electronic device in my rig I had been given a second chance.

It's now been four weeks since that fateful afternoon, and after a few days in hospital and three weeks at home, I've been starting to feel more like myself. I was able to avoid having any surgery despite shattering my first lombard, and after just two weeks am off of my medication. I stopped by the Ranch for the first time since I got hurt yesterday, and Andre came to me with a big hug and a small gift."Here," he says. "This saved your life." It was the CYPRES cutter from my rig. It stopped my heart for a moment to see the tiny device sit in my hand and know that it alone was responsible for the fact that I'm here to skydive another day. I had certainly learned my lesson. Never again will I ever lose altitude awareness, or forget that there is nothing more important in this sport than stopping freefall.

I wanted to write to thank you, at Airtec for saving my life. I can't begin to relate the thoughts of terror that were going through my head at that moment when I had thought that I was seconds away from certain death. It's an amazing feeling to be able to walk away from the scariest moment of my life and know that for me, and all future skydivers, there is a back up plan to the worst possible situation.There aren't words enough to explain how grateful I am for your product, and for what it's done for me. I celebrated my 21st birthday on the 30th, and it may have been the sweetest of all. But I wouldn't be here without you. Looking forward to a Spring full of blue skies... and open parachutes.

Sincerely,
Rita Roy

June 10, 2009 - Melipilla Chile
Expert CYPRES

CYPRES saved my life!!
Hi, I'm Eugenio Dominguez, from Santiago, Chile. I've been skydiving since last year. It's a sport that I love and it's what I've been dedicated to do almost every single weekend for many months. I finished buying all my equipment 3 months ago, part of it, was my CYPRES. That's where my story begins.
Last Wednesday I suffered the most extreme accident of my life. I almost died and I almost killed my friend, and flying partner, Jumping out of a Comp Air 8 in Melipilla, Chile at 13.000 ft, last jump of the day, beautiful sunset. Part of my dis co-ordination and non-concentration made me crash head to head with Nicolas, I just didn't see him. We were doing a track dive, very very fast. Right away both of us were unconscious and starting a never ending freefall. At 750 feet god's hands came and activated my CYPRES that worked perfectly for me and my friend. Both of us landed unconscious... I woke up at ER, knowing nothing of what was going on around me.
Later I found out that a have almost a new face...Titanium everywhere, I broke my eye bone, both cheekbones, nose, palate, some teeth, mandible, some strokes on my liver, kidney, and some cuts... but I'm walking, thinking, talking, smiling and expressing myself like it was a normal day. All of this BECAUSE OF MY CYPRES, if I didn't have it I would not be here in my hospital bed telling you this story.

July 26, 2003 - Germany
Tandem CYPRES

The TM set's the drogue after a normal exit. The drogue doesn't inflate, the freefall speed increases. The videoman can't follow. The TM realizes that there is something wrong with the drogue, and decides to pull the release higher (at approx. 2200 meter). The TM waits a few seconds after the release pull, „nothing happened". The TM pulls the cutaway handle. At this moment, observers on the ground see the disconnected main going off, at approx. 1700 Meters. The RSL is disconnected. The TM reported that he had difficulties to find the reserve handle and to remain stable. After some seconds, the Tandem CYPRES fires and cuts the loop. The reserve opens, the tandem couple is in the saddle at approx. 300 meters, they just make it back to the DZ. Currency of the TM : He has several hundred tandem jumps to his credit. But his last skydive was over a year ago, his last tandem jump was 1,5 years ago.



All of the posted rescue reports here are based on messages that we have received from skydivers from all corners of the world. Even though we don't hear of all the other rescue situations, we are still very proud of the estimated number of more than 2,000 skydivers who have been saved by CYPRES.


Source Reference: We have received automatic notification of each CYPRES activation and were able to evaluate the details until we developed the new and easier connection between device and cutter in 1994. We used the data of these reports and additional factors, such as the number of delivered cutters, systematically for the same purpose of evaluation. Even a very conservative guess would still bring the number of saved lives to a total of over 2,000.