On Wednesday, January 6, 2016 at 9:56:20 AM UTC-6, Bob Whelan wrote:
P.S. Also, and probably showing the different influences between military and
sport-flying worlds ( :-) ), it was commonly held in the gliding world that
hanging onto the D-ring was preferred, to avoid the $15-or-so you'd be charged
for a new one if you ever had occasion to take your deployed 'chute in for
repacking! At the risk of triggering a burst of internet-enabled
expert-outrage and superciliousness, my brain imagines that inserting the loop
of a D-ring betwixt thumb and index finger thereby retaining same while also
retaining normal hand function, would be trivially easy to do while only
marginally increasing one's under-canopy risks.

Hmm, so now you are trying to PLF on some rocky slope or grab a tree as you let down into a forest, while hanging on to a useless $15 D-ring? Sorry, that seems like a bit foolish to me. We aren't talking about a controlled landing on some nice smooth LZ, this is an emergency descent onto unknown territory! I can see several ways that D-ring could cause some serious pain and damage to your hand in a rough landing, too. If you are really cool under pressure, drop it at the last moment!

Seriously, while this may all seem a bit trivial, the process of bailing out of a glider and successfully completing the descent under canopy needs to be carefully thought out before it happens!

Cheers,

Kirk
66
(Airborne, Ft Benning 1971, plus AF free fall training, 1973).