Use of drag chutes

At 14:46 07 February 2016, wrote:
I tried to use the tail chute twice in my H-301 Libelle. First time
was
dur=
ing an off field landing, I pulled the chute and stuffed the nose
down.....=
......next thing I knew I was scooting through the weeds doing 80.
The
chute=
hadn't deployed! Next time I gave it a try was a landing at
Winnemucca,
N=
v. I popped the chute on down-wind and soon found I was going
to be way
sho=
rt, so I pulled the jettison handle..............you guessed it, it
didn't
=
jettison! I made the runway, but was a half mile from my desired
stopping
p=
oint. The chute worked fine on the ground, before and after both
incidents.=
My conclusion, unreliable and not necessary in a ship that had
landing
fla=
ps and dive brakes.
FWIW,
JJ

I had a Slingsby Kestrel which had flaps, 2 lots and airbrakes. The
best that could be said about the airbrakes is they made a nice
noise. It also had a tail parachute which was very effective, if it
deployed. The tail parachute was in a shaped box on the bottom of
the rudder. The technique was to select the deployment and then
waggle the rudder from side to side to encourage it to deploy. This
worked most of the time. I used to start an approach where I
intended to use the parachute from 600ft. If it did not deploy I had
enough height to do a 360 deg turn on finals to loose the height.

The ASW17B (17045) has a belly chute. One day Mark Grubb and I took turns landing it with the chute. We intentionally packed it with less care each time, and it always deployed. This was a fun test prior to Mark's rebuild of the ASW12.
The technique was pull at 600'AGL on short final. Woomph! Nose down, pull the double-surface airbrakes out fully. Laughter! Gently ease back on the stick just before your feet hit the runway. Normal touchdown. As it was a paved runway, we jettisoned the chute shortly after touchdown to reduce wear on the cover attached to the crown of the chute. The loss of drag is quite apparent.
Unfortunately we lost the piece of the belly (swivel clip failure) off the end of the runway before trying the drag chute at 15m span.
The 17B has a lot of handles at the bottom of the panel. Best not to adjust the pedals without looking at the handle.
Jim