New Device Makes for a Safer Parachute

Manley Butler’s proudest moment as a parachute designer came last year when he heard an answering machine message from Dick Rutan, who bailed out of his balloon with a co-pilot after an equipment failure.

“Thank you for an outstanding parachute,” said Rutan, who hoped to become the first to fly nonstop around the world in a balloon.

Rutan and Dave Melton parachuted in 45-mph winds from 5,000 feet and landed in a cactus-studded pasture in Texas. “You ought to be proud of yourselves,” Rutan told Butler and his workers. “You saved our butts.”

Now Butler is hoping to become known as the inventor of a safer parachute for anyone faced with an emergency bailout, not just as a custom parachute designer.

The Federal Aviation Administration has given Butler Parachute Systems clearance to manufacture a parachute that uses a “Sombrero Slider.” Butler said his patent on the contraption was to be published April 6.

“It’s absolutely brilliant,” said Dan Poynter, who has written seven books on parachutes and skydiving, including voluminous technical treatises. “It’s a fairly simple thing, just nobody thought it through before.”

The Sombrero Slider looks like a Mexican hat and it slides down the strings under the canopy as the parachute opens. The nylon device slides because there are metal eyelets around each parachute string.

Butler, an aerospace engineer, said the Sombrero Slider controls the canopy inflation no matter how fast the person is traveling through the air. It opens the canopy faster at slow speeds and more slowly at fast speeds, which reduces the shock that people feel when the canopy opens and abruptly slows their descent.

By forcing the symmetrical opening of the canopy, Butler said, the device eliminates dangerous inversions, a malfunction that plagues round emergency parachutes but not the rectangle parachutes that most sport skydivers use.

An inversion, which tangles the canopy and strings, can damage the canopy, cause bad landings and, in rare cases, keep the canopy from opening.

“At the moment, there are no other companies making this type of parachute with an inflation device on it approved by the FAA,” Butler said.

Butler’s 5-year-old company employs 10 to 20 people, depending on how many orders they have to fill. Like the parachutes made for Rutan and Melton and those made for Coast Guard rescue operations, he designs them to fit specific missions.

Nobody has been seriously hurt using a Butler parachute. But, ironically, Butler recently had a knee replaced and walks with a limp, the legacy of his days as a skydiver.

Butler, 46, was a crewman on a Navy plane in the early ‘70s and began skydiving for sport and for testing equipment in 1973. On the 17th of what would become more than 1,200 jumps, he hurt his knee.

He became an engineer for the Navy’s parachute-development center and got a parachute-rigger’s license.

His fascination with parachutes, however, goes back to age 6, when he was glued to the television set during broadcasts of the series “Rip Cord” and “Sky King,” which featured skydiving.

“There were these guys who were always on some kind of adventure,” he said.

In 1995, he was on a commercial plane during a trip from California to Roanoke when he came up with the “sombrero concept.”

The Air Force had requested proposals for building a parachute that could open at higher speeds without load limits.

“I let it stew around for a while,” Butler said. “When it came to me, I did all the calculations on the back of an envelope.”