Army Determines Unstitched Guide Ring Caused The Parachute To Fail

An unstitched metal ring intended to guide cords in a reserve parachute is the likely cause of the fatal injury to Army Capt. James Ahn last year, according to the Army's official report on the accident.

A story appearing in The News Tribune of Tacoma, WA indicates that the Army found that Ahn's parachute had been improperly rigged prior to a training exercise on September 11, 2015. The report indicated that a ruck sack that Ahn accidentally attached to the reserve chute rip cord caused the reserve chute to deploy immediately when he jumped, and one of the four cords that attached him to the chute broke loose due to the manufacturer's defect.

Investigators determined that Ahn probably thought the main chute had malfunctioned, and detached himself from the main canopy. To deploy the reserve, he would have had to jettison the malfunctioning parachute to keep the lines from becoming tangled. So he cut the lines from the reserve chute he thought was the main.

Then, the investigators said, he would have been confused to find the reserve parachute gone, and likely pulled the rip cord for the main parachute, thinking it was the reserve. But since he had already detached himself from the main, it flew away when it deployed. "At this point, Capt. Ahn’s situation was unrecoverable and unsurvivable," the report said.

The Kansas City Star reports that when the MC-4 parachute is manufactured, the rings are hot-glued in place to assure proper stitching. The chute used by Ahn was never stitched. The Army suspended use of the MC-4 parachute after the accident and inspected its entire inventory, but none of the other parachutes was found to have the defect.

An Army investigator wrote "that Capt. Ahn likely misidentified which parachute had malfunctioned and lost what little chance he had to land safely," according to information obtained by the paper through a FOIA request.

The 409-page report indicated that the defect had gone undetected for four years since the parachute's manufacture and was unnoticed by at least 22 Army riggers and six professional inspectors. It took accident investigators four days to find the unstitched guide ring on the parachute.

Capt. Ahn had participated in at least 50 jumps before the fatal accident.

(U.S. Army photo)

FMI: www.army.mil