If your main parachute fails during a skydive, you cut it away and deploy your reserve. Every skydiver jumps with two parachutes for exactly this reason, and the sequence for switching from a failed main to a working reserve is trained repeatedly before you ever leave the plane. About 1 in every 764 jumps results in a reserve deployment, so while malfunctions are uncommon, they are a routine part of the sport.
Recognize the Problem Fast
After you deploy your main parachute, you should immediately look up and check whether it opened correctly. A healthy canopy is rectangular, fully inflated, and flying in a straight line with no tangled lines. Anything that deviates from that picture is a malfunction, and malfunctions generally fall into two categories based on how fast you’re still falling.
A high-speed malfunction means the canopy either never came out of the container or never inflated. You’re still in freefall or close to it. These include a “bag lock” (the canopy stays packed inside its deployment bag) or a situation where the pilot chute, the small parachute that pulls the main canopy out, gets tangled around your body or gear. High-speed malfunctions are the most urgent because you have less time before you hit the ground.
A low-speed malfunction means the canopy partially deployed but isn’t flyable. It might be spinning violently, have lines tangled around it, or have cells that never inflated. You’re descending slower than freefall but faster than a normal parachute ride. These are more common than total failures and still require emergency action.
The Cutaway and Reserve Sequence
The United States Parachute Association recommends a simple two-step response for nearly every malfunction: cut away the main parachute, then immediately deploy the reserve. “Cutting away” means pulling a handle on your harness that disconnects the main canopy so it falls away from you. Once it’s gone, you pull a second handle to fire the reserve.
This sequence exists because a tangled or partially open main canopy can interfere with a reserve trying to inflate above it. Clearing it first gives the reserve clean air. The movements are drilled until they become muscle memory: look at the cutaway handle, grab it with both hands, peel and pull, then reach for the reserve handle and pull that. The whole thing takes a few seconds.
There is one exception. If you’re in a horseshoe malfunction, where the canopy has come out of the container but is still physically attached to you at two points (often wrapped around a limb), cutting away can make things worse because the canopy won’t actually separate. In that case, the priority is to clear whatever is trapping the deployment system. Horseshoe malfunctions are rare and considered one of the most dangerous scenarios in the sport.
Altitude Decides Everything
Time is altitude, and altitude is survival. The USPA recommends that newer skydivers (A-license holders and students) set a decision altitude of 2,500 feet. That means if your main canopy isn’t open and flying correctly by 2,500 feet, you begin emergency procedures immediately, no troubleshooting, no second chances. More experienced jumpers (B through D license) can set that threshold at 1,800 feet, but no lower.
Below those altitudes is a hard boundary called the cutaway hard deck, set at 1,000 feet for most situations. At that altitude, you no longer have enough height to cut away a malfunctioning main and then deploy a reserve. If you’re below 1,000 feet with a partial malfunction, the only option is to deploy the reserve on top of whatever is already out, getting more fabric overhead to slow your descent to something survivable. It’s not ideal, but it’s better than the alternative.
Why Reserves Almost Always Work
Reserve parachutes are built, packed, and maintained to a higher standard than main canopies. Federal regulations require that every reserve be packed by a certified parachute rigger, not by the skydiver. For reserves made of synthetic materials (which is nearly all modern reserves), repacking must happen at least every 180 days, whether the parachute was used or not. This ensures the fabric hasn’t settled or stuck together in ways that could slow deployment.
Reserves also use simpler, more reliable deployment systems. Many are equipped with a spring-loaded pilot chute that fires the canopy out of the container rather than relying on airflow to pull it out. The canopies themselves are designed to open fast and predictably rather than softly. The result is that reserve deployments have an extremely high success rate. According to USPA data, the vast majority of skydiving fatalities involving malfunctions happen because the jumper reacted incorrectly or waited too long, not because the reserve itself failed.
What Your Body Should Do on Landing
Even with a working reserve, you may be landing faster or in a less controlled direction than a normal skydive. This is where the Parachute Landing Fall (PLF) technique matters. The goal is to spread the impact force across as much of your body as possible, over the longest possible time window, rather than absorbing it all through your legs.
A PLF uses five points of contact in sequence: the balls of your feet hit first, then the side of your calves, your hamstrings, your buttocks, and finally your back. You’re essentially rolling sideways as you hit the ground, converting a vertical impact into a controlled tumble. When your body stops all at once (like landing stiff-legged on concrete), the force concentrates in your ankles, knees, and spine. Distributing it across those five contact points dramatically reduces the chance of fractures or spinal injuries.
If Nothing Opens at All
A true dual-failure, where both the main and reserve parachute fail, is extraordinarily rare with modern equipment and proper maintenance. But people do search this question wondering what happens in the worst case, so here’s what the survival research says.
A human body in freefall reaches a terminal velocity of roughly 120 mph in a belly-to-earth position. At that speed, the surface you hit and the position of your body at impact are the two factors that most influence whether survival is even theoretically possible. Research published in the Scandinavian Journal of Trauma, Resuscitation and Emergency Medicine analyzed cases of extreme vertical falls and found that landing feet-first gives the body the longest possible deceleration path. Energy transfers upward through the legs, pelvis, and spine sequentially rather than hitting the brain and cervical spine all at once. Landing head-first is almost universally fatal.
Surface matters just as much. Concrete stops you instantaneously. Snow, mud, dense vegetation, or sloped terrain allows a slightly more gradual deceleration. Documented survivors of extreme falls have almost always landed on forgiving surfaces in a feet-first or back-first orientation. These cases are statistical outliers, not strategies to rely on, but they illustrate why body position and surface interact so powerfully in impact physics.
The Real Takeaway
Parachute failure is a trained-for event, not an unimaginable catastrophe. Every skydiver practices the cutaway and reserve sequence on the ground before jumping, and many practice it in a suspended harness until the handle pulls become automatic. The system is designed with layers of redundancy: two canopies, a mechanical backup device that deploys the reserve if you fall past a certain altitude at a certain speed, and rigorous maintenance requirements enforced by federal law. The skydivers who survive malfunctions are the ones who followed their training without hesitation and acted at the right altitude.