Back in the early days of sport parachuting, jumpers considered the slider unusual and perhaps even a bit dangerous. But in the 1970s, parachute designer Greg Yarbenet pursued the idea to help slow the severely hard openings that were common at the time. As the story goes, he started by placing his wedding ring around the lines on a toy parachute. Liking what he saw, he played with the design and created a full-sized fabric slider that had D-rings at the corners. Eventually, designers modified the design to incorporate grommets at the inside of the fabric edges, which helped reduce entanglements, giving us the design still in use today. more »
