CYPRES - From Dream to Reality

March, 1996

The fatal accident of a close friend of mine in 1986, which would have been avoided by an AAD, initiated first thoughts about how an ideal AAD should perform and look like. As a result, I compiled a list of all the desirable capabilities an AAD should have.

The next step was to determine whether such a device could be developed without taking into consideration the manufacturing and research and development costs. This evaluation took in excess of six months, as no one was capable of visualizing the complexity of the realization of such a project.

On one side, the development required work in areas where no research had ever been done before. On the other side, new solutions had to be worked out for a number of problems in order to solve them more elegantly than previously done.

Research and development were finished in December, 1990.

Since sales began on the 10th of January, 1991, over 25,000 CYPRES (40,000 as of January 1998) are today in regular use. Static line students, freefall students, experienced jumpers, sky surfers, CRW and Demo jumpers, tandem instructors and passengers have all been saved from death in the past 5 years. To date, there is conclusive evidence that over 75 lives have been saved by CYPRES. (See Documented CYPRES Saves for latest update)

Airtec now employs thirty one people to produce the different versions of CYPRES. The work force are also actively engaged in future development of CYPRES and its compatibility with new rigs and canopies as they are developed. Because of the stringent standards applied and the thoroughness of the quality control it still takes over two weeks to produce one CYPRES.

Greetings,

Helmut Cloth

Helmut Cloth is the inventor of the CYPRES AAD, and the founder of Airtec GmbH, located in Wünnenberg, Germany.