[stymaar]

Casual skydiver with no piloting experience here.

> > skydiving rig

> Is this because he is already a skydiver and/or was going paragliding (is this the same rig? Another thing I don't know). Would it make sense that this is just "what he has," as opposed to owning both a bail out and a sky diving kit?

Not really. Those are really different material, with really different design constraints. Skydiving parachutes open slowly so they aren't a good fit for an emergency situation because if you have to leave the plane too low, you're pretty much dead, and as long as your plane is still high in the sky, I guess there's little reason to leave it…

> > long/stable freefall

> What is the norm for this? My thinking was this was to distance himself from the plane, which he later mentioned "came back around him" after he pulled.

AFAIK safety parachute don't open well at high fall speed (unlike skydiving ones) so you want to open it quickly and not enjoy your freefall.

[ashtonkem]

Skydiving rigs are also big which make them annoying to fly with. You can tell early on in the video that he's basically on top of the yoke, which would be extremely obnoxious for obvious ergonomic reasons. The idea that someone would "always" fly like that (as the pilot claims) is ... dubious.

Also, there are other videos of this guy flying without that rig, which doesn't help his case.

[hindsightbias]

Jumping in that terrain with a safety parachute would be pretty dangerous. You don't have any control, so just as well crash the plane in a flat spot.