A parachute sounds like a "life support system" to me :-)

I'd be about as happy with a PIC as any other micro I've seen (ie -
grudgingly accept it :-)) as long as it didn't have to power up, the
circuit was genuinely EMC compliant,  and the system was self
contained.

One just possibly useful comment (and not a PIC in sight, almost)..
Fail safe is meant to mean just that - the failure mode is SAFE.
You need a total "map" of the activity (or as total as you can get)
to know what safe is throughout the process.
Safe will sometimes/often change with circumstance.

In this case, if a parachute opener went "bleep" and THEN opened the
chute, just as you jumped from the aeroplane, the results would very
probably be disastrous. You don't have to be a sky-diver to build
fail-safe equipment for them but you DO have to know everything the
skydiver needs to know which may be even slightly pertinent, at all
stages of the "process" if you are going to have a chance of making a
truly failsafe device.

Qualifier: I suspect that I have never built a truly failsafe product
in my life but common sense idiot-proofing-engineering goes a long
way down the road :-).

regards

        Russell McMahon

From: Michael Rigby-Jones <mrjones@NORTELNETWORKS.COM>

>No it isn't.  I used to work for a comapny making railway signalling
>equipment.  ....