Video frame of deployment bag being extracted from nose cone

I taped a mobius video camera to the black nylon shock chord seen running to the bottom of the picture.  It was about one foot below the Nose Cone pointing at the NC.  This allowed me to see entire deployment process.  The red bag is a custom made deployment bag for the main 36" chute.  It is being extracted from the large tube that can be seen just to the left of the black shock chord.  The line attached to the top of the deployment bag and running to the right side of the picture is attached to an 18" drogue chute.  The main chute is attached to the same eye-bolt as the SC.  The drogue was attached to an ARRD from RATTworks (not easily seen in this picture).  A stratologger fired the ARRD which allowed the drogue to extract the main chute.

Although I had 3 successful flights with this configuration,  frame by frame evaluation of the video revealed that the main chute could have failed to deploy because the main shock chord wrapped around the drogue tether during the decent from apogee, but in each case the main shock chord untangled before the main chute deployment.  In summary I was lucky three times.  The tangling would not have happened during the drogue descent if the recovery stack had been vertically oriented (Drogue at top, nose cone in the middle, and air frame at the bottom), instead the nose cone and the air frame fell in a flat configuration.  You can see this in the video by the fact that in most of the frames the camera is pointed at the horizon and not into the sky up toward the drogue chute.