The Outlaw enters production this week, with the first canopies shipping before the end of March. We're very excited about this new canopy, and we tried to describe all of its features as thoroughly as possible on the OUTLAW page. For those of you who want even more, here's the backstory on this new canopy:

The Outlaw is the brain child of Simon Perriard, who is the newest member of the Squirrel R&D Team. Simon is a BASE jumper from Switzerland. He is a brilliant guy with a very open mind when it comes to designing canopies, and (like with our engineers from Ozone Paragliders) he has a vast amount of aerodynamic experience in paragliders which is very useful when applied to parachutes. He has had the Outlaw design concept working for several years now, and has been working on it since before Squirrel existed. We are very happy that Simon decided to collaborate with Squirrel to get his baby into production. From the beginning we were stoked on the concept, and although the parachute was "nearly finished" as early as 2012, it has taken us this long to get it to market. The last two years were spent getting the pattern to the point that our production facility liked it, getting the design polished to the point that our team pilots liked it, and putting in the test jumps needed to ensure that the concept was sound and solid and did what we wanted it to do.

The testing process was interesting – this canopy is more complicated than the IBEX or any other parachute we have jumped. We wanted something that worked well for a wide range of people at a wide range of objects. BASE jumping now includes a very wide range of situations - it's not just "slider-up or slider-down" any more. Jumpers these days, especially in the US, are going for low freefall objects and technical LZs (just like we always have) but then putting on a wide range of tracking and wingsuits and heading to the Alps (kind of like we always have, but with a wider variation in gear). There is no one magic parachute, but if you configure the slider brake (see the manual) correctly and use the right PC and deploy it responsibly, then we think it performs very well overall.

Simon is super keen on safety and a lot of the new features on this canopy are the result of that mentality. We would not say that the Outlaw is safer than other canopies, that would not be true at all, but we do think that it has great pitch stability, handling, and deep brake behavior, as well as improved slow speed handling (rapid heading changes in deep brakes) compared to other canopies we have flown.

The principle difference between the IBEX and the OUTLAW is that the IBEX is designed specifically for wingsuit and tracking use. It is the lightest and lowest-bulk parachute we make, so if those are your priorities, go for the IBEX. If you want something more versatile and don't mind it being a tad heavier, then we recommend the OUTLAW.