I've always suspected that failure to apply temperature correction to their altimeters caused them to deploy their canopies lower than they intended, with a higher vertical velocity than planned.
I'm confused here. For freefall/HALO jumpers, they are at terminal velocity long long before they get anywhere near the ground, so I don't understand the bit about "higher vertical velocity than planned."
And for static line jumpers, they don't deploy their canopies at all. It's done for them when they reach the end of the static line. So if the canopies deployed too low, it was because the airplanes they jumped from were too low.
Can someone clear up my confusion?