That's interesting! Small world. Yeah grey canopies, I guess that's camouflage against an overcast sky.
Do you know where I could find info about that US Naval Academy study? I tried searching usna.edu but couldn't find it. I could cite it in my report if I found a copy of their paper.
Closest I could find was in this newsletter;
http://www.nps.edu/research/newsletters/june2002.pdf
but they only seemed to have used round chutes.
I also just stumbled across this paper which is very useful;
http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a525801.pdf
Apparently what I'm going for right now is called "Automatic trim" mode. I set up the controller to turn servos to counteract roll/pitch changes. Tuesday we'll drop it off the building 10x again and see how it works.