United States Army Aviators' Equipment, 1917-1945 by C.G. Sweeting

Author:C.G. Sweeting [Sweeting, C.G.]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: McFarland
Published: 2015-04-03T00:00:00+00:00

Parachute testing was conducted in the new vertical wind tunnel at Wright Field, beginning in 1944. This photo was taken in August 1945, during testing of the aneroid-activated parachute-opening device, which can be seen attached to the right side of a chest parachute. The full-scale plastic mannequin used for this test was dressed in standard flying clothing, and was rigidly secured to a 14-foot length of pipe installed across the 12-foot wind-tunnel test section (courtesy U.S. Air Force).

Another problem that required immediate attention had emerged by the latter part of World War II. It had become obvious that the speeds attained by fighter aircraft had made escape by conventional bailout almost impossible. The escape-fatality rate increased significantly, and collision with aircraft structures on bailout was responsible for a number of deaths and injuries. Escape from the new jet aircraft coming into service was even more difficult, because of increased wind blast and immobilization by G forces. The Germans had anticipated the need for a positive means of escape from jet aircraft, which would overcome these forces, and began installing special ejection seats in fighters in 1944. In an emergency, the pilot and his seat were ejected from the plane as a unit, and after clearing the tail the pilot separated from the seat and deployed his parachute. British development of an ejection-seat system proceeded rapidly after 1944, in the form of the Martin-Baker seat, and the United States made use of both British and German research in developing ejection seats for high-performance aircraft. In the postwar years, improved parachutes and survival kits were eventually built into automatic ejection seats for maximum efficiency and protection.

Many peacetime activities also profited materially from the multitude of experiments in parachute technology conducted for military purposes. Modern parachutes have many applications, including slowing down jet aircraft during landing, recovering manned and unmanned space vehicles, dropping emergency supplies, fighting forest fires, lowering weather instruments to earth, slowing down race cars, delivering weapons, equipment, and troops, and the increasingly popular sport of skydiving.

The most important use of the parachute, of course, is still lifesaving, a function performed with increasing safety and certainty since World War I. The lives of thousands of airmen have been saved through emergency parachute jumps in both peace and war. Those saved include such famous flyers as Peter Townsend, Douglas Bader, RAF, Pappy Boyington, USMC, Jimmy Doolittle, and Chuck Yeager, AAF-USAF, Adolf Galland, Ernst Udet and Erich Hartmann, German Air Force, Charles Lindbergh and William H. Rankin, to name just a few. Without the parachute, today’s world would be a very different place.

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