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Aviation History
1918
1918 - 1191.PDF
OCTOBER 24, 1918. THE PARACHUTE IN GERMANY FROM the earliest days of flying, inventors have been busythinking out appliances intended to safeguard the life of the aviator, often, be it said, prompted by an exaggerated notionof the dangers attending flight in an aeroplane. Of such appliances probably the parachute has been that appealingmost to the inventive mind, possessing, it would seem, distinct merits which only needed adapting in minor details to therequirements of the aeroplane. The parachute was, of course, well known and in use long before the aeroplane,and the problem of how to apply its use for jumping from an aeroplane would not, upon first glance, appear a particu-larly difficult one. There was no lack of ideas, but the chief difficulty was to test these ideas under conditions approachingas closely as possible to those obtaining in the air, i.e., during actual flight. This is scarcely to be wondered at, since notonly would the experiment necessarily be one entailing con- siderable risk on the part of the parachutist—dummy figuresare never conclusive—as nobody could predict with an ^ and still is, for that matter, slow at first, on account of the*questionable advantages attending its use. Before the war an aeroplane seldom misbehaved to the extent of breaking inthe air, and as long as the machine held together there really did not seem to be any function of which the parachute wascapable that could not equally well, or better, be performed by the aeroplane. Then war came, and breakage in the airbecame no uncommon occurrence with the introduction of machine guns and " Archies." There was, further, thedanger of fire breaking out on board, a danger always present where petrol is the fuel, to be sure, but a danger greatlyincreased in aerial fighting when tanks may easily be hit and the petrol run1 out on to some hot portion of the engine.All these risks appeared to bring into prominence again the question of the use of parachutes. ' Of what has been done athome nothing may be said, and it is, indeed, little enough in all conscience, at any rate as far as the authorities areconcerned. We are here referring to the use of parachutes THE PARACHUTE IN GERMANY.—Two photographs showing the harness by which the parachute case is strapped to the back of the aviator. Note the anchor rope passing out of the open end of the parachute case and to the observer's cockpit. degree of* certainty the behaviour of a parachute when launched from a swiftly moving aeroplane, but there was also a very great possibility that the aeroplane itself might be thrown out of control, with disastrous results. It should further be remembered that in the early days of flying the need for such an accessory as the parachute was somewhat problematic, since, if trouble occurred when the machine was at a low altitude, the parachute would in any case be useless (or so it was thought), while in case of something going wrong when the machine was at a fair height the aero- plane itself was thought to form the best parachute possible, inasmuch as it had the additional advantage that it could be guided to any desired spot within fairly wide limits. It was not until that fine sportsman, the late M. Pegoud, demon- strated it by jumping from a B16riot monoplane that the •world at large realised the possibility of coming down safely from an aeroplane in a parachute. This daring experiment further showed that an aeroplane left to its own devices would not necessarily crash itself on the ground, for Pegoud's Bleriot was, as a matter of fact, very little damaged after making a landing on its own accord. Progress with the parachute as applied to an aeroplane was, on aeroplanes, and not to the other uses to which the para- chutes have been and are being put. The chief thing to keep in mind when discussing the pros and cons of the parachute as applied to the aeroplane is that the extreme views, which are those one most frequently meets with, are not to be taken too seriously. On the one hand we have those who see no use whatever in the equip- ment of the crew of an aeroplane with parachutes. On the other, we have the enthusiasts who think the parachute is a remedy for all troubles besetting the path of the aviator. Neither is, of course, absolutely correct, and the truth is, as usual, to be found somewhere between the two extremes. In the first instance, let us take the case of an aeroplane having one of its wings broken. The machine will drop fairly fast, probably spinning as it falls. A parachute anchored by some means to the aeroplane would have a very small chance of opening out when the pilot jumped, since the machine would probably be falling at least as fast as the ordinary rate of descent of a parachute with a man attached. If the parachute could be flung upwards and open there, thus dragging the man clear of the machine in an upward and rearward direction rather than in a downward one, there might I 192
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