Air Deployment

The floats were deployed from a chartered King Air turboprop usually used for skydiving. Skydive aircraft are good because unlike most aircraft,they are allowed to open their doors in flight and think throwing things out of a plane is normal. Carolina SkySports did a great job for us The Air Force Reserve Hurricane Hunters are the real pros in this game.

MOVIE of test airdrop over Lake Washington, Seattle

(by Kapowsin Air Sports ) mpeg (800k) quicktime (3.7M)

Pictures of test airdrop

The parachute is just about to deploy. The tube was actually launched backwards, but since the weight is concentrated near the bottom of the tube, it flips over in the air in time for the parachute to deploy properly. You can see this better in the movies.

Notice the static line still attached to the plane. The parachute bag is tied onto the top of the tube with a light cotton string. The static line is tied onto the bag. The static line pulls the bag off the package and the parachute out of the bag. The bag and static line stay attached to the airplane.

In the air. We use two parachutes because it is redundant and more stable in flight. A package under one parachute oscillates, but multiple parachute systems fly stably. Pioneer Parachute designed the parachute system for us.

Impact! - The airdrop package is designed to sink to get it away from the parachute.In this test it sank a bit too fast and we had to recover it from the bottom of the lake!