Gleb Kotelnikov

Skydiving: "Free Fall Safety Procedures" 1966 US Army Skydiver Training Film; Kyle Rote

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• published: 28 May 2016
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Skydiving, Parachute Jumping, Free Fall... playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLBE2CC7CF36805257 more at http://scitech.quickfound.net/aviation_news_and_search.html "Packing and wearing parachute equipment; proper parachute techniques - landing on land and water, jumping with a static line, and executing free fall jumps." Narrated by Kyle Rote. Public domain film from the US National Archives, slightly cropped to remove uneven edges, with the aspect ratio corrected, and one-pass brightness-contrast-color correction & mild video noise reduction applied. The soundtrack was also processed with volume normalization, noise reduction, clipping reduction, and/or equalization (the resulting sound, though not perfect, is far less noisy than the original). SOME of the music on this film had to be deleted due to a bogus copyright complaint. The narration is intact. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/ from Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parachute The earliest evidence for the parachute dates back to the Renaissance period. The oldest parachute design appears in an anonymous manuscript from 1470s Renaissance Italy (British Museum Add. MSS 34,113, fol. 200v), showing a free-hanging man clutching a cross bar frame attached to a conical canopy. As a safety measure, four straps run from the ends of the rods to a waist belt. The design is a marked improvement over another folio (189v) which depicts a man trying to break the force of his fall by the means of two long cloth streamers fastened to two bars which he grips with his hands. Although the surface area of the parachute design appears to be too small to offer effective resistance to the friction of the air and the wooden base-frame is superfluous and potentially harming, the revolutionary character of the new concept is obvious. Only slightly later, a more sophisticated parachute was sketched by the polymath Leonardo da Vinci in his Codex Atlanticus (fol. 381v) dated to ca. 1485. Here, the scale of the parachute is in a more favorable proportion to the weight of the jumper. Leonardo's canopy was held open by a square wooden frame, which alters the shape of the parachute from conical to pyramidal. It is not known whether the Italian inventor was influenced by the earlier design, but he may have learnt about the idea through the intensive oral communication among artist-engineers of the time. The feasibility of Leonardo's pyramidal design was successfully tested in 2000 by the British Adrian Nicholas and again in 2008 by another skydiver. According to the historian of technology Lynn White, these conical and pyramidal designs, much more elaborate than early artistic jumps with rigid parasols in Asia, mark the origin of "the parachute as we know it". The Croatian inventor Faust Vrancic (1551--1617) examined da Vinci's parachute sketch, and set out to implement one of his own. He kept the square frame, but replaced the canopy with a bulging sail-like piece of cloth which he came to realize decelerates the fall more effectively. A now-famous depiction of a parachute that he dubbed Homo Volans (Flying Man) appeared in his book on mechanics, Machinae Novae (1595), alongside a number of other devices and technical concepts. In 1617, Vrancic implemented his design and tested the parachute by jumping from a tower in Venice. The modern parachute was invented in the late 18th century by Louis-Sébastien Lenormand in France, who made the first recorded public jump in 1783. Lenormand also sketched his device beforehand... Subsequent development of the parachute focused on it becoming more compact. While the early parachutes were made of linen stretched over a wooden frame, in the late 1790s, Blanchard began making parachutes from folded silk, taking advantage of silk's strength and light weight. In 1797, André Garnerin made the first jump using such a parachute. Garnerin also invented the vented parachute, which improved the stability of the fall... in 1911, Grant Morton made the first parachute jump from an airplane, a Wright Model B, at Venice Beach, California. The pilot of the plane was Phil Parmalee. Morton's parachute was of the 'throw-out' type where he held the chute in his arms as he left the aircraft. In the same year, a Russian inventor Gleb Kotelnikov invented the first knapsack parachute... Round parachutes are purely drag devices (that is, unlike the ram-air types, they provide no lift) and are used in military, emergency and cargo applications... Modern sports parachutists rarely use this type.... Most modern parachutes are self-inflating "ram-air" airfoils known as a parafoil that provide control of speed and direction similar to paragliders. Paragliders have much greater lift and range, but parachutes are designed to handle, spread and mitigate the stresses of deployment at terminal velocity...