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 Charles Lindberg on Parachute Jumping
I watched him strap on his harness and helmet, climb into the cockpit and minutes later, a black dot falls off the wing two thousand feet above our field. At almost the same instant, a white streak behind him flowered out into the delicate wavering muslin of a parachute – a few gossamer yards grasping onto air and suspending below them, with invisible threads, a human life, and man who by stitches, cloth and cord, had made himself a god of the sky for those immortal moments.
A day or two later, when I decided that I too must pass through the experience of a parachute jump, life rose to a higher level, to a sort of exhilarated calmness. The thought of crawling out onto the struts and wires hundreds of feet above the earth, and then giving up even that tenuous hold of safety and of substance, left me a feeling of anticipation mixed with the dread, of confidence restrained by caution, of courage salted through with fear. How tightly should one hold onto life? How loosely give it rein? What gain was there for such a risk? I would have to pay in money for hurling my body into space. There would be no crowd to watch and applaud my landing. Nor was there any scientific objective to be gained. No, there was deeper reason for wanting to jump, a desire I could not explain. It was that quality that led me to aviation in the first place – it was a love of the air and sky and flying, the lure of adventure, the appreciation of beauty. It lay beyond the descriptive words of man – where immortality is touched through danger, where life meets death on equal plane, where man is more than man, and existence both supreme and value less at the same instant.
Charles A. Lindberg
Army and sporting parachutist who tested safety equipment
Terence Willans
Terence “Dumbo” Willans, who has died age 86, lived and died in harness. He risked his life on a regular basis for the safety of others in the air, on land and at sea by his pioneering work on parachutes, ejector seats, seatbelts, and other kinds of safety harness. Though almost blind at the end, he was still working full time until his brief final illness.
Born in York, he was the son of an engineer father, and his grandfather was the inventor of the Willans steam engine. He was only 13 when he was orphaned, and, at 16, he went to Australia, where he took several jobs in farming. He may well have acquired his lifelong taste for risk-taking when working with a traveling rodeo.
But he came back to England at 21 to volunteer for the Royal Air Force when the second world war started in 1939. Colour-blindness scotched his aircrew ambitions and he went into the army. After officer training at Sandhurst, he volunteered as a parachutist.
Paratroops were first led into combat in 1940 by Luftwaffe general Kurt Student. Winston Churchill ordered the creation of a British parachute arm after the fall of France in June 1940. Manchester airport was the site of the first training course, run then, as now, by the RAF.
Willans acquired his nickname on his first parachute jump when the instructor, perhaps detecting an understandable hesitation, called out: “Uncurl your ears, Dumbo, and fly!”
The first parachute battalion grew into the first brigade, and by October 1941 the first parachute division was formed from volunteers, mainly from the conventional infantry. In August 1942, the Parachute Regiment was formally founded, growing to a wartime strength of 17 battalions, plus several independent pathfinder units.
Willans joined the 21st Independent Parachute Company in this role, among the most dangerous in a particularly hazardous form of warfare. Pathfinders were deployed in small numbers in advance of the main assault to spy out the drop zone and guide the transports, gliders and paratroops to it by wireless and visual means. He fought in Italy and the south of France, scenes of the first two British combat drops, and later in Greece, rising to major and taking part in some secret missions.
After the war, he stayed in the army for three years to research and personally test new types of parachute. From 1948, he was making voluntary display jumps for charity, and in the ensuing years became the effective founding father of sports parachuting in Britain.
In 1940, he saw a new kind of parachute lying apparently unattended on a work bench and volunteered to test it in a drop from 15,000 feet. Attached to it was a revolutionary device that worked by air pressure to open a parachute automatically at a safe height. It was designed for injured aircrew expelled from a crashing aircraft by ejector seat, but unconscious or otherwise incapable of pulling the ripcord. He also tested ejector seats and took part in stunt jumps.
Two years later, after testing the same device from 25,000 feet, he represented Britain in the first world parachute championships in Slovenia, winning a silver medal, and in 1952, he made a series of jumps in north Africa to study the effects and prevention of spinning during descent. His enthusiasm for parachuting as a sport unabated, he was elected chairman of the Royal Aero Club’s parachuting committee in 1959, earning the club’s silver medal in 1960.
He ran his own business from 1968, developing the Willans Harness for racing-car drivers and seat belts in general. He also designed special rigs and harnesses for a wide variety of pursuits, including oil-rig workers, speedboat drivers, equestrians, steeplejacks and tree-surgeons.
None of this made him rich, because so many of his ideas for protecting the safety of others arose in voluntary, unpaid work. Considering his long history of pioneering in the field of safety harnesses, it is more than merely remarkable that Willans received no national recognition for a lifetime’s service. He published an autobiography, a history of parachuting and a children’s adventure story.
He married three times and was divorced twice: his wives were Joan Pearce in 1943 (one daughter): Angela Best in 1951 (two daughters): and Alma Collis in 1974 (one son).
Terence ”Dumbo” William Willans, parachutist and safety harness pioneer, born January 29, 1918; died September 10, 2004.
 OLDIES & ODDITIES
Cotton Candy, Hot Dogs, and Parachutes
In the early 1930s, retired naval air commander James H. Strong traveled to Russia to check out paratroop training, a new aviation specialty. As a cost-saving alternative to bailouts, Russian recruits preparing to drop behind enemy lines practiced their descents by parachuting from tall wooden platforms with wires attached to the chutes to guide them back to earth.
Back Stateside, Strong improved the technology, patenting a steel-frame tower, with arms at the top for suspending the chutes. Each chute was carried up the tower by an electric winch, then guided on its travel to the ground by eight cables attached to the parachute to stabilize its decent. Strong erected a prototype on his estate in Highstown, New Jersey. Passing motorist, spotting the tower above the trees and the white canopies wafting earthward, simply had to know more. To Strong’s surprise, the curiosity-seekers were soon clamoring to takes rides themselves.
What started as a steely preparation for a new kind of combat showed promise as an unlikely sport. Around the same time, author and publisher George Putnam erected his own 115-foot tower, His inaugural jumper, who pronounced her descent “loads of fun,” was his wife, Amelia Earhart.
Capitalizing on this newfound consumer market, Strong designed a graceful tower, 262 feet tall, its mushroom-shaped top suspending a dozen parachutes from a maze of beams. It debuted for rides at New York’s 1939 World’s Fair and proved a huge success. Among its many aerial festivities was a parachute wedding, the newlywed couple gliding to the ground after being married at the tower’s peak.
On the fair’s closing in 1940, theme park visionary Edward Tilyou acquired the spire and moved it to Coney Island, where it earned the nickname “Brooklyn’s Eiffel Tower.” There, amid the cotton candy stands and roller coasters of Steeplechase Park, patrons sat side by side on the ride’s bench seats. After the dizzying, 25-story ride to the top, the hook trawling the parachute up the tower disengaged. The riders experienced free fall for a few seconds, then the oversized canopy inflated to its full breadth with a whoosh. After the parachute swayed gently down the wires, shock absorbers in the base of the ride provided a soft, if bouncy, landing. One rider summed up the experience: “They hooked us in, and my father put his arm around me. But I wasn’t terrified at all--it was a dream come true.” The more adventurous descended at twilight, dropping from the sky into the boardwalk’s flashing lights.
But as Hitler’s troops continued to drop from the skies over Europe, carnival amusements quickly gave way to Commander Strong’s original purpose. By April 1941, three towers, virtually identical to Coney’s, were erected at Fort Benning, Georgia. In place of Coney’s parasols, Benning’s recruits would jump using the Air Corp Test Center’s new T-4 parachutes. These were among the first chutes fitted with separate “riser” cords, which allowed paratroopers to steer their descent by pulling on them.
No carnival rides here. “Suspended agony” better described the hours of practicing with the risers, all the while hanging from the T-4’s notoriously uncomfortable harness. And unlike Coney’s big chutes, the little T-4 s really plunged down the tower. Dropping from the “dirty arm” (the side of the tower facing the wind) guaranteed an alarming descent, followed by a hard PLF (parachute landing fall), said to build toughness. “We separate the men from the fools,” one instructor snarled. “Then the fools jump.” The first U.S. airborne divisions were formed by summer 1942.
In the wake of the war it helped win, Coney’s parachute attraction would continue to thrill, rising to pop icon status with occasional pop culture silliness (TV’s “The Flintstones” even dangled from a Stone Age version). Meanwhile its duplicate towers, still at work in Fort Benning, continued to prepare generations of real paratroopers for jumping over Korea and Vietnam.
Abandoned to rust when Steeplechase Park closed in 1968, then perennially slated for demolition, the parachute tower finally gained landmark status in 1977. Its now-quaint technology rules out putting the ride back into service. But the tower itself, perhaps America’s first flight-inspired thrill ride, was cleaned up and painted its original colors in 1992. And last July, the New York City Economic Development Agency chose a winner in an international competition to design a new pavilion at the tower’s base.
Nick D’Alto
Air & Space December 2005/January 2006
The Haunting, Daunting Past and Future.
by Bob Gilmour
"If I only knew then what I know now." This quote is not attributable because so many people have said it over so many years in so many situations, that it is now simply part of humanity's lore.
Manufacturing parachutes probably began in 1783 with Sebastien Lenormand. In the ensuing 222 years much has been learned, of course, but most of the learning and progress has been through the very painful process of trial and error.
Today's modern parachute manufacturing industry is rapidly moving away from trial and error into the world of computer design and high-end product-specific materials. This has created one of the fastest growing industries in the world. From the beginnings of building gear for our friends and running small companies with dubious futures and profit margins, to modern international corporations growing by leaps and bounds serving hundreds of thousands of demanding clients and customers, our industry is now filled with brilliant engineers and world-class designers producing not only sports freefall gear but crucial components of national security.
For this success to continue and for the industry to achieve its full potential, the role of the Quality Control Professional's oversight of the process and especially the raw materials of parachute manufacturing is critical to the point of obsession. Everyone knows you can't build a safe product with unsafe materials, so inferior materials must be eliminated from the manufacturing process. Everyone should also know, although it may be our little secret, that as much as 18% of materials coming to the industry's receiving docks are deficient in some way. That's almost one in five pieces of everything: webbing, cloth, tape, thread, steel ... everything.
Raw materials in parachute manufacturing often exceed 30% of the cost of manufacturing expenses. All deficient materials must be eliminated prior to manufacturing, first and foremost for safety of course, but second and importantly, recalls and corrective measures destroy the slim profit margins that our competitive and growing industry ekes out. Because of this inescapable (sometimes torrid and always fervent) competitive nature of our process, sharpened pencils when bidding for jobs plays a big role. It is therefore very important, perhaps critically important, that we work together in quality control. But are we doing everything we can?
Like many high technology industries, parachute manufacturers often purchase materials from the same places and often from each other. Without an aggressive, comprehensive, industry-wide, quality control system, history has shown us what can and did happen:
- The Acid-Mesh Problem of the 1980s. Thousands of parachutes turned overnight into covers for cars and drop cloths for home improvement projects. This problem persists still today (packers know too well) and every once in a while Strong Enterprises still finds one sent in for service.
- Metallurgic issues in the hardware. High volume manufacturing in the past has created potentially catastrophic conditions that at its worst could have prevented the release of the main canopy.
- Bricking of packed lines. Reserve lines that morph from soft, dependable components into a solid brick-like mass when tightly packed into modern systems.
- Ripcord pin strength. The recent breaking, recall and retesting of many reserve pins rocked the skydiving world, and will probably continue to plague us in the years ahead.
Without systematic, industry-wide quality control procedures, protocols, and systems, it really should come as no surprise to any knowledgeable manufacturer if history continues to repeat itself. The question is: will we learn from our own history?
The recalling and repairing or replacing of parachute components effected, repacking and re-shipping them all out, replacing risers, lines or any element of the system creates havoc in any parachute manufacturer's plans, sometimes creating deficits that cannot be overcome. Yes, our history has its lessons, and now is the time to move away from those haunting visions, with a cooperative future that is less daunting and more promising.
It won't happen by itself. And, even though we are smarter and far more scientific than in the past, one of the lessons the past teaches us is that our biggest problems are always those things we are not looking for. Looking back, if we knew then what we know now ... well obviously all would have been avoided. But, how can you "know," what you don't know? How can you avoid the unseen problem? For the parachute industry it would require fully equipped, full time inspection facilities with chemical analysis laboratories, including destructive testing staffed with imaginative, determined professionals.
Is there even one parachute manufacturer that has such a facility? How many of us have a receiving inspection procedure that tests for chemical composition? Truth is, in our industry, there is neither space in our facilities, capitol for such expenditures, or the availability of needed number of qualified engineers with the knowledge to make it happen.
One company's efforts toward a solution
At Strong Enterprises, we rely heavily on the "Certificate of Conformance." This is a document that accompanies the materials, usually signed by a quality control official at the supplier that documents thorough compliance throughout the process, in accordance with the requirements of our purchase orders and/or the applicable mil-spec(s). This "paper trail" documents the process's integrity, promising that it meets our basic requirements. Inspection upon receipt of the materials continues in the quality control system, but only in the most basic of tests:
- Visual. Color correctness and finish quality.
- Micrometer or caliper testing
- Comparison testing: does it look like our approved sample?
- Strength and hardness. This is a destruction test and requires, testing each part of a piece of hardware, and many different jigs and fixtures for each test machine.
- Careful document inspection. Certification of compliance with all orders and specifications, prior to acceptance.
As Damon Runyon said. "Trust, but verify." He was not a skydiver, but one of America's most famous journalists and a friend of Jack Dempsey and Babe Ruth. But more importantly, Mr. Runyon practiced what he preached.
Quality Control receiving inspection systems ("trust, but verify") will go a long way towards preventing and detecting problems before they happen in the sky. By catching discrepancies at the dock with rigorous QC procedures, our industry will be practicing what the new, self-managed parachute industry's high quality specifications are preaching in the recently adopted PIA Specs. The linkage between what we order and what we get, can and should be stronger and more consistent, this is not a point to argue, it's a matter of fact.
At Strong Enterprises, we have found that the best, and perhaps the only way, to discover a vendor's quality problems – before they become our quality problems – is through building a strong, knowledgeable relationship with the supplier, beginning with thorough source inspections. Sometimes discrepancies are as simple as basic dimensional errors found during receiving inspections, but some are far more complex than that. We often reject materials during source inspections, and we believe without source inspections no true level of quality can be assured.
Yes, source inspections involve airfare, accommodations, car rentals, and lots of time. A two-day inspection can cost in the hundreds of dollars. But, this is a big savings over the costs involved compared to allowing an inferior material to enter the production environment.
The parachute industry produces a great product. Our professionals compare with world-class professionals in any industry. Fact finding at the source of supply will only enhance our technical understanding (quick tell me the exact chemical composition of the coating found in Cordura) and through that important relationship the education you receive and the attention to detail you demonstrate and require, will benefit all parties, from the supplier to the end user. The education you provide to the vendor's quality control staff will go a long way to insuring that they are more fully aware of the "why" as well as the "what" of your requirements.
To KNOW how your suppliers inspect their product and how they perform their tests is really essential knowledge. I once rejected over 100,000 yards of cloth, an entire lot, after it had gone through and passed the supplier's inspections and tests. It was not a "nitpicky" thing either: 20 times out of tolerance from the applicable mil spec. Trust, but verify. Imagine the cost involved had that material been introduced into a production run.
Distributors of raw materials seem to present a more difficult problem, but not really. Before purchasing, ask if they do source inspections. Even if you have been purchasing materials to the same spec for many years, take nothing for granted. Once at Strong, a supplier of many years, without notice, changed from supplying forged rings to supplying machined rings. They look, at first glance, the same, but machined rings are much inferior in strength, breaking when a forged ring will bend. The batches quality control tested were forged and met all the specifications. So how had these machined rings gotten through? In the investigation it was discovered that inside the lots of rings were a mix of forged and machined. The supplier had changed the spec and were slowly changing from forged to machined without telling us. Waiting for a failure in the field, then reacting to it is not a quality control system.
Changes on the supplier/distributor end if left undetected can be very costly. With the globalization of manufacturing and the search for less expensive labor, we need to be on guard and informed like never before.
The expense of source inspections and of building thorough relationships with your suppliers may be the best investment you've ever made. Prevention is active. Rejection is reactive. Active is always much better.
Whether a supplier's employee grabs the correct resin coating or the incorrect and disastrous water-soluble latex coating for the lines he is manufacturing is something that can happen. How far down the line this error cascades will be a function of your quality control systems. Good paperwork helps, but quality control integrity, quality relationships based on verification and mutual knowledge, and diligent attention to detail are the elements of success.
Working together with your suppliers and distributors, building meaningful relationships, performing source inspections that make a difference, and raising the bar on quality goals and standards will bring in a future, less daunting, and more promising both in progress and in profits. The education shared and nurtured by all, as active partners in the process, will benefit the entire industry from design to deployment. Trust AND verify: it's the way to go.
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Bob Gilmour has worked for Strong Enterprises for 18 years. He is currently Operations Manager and Quality Control Manager. Bob attended College in Buffalo, New York studying Industrial Engineering Technology. He is a Master Parachute Rigger with over 5000 reserve pack jobs, and has over 300 skydives. Bob has given numerous presentations at Parachute Industry Association Trade Shows, as well as to the Experimental Aircraft Association Fly-In at Osh Kosh Wisconsin. Bob's articles on Parachute safety and manufacture can be found in various issues of Sport Aviation, Soaring Magazine and at www.stongparachutes.com.
History of parachutes.
 
Faust Vrancic
Polyhistorian, lexicographer, and inventor Faust Vrancic (Sibenik, 1551 - Venice, 1617), who was educated in Italy, became a bishop of Canad, after which he was staying in Rome, and finally, until his death, in Venice. He is the author of a five-language dictionary (publ. in 1595, including Croatian), as well as of books on logic and ethics (1616). He was also working on an account of Dalmatia's history (the manuscript of which has, sadly, been lost).
Of importance is his piece entitled Machinae novae (1595, 1615/16), including 49 different drawings and designs, many of which were his own originals. Among them, we may single out the model of an arched bridge, a mill driven by tides, and particularly the parachute which he even tested by jumping off towers and cliffs in Hungary and Italy.
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