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parachute question.................


gizzard
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I just posted this , and it disappeared. let me try again..........Like i said before, you gutys know my mind can wander all over the place and all kinds of crazy stuff pops up, so bear with me........Every thursday I do a volunteer day at the local hospital helpin' out at the diagnostic center there. Yesterday this guy comes in, has a basic parachutist badge tatoo, asked him about it, turns out i very well may have dropped him down at Bragg about a hundred years ago. We talked abiout jumpin' and chutes and herks and things like that. Later, somewhere out of th blue came a recollection about the "four line cut." Now this, as I remember, was supposed to, when acomplished, release the last two shroud lines on either side of the back center of the chute we had on board,(it was what a C-9?), which created a bubble in the skirt of the chute, supposedly givin' some degree of maneuverability. As I recall these lines were marked red some how, either by tape or cord or something. The hook blade on the orange handled survival knife was used for this purpose, but was there any other release mechanism other than cutting? Do they still issue this knife? Did the process work??? I never heard,best i recall, if it did or not. I jumped a T-10 with double "L" cutouts, which gave it some steering but don't know about the other. Thanks.....

load clear

Giz

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Giz

Sounds just like I remember. Yes, once the chute was deployed you pulled on the looped red cord and it did the cut. The hook knife was to be used IF the lines didn't cut. Trivia -- the hook was supposed to be the "switch blade" not the knife edge. However, when the manufacture looked at the design they decided there was a mistake and made the standard switch blade knife.

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It is the C-9 canopy, within the BA-22 parachute. Imagine you are clear of the aircraft and have deployed your parachute. At the back of the risers you will red parachute cord with loops in the end. Pull down on the red loops. That will release the 4 lines. Use the risers to steer the chute. The switchblade knife has always been a controlled item. I understand there have been problems with them opening while still in the pocket on the flight suit.

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Charley, as soon as i read your post, i remembered the loops. I was thinkin' there may have been a primary release of some type, but 36 years has pretty much evaporated a lot of things i once knew...........As for the knife openin' in the zoom bag, well it was definitely in an area that one would be very careful with. I cannot imagine a Camillus vasectomy!!!!!!!! Thanks for the refresher..

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giz

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Two or three years ago AMC removed the parachutes from the KC-135 fleet.

I was assigned to AWACS in the late 70's. We had chutes in every crew seat. (Around 30) It was deemed that the aircrew were too dumb to preflight their parachutes.

Prior to every flight, L.S. had to do complete 30 day inspections with the exception of signing the logbook. After I left AWACS they put all of the chutes in a big red bag under the bunks in back. They had a flight where they hit an air pocket and the big red bag took flight. When it landed it broke the floor of the jet. TAC removed them, and had the escape hatch buttoned up.

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The Four-Line Cut was something we were taught in survival school for use with the Air Force parachutes. There were four lines at the back of the riser that were marked with tape, and the survivor was supposed to reach back and cut them with the survival knife. Once the lines were cut, the chute was supposed to be easier to steer. I don't remember anything about any line being pulled to make the cuts. The survival films showed the survivor reaching up over his head and identfying the lines by the orange tape and then cutting them with the hooked blade on the knife. (By the way, I've still got mine. I gave it to my dad and got it back after he passed away. I don't think they were controlled. We were issued one with our initial issue of flight gear. )

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Sam, I sorta remember a way to release them, without cuttin', like Charlie said, but I could be wrong. I think I still have my knife also, as Bob says, ya couldn't sharpen the thing worth a hoot, but the hook made an excellent gut knife for deer skinning. I tried usin' it for rigging purposes, but only the hook was much count, and i didn't want to dull it, so I ended up carryin' a hunting knife like a bunch of us did way back....Some where in all my old stuff I have a card that states I am 'authorized to carry the MC-1 survival knife" or somehting to that effect. It was on my physiological training card. Why? Who knows!!!!!!!

Giz

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Hey, Pat, yep we did wear chutes for quite a while after we started flyin', but it seems to me around the end of '72, maybe (?), the 316th at least went to restraint straps. Of course there is the story of the load who jumped after the paratrooper, and he must have been wearin' one of the airplanes chute........ kinda makes me wonder, though, if you were at, say, 1200 agl or so, how you would have enough time to get into any kind of postion that you could pull the cord and still be able to make a decent landing, much less kick a guy's butt. believe me, bad landings HURT.........And to add to my initial thread, didn't be have a baraometric opener that had to be fiddled with, somehow, for high altitude drops, like HALO????? Just wonderin'.

Giz

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When we were doing low level airdrops, we were required to wear one of the chutes. We were told that it probably wouldn't open before hitting the ground. Is this true, and has anyone ever bailed out of a Herk during an emergency?

Pat Wylie

Pat,

I seem to remember part of a gunship crew bailing out in SEA. I'm sure there will be someone on this forum who can come up with more details.

Don R.

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Yup, now that you write it out, I remember, looked sorta like an orange lollipop, back then. But it still seems to me that there was some procedure to deactivate above a certain altitude if you were flying missions, like HALO. I think i recallit bein' a checklist item, but my lists for that are long gone.

Giz

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The drops at Pope were from around 800' AGL, which is plenty of altitude for a parachute to open. Crews always wore parachutes on formation and tactical missions. The only mission we wore restraint straps on were PLADS, which were flown at about 400' as I recall. We wore parachutes on LAPES. The reason we used straps - which were actually 5,000-pound tie-down straps hooked to the parachute and to a D-ring, was because we were back on the open ramp making the drops. The bundle was pushed to the end of the famp and hanging over with a piece of webbing holding it in and the loadmaster cut the webbing to let it go.

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Actually, when something is under tension, you can cut it with a butter knife. I cut away a bunch of extraction 'chutes one week when our crew was at the A&E Board and every time we went up we had a platform hang up. (We were testing wooden platforms with modular rails and the platforms would bow up and hang.) I had already been told that all you had to do was touch it and it would go. Can't remember for sure, but I'm pretty sure I used the orange survival knife to make the cuts.

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One other thing - when we on the flare mission we wore 'chutes all the time because of hostile fire. Then a guy who had been in MATS suggested we look into the harness with chest packs and they got a bunch for the loadmasters to wear. (They had used the harnesses on C-124s.) We wore the harness and stashed the bag closeby where we knew where it was. They were designed so that the clips on the back dropped right into a snap-ring. Nobody ever bailed out of a flareship. Except for two that were shot-down with no survivors, all of the birds that were shot up made it to a landing somewhere.

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When we were doing PLADS into special force's camps in 66, we did not wear chutes or retaining straps. An extraction chute was reefed and dropped , when the green light was illuminated a squib was fired which cut the restraing strap on the load. At the same time we made a swipe with a large knife at the strap. Usually the sqib fired.

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Sam, sometime around early "73, at least with the 316 TAW, we stopped using chutes drops and we had the restraint harness, which basically looked like a chute harness with an adjustable strap with a hook for the anchor cable.

Giz

I had a 1st shirt who had been a LM, until he hooked the harness strap to the pallet going out the back. The other load caught the error before the pallet slid out.

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