online article:
"In World War One countless balloonists and scores of pilots rescued themselves in perilous situations. The Germans were the first aerial combatants to realize it was an enormous waste of personnel to place a soldier in an extraordinarily risky situation without a life-saving alternative. However, that realization was not immediate with the start of hostilities. Nonetheless, the Germans learned quickly and took hasty measures to save much-needed pilots and balloon observers. Later, much later, the Allies reluctantly reached the same decision.
With the advent of aerial warfare, Allied air commanders were opposed to providing parachutes to pilots, worried that wearing a parachute might encourage early, unnecessary abandonment of only slightly damaged aircraft; after all, aircraft were at a premium, but there were a lot of military men who wanted to pilot flying machines. It certainly was a more glamorous aspect of war. Implementation was another matter, and a great deal of time was needed before parachutes could be manufactured and supplied and before lives could be saved. Balloon-type parachutes were available but the pilots refused to use them for a variety of reasons. When released from a speeding airplane, a parachute could rip in the windblast or snag in the airplane’s tail. Falling at the same rate of speed as the pilot, the plane could collide with the falling man. It was also possible for the parachute to get tangled in the propeller blades. Many pilots considered it their duty to go down with the ship or to ride the crippled airplane in for a crash landing.
Parachutes were initially forbidden as flying equipment. However, by one account, in the fall of 1916 an Austrian pilot on the Russian front made a parachute jump from a burning plane, the first practical application of the parachute to military requirements. According to another story, in 1917 a German pilot ignored the prohibition, bought a personal static-line deployed rig, wore it on combat missions, and successfully bailed out of his unmanageable plane. In any event, some pilots spent their own money for life-saving equipment. Commanders gradually understood that destroyed airplanes could easily be replaced but replacement pilots were difficult to recruit, their training was time-consuming, and financial costs were greater.
Parachutes were then authorized by most air services late in the war. However, military parachute inventories were extremely limited. To save pilots, the Germans equipped planes with static line-operated parachutes. Aviators wearing only a harness simply leaped out. After falling only a few feet, he would reach the end of a line attached to lacing on a container fastened outside the cockpit. His weight would break the lacing, the parachute deployed, and he floated down. There were many complications: spinning aircraft would snag a deploying parachute; tumbling wreckage sometimes tore apart canopy fabric or suspension lines; flames racing along a fuselage damaged a container and canopy, making it useless; or fire would lick at a canopy for the seconds it took for fabric to leave the container. However, many World War One flyers and balloonists did ultimately owe their lives to parachutes.
Before the end of the war in November 1918, the U.S. Army formed a Parachute Section in October at Wilbur Wright Field in Dayton, Ohio, to work out a practical parachute for emergency escape from aircraft."
Manfred Von Richthofen
Магазин
