APRIL 18, 2025 – Useful for seizing isolated airfields deep behind enemy lines which can then be used to receive and deploy more troops and armaments, the tactic of mass parachute jumps has a long history with American forces.
The T-11 personnel parachute offers jumpers a slow and stable descent, especially in high winds, and can support more weight than previous parachutes, a crucial advantage for warfighters who carry robust, heavy gear.
Since the T-11’s canopy deploys slowly and further away from the aircraft than preceding parachutes, the Army was able to increase the gross cargo weight of a C-17 aircraft by 15,000 pounds, which allows the aircraft to safely carry more fuel or cargo.
During developmental testing at U.S. Army Yuma Proving Ground (YPG) in the early 2000s, the T-11 proved to be a remarkably robust system, able to compensate for multiple kinds of malfunctions that testers intentionally rigged into it: When they tied the hem shut, the T-11 still inflated through corner vents. Even when testers put different reefing lines throughout the canopy and tried to restrict airflow inside, it still inflated.
Now long-fielded, the T-11 is still returning to YPG for further refinements and improvements. Testers recently evaluated modifications to the T-11’s corner vents.
“It isn’t that big a change, but it is enough to make a difference,” said Joseph Shoun, test officer. “They removed the slider and added T-shaped slits to the bottom band. The idea was to make it open faster, lower the altitude jumpers can drop from, and reduce the possibility of malfunctions.”
The first phase of the testing didn’t utilize live jumpers, instead using torso mannequins with stubs for arms to simulate jumpers. The mannequins were ballasted with different amounts of weight to simulate a wide range of Soldier body types and gear loads, then hung onto an aluminum deployment rack specially designed and constructed by YPG engineers. Once loaded into the cargo bay of a C-130, the deployment rack allows the air crew to move the mannequins to the cargo plane’s door by means of a large crank, ensuring a safe and uniform drop from the aircraft. Later phases of the test saw jumpers from YPG’s elite Airborne Test Force put the modified T-11s through their paces.
Since there is no physical instrumentation on the parachutes themselves during these tests, evaluators depend on Go Pro cameras in the aircraft and ground-based tracking instruments for video and data of each parachute’s deployment, particularly the critically important first seconds of flight.
“Normally we have GoPros on top looking up at the canopies,” said Shoun. “We might time and space positioning for the first few to make sure it isn’t doing anything weird with the live jumpers.”
Once each airdrop is complete, testers recovered the landed parachutes, after which they undergo a meticulous inspection of the parachute systems for rips and tears that could occur on the drop zone.
YPG is home to all manner of parachute testing, with spacious and instrumented ranges large enough to accommodate even the world’s largest cargo parachutes.
Story by Mark Schauer
U.S. Army Yuma Proving Ground