I remember dropping parts for my dads loggging operation when I was a kid. As I remember, my grandpa and I just threw the parts in a gunny sack with whatever fresh baked goods my grandma had and dropped them on the log landing. I dont recall any special precautions other than a 'heads up' call on the radio.

What sort of things have you or your friends dropped, and what's your procedure for doing it?

I have delivered supplies in the back country to family and friends camping mostly kayak trips along mountain rivers, every thing from watermelon to ice cream to fishing worms. Usually wrapped in bubble packing with low pass and drop in the water. Most of them were successful with one of the watermelons that did not survive.

Loach torques, gunners on the floor in the back, dropped grenades and super bombs on bunkers in Vietnam. But that was at a hover or at least very slow. I tried the flower sack bombing at a fly in once and was no good at it. The Air Force was very proud of the Norton bomb sight in WWII, but they didn't hit many ships in the Pacific. The dive bomber in the Pacific and the Stuka in the European Theater killed ships and tanks in very great numbers. The more vertical the dive, the more exactly round the cone of fire. We used sixty degrees with Cobras in Air Cavalry. Starting at 1200' and forty knots, we broke at treetop level and near 190 knots. The Apaches in the video on IR development are firing Hughes Chain Gun. They are far back. You can tell by the elongated cone of fire. The thirty mm rounds have explosive charges, however.

I flew with a pipeline pilot who liked to use those long range tanks. He would pee in a zip lock bag and drop it. He wasn't trying to hit anything, however. I had no use for long range tanks. I stopped somewhere every two hours to step out beside the 172, put my back against the door so the prop blast would take my pee downwind, and get rid of my coffee. I drank coffee and smoked cigars all day to stay awake.

Air drop, like high altitude bombing, is very inaccurate without expensive smart bombs.

I try to dump a load of dog shit over Tahoe now and then. Those extra micro organisms are good for the lake. Bio degradable of course. We feed organic dog food.

Tim

I'm pretty good at this. Boatloads of practice with smoke grenades...

Fly over the target around 100' AGL doing about 80-90 knots. When the target passes just in front of your feet (it'll take some practice to know that point without a chin bubble) lightly throw the object straight down and let Sir Isaac do the rest. It'll take some practice to mark your exact spot every time.

As far as calls, you could use the 1: "shot over" 2: "shot out" 1: "splash over" 2: "splash out" calls from artillery land.

And contact, these days us true Cav Scouts (OH-58D) use between 20-30* pitch to tighten up the beaten zone (narrow the dispersion). Pitch and steer as if you'd eventually fly into the target and you'll hit it on your first burst every time. Then adjust your grease pencil mark as necessary!

I find ice cream sandwiches fall almost straight down. Drop them at a few kids camps every year. T shirts also fall close to straight. They need a throw though, otherwise they may or may not hang up on your horizontal...

CamTom12- Did they at least give the D model more power and meybe some hydraulics on the anti-torque pedals? The Loach didn't need either, but it was what MTV would have called a good flying aircraft. Hughes Tool and Die knew how to make them. I wish all my crashes had been in that wonderful egg shell. My back wouldn't be in such bad shape.

My limited dropping experience includes dropping coffee cans to a scout troop, with my passenger's judgment of the effectiveness of their mock SOS signals. We circled in a 60 degree bank at minimum safe speed to drop them, and they hit very close to our target area.

My more detailed experience involves flour-bombing at fly-ins, and since I've been the pilot, all I've had control over was the lateral line; the "bomber" had to decide when to let it go. At 80 mph indicated and 75' AGL, dropping it as the target disappeared under the cowling seemed to work pretty well--but the safest place for the ground crew to be was directly on the target.

Cary

contactflying wrote:CamTom12- Did they at least give the D model more power and meybe some hydraulics on the anti-torque pedals? The Loach didn't need either, but it was what MTV would have called a good flying aircraft. Hughes Tool and Die knew how to make them. I wish all my crashes had been in that wonderful egg shell. My back wouldn't be in such bad shape.

Yeah, we're up to 650 shp and hydraulics all around! Super fancy! We even have a stability augmentation system now that has up to 10% control authority to counter things like wind gusts.

Still the simplest aircraft in the inventory.

The loggers I saw dropping parts to a landing would tie a white tea shirt to it so it would be easier to find if it went into the brush.

The early days of dropping equipment to firefighters they would just free fall it. They tied a board full length to crosscut saws to keep them from breaking when they hit on end. Later on they made simple parachutes out of squares of burlap. Just a cord tied to each corner.

For small items a streamer is needed or the ground crew can't see it while it's in the air let alone find it on the ground.



The streamer is 4 inches X 8 feet. Today they make their own out of Crepe paper.

tcj- That Forest Service long yellow plastic bag looks like the toilet paper sized, about that long, flags we used in the automatic flagman for spraying. Now that worked well because of the drag when it deploys and the fact we were only three feet high. There was a cardboard trapezoid the shape of the flagman shoot to give it about the same weight as your sand. An electric solenoid pushed each individual flag up above a small lip so the ram air would deploy it. It was a good system and still useful. I can't get the kids, who use only Satlock, to keep them on the planes. Sometimes the computer doesn't want to compute and it would be good to have a load of flags. That way you wouldn't have to come back with a full hopper.

Cam Tom 12- We had SAS on the AH1-G Cobra. Lost SAS a couple times. Flies like a pig without it.

Contact, the aerial Coyote hunters in NE Oregon had an automatic flagman installed on the strut of their Husky. When they shot a coyote they would fly straight to the nearest road and lay one on the edge of the road so the skinners would know there is a dead coyote to go find and skin. Also if the coyote went down a hole before they could get him they would mark that spot and come back later.

The kids spraying have changed. They used to tell us "An ag pilot doesn't land if he still has spray in his tanks."

Before Satlock, we would freehand when a flagger failed for any reason. When using a flagman on the ground, we would just aim for the side window on the pickup. Inbound as soon as my wings went level, he would gun it and go another 35 feet upwind. The kids have the farmer believing it takes a yellow jet airplane and Satlock. We actually did a better job, overlapping just a bit. Even the Pawnees set 50' swath width, on the computer, now.

I've dropped a lot of ice cream sandwiches in insulated boxes with attached parachutes. Scouts and youth groups love it, and with the parachute there's little chance of one of the kids getting injured by falling frozen treats. The first time we used the rain fly from a 2 man pop tent as the parachute, but now I have two of the military surplus chutes that are designed to pull out the main chute on a supply drop. They are plenty big for what we do, and make the box come down nice and slow. It's fun to watch the kids chase it on it way down.





I just wrap the chute around the box and toss it down and out of the plane. It unfurls as it drops, then opens up every time. I turned the camera on the wing backwards once to record the drop - it doesn't even get close to the horizontal stabilizer, but like I said I through it down and out from the plane. I can get pretty close when dropping from 500', usually within 20-30 yards, but we practice a lot with pumpkins.

Haha, awesome!

qmdv wrote:I try to dump a load of dog shit over Tahoe now and then. Those extra micro organisms are good for the lake. Bio degradable of course. We feed organic dog food.

Tim

I live near Tahoe and you've got "crappy" aim. So you're the sorry %*#$& that has been dumpin doggie doo on my place!

bumper

bumper wrote:

qmdv wrote:I try to dump a load of dog shit over Tahoe now and then. Those extra micro organisms are good for the lake. Bio degradable of course. We feed organic dog food.

Tim

I live near Tahoe and you've got "crappy" aim. So you're the sorry %*#$& that has been dumpin doggie doo on my place!

bumper

No, that is Gump

TA

tcj wrote:The loggers I saw dropping parts to a landing would tie a white tea shirt to it so it would be easier to find if it went into the brush.

The early days of dropping equipment to firefighters they would just free fall it. They tied a board full length to crosscut saws to keep them from breaking when they hit on end. Later on they made simple parachutes out of squares of burlap. Just a cord tied to each corner.

For small items a streamer is needed or the ground crew can't see it while it's in the air let alone find it on the ground.



The streamer is 4 inches X 8 feet. Today they make their own out of Crepe paper.

The yellow streamer pictured above was used for messages to ground personal, the crepe paper streamers you mention are used for determining drift prior to jumping. They cut them to a standard length and used a fairly standard amount of weight to replicate the descent and drift of a parachute. Cross cut saws were tied to other cargo, but bundles of sleeping bags are usually dropped via free fall. Never any burlap that I was aware of.
A person really needs to be careful dropping stuff from the air. Folks have been killed trying to be the pilot and drop master at the same time. Just fly and let someone else do the dropping. If you use a chute, it should be packed correctly so it doesn't deploy in the plane or going out the door. If it is packed, it needs to be hooked up correctly. There was an incident, by inexperienced personal, where the cargo was hooked up on the wrong end of the packed chute, and the other end tied to the plane. When it was thrown out the door, the plane had a drag chute, the plane was now the cargo. It didn't end well. Even when done correctly there have been incidents.
One story and then back to work. We were dropping a fire camp on a fire in a Salmon River drainage, as they say in Star Wars "long long ago".A fire camp is basically all the supplies needed for a large crew that has walked into a fire not accessible by roads. So it is food, tools, sleeping bags, cooking supplies, etc. the drop zone was marked and they had a person in the zone watching for any chutes that might wander from the drop zone. He was laying next to to panels they had layed out marking the center of the drop zone, relaxing and watching the chutes come in. The next trip around we saw him quite a distance up the hill from the drop zone.
The USFS spotter or kicker, came to the front laughing and told us that on the last pass, a box of fire tools had broken open when the cargo chute opened. Our friend relaxing on the ground watching the chutes come in was now having to deal with several dozen polaskies and double bladed axes raining down around him. There was the time a window on a lookout was broken during a Sunday delivery of a newspaper and beer to the look out via free fall, but I don't know if there is a statute of limitations on damaging Goverment property. So, back to work.