History
The drogue parachute was applied for the first time in 1912 by a Russian inventor Gleb Kotelnikov, the same man who had introduced the knapsack parachute a year before. On a road near Tsarskoye Selo (now part of St. Petersburg) Kotelnikov successfully demonstrated the braking effects of parachute by accelerating a Russo-Balt automobile to the top speed, and then opening a parachute attached to the back seat.
In aviation, drag chutes were used for the first time in 1937 by the Soviet airplanes in the Arctic that were providing support for the famous polar expeditions of the era, such as the first manned drifting ice station North Pole-1, launched the same year. The drag chute allowed airplanes to land safely on the ice-floes of smaller size.
One of the earliest, if not the earliest, regular production military aircraft to use a drogue chute to slow down and shorten the landing run was the Arado Ar 234 reconnaissance-bomber of the Luftwaffe, as both the trolley-and-skid undercarriage series of eight prototypes for the never-produced Ar 234A series and the tricycle undercarriage-equipped Ar 234B production series were fitted with drogue chute deployment capability in the extreme rear ventral fuselage.
Read more about this topic: Drogue Parachute
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