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
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“What you don’t understand is that it is possible to be an atheist, it is possible not to know if God exists or why He should, and yet to believe that man does not live in a state of nature but in history, and that history as we know it now began with Christ, it was founded by Him on the Gospels.”
—Boris Pasternak (1890–1960)
“History ... is, indeed, little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.
But what experience and history teach is this—that peoples and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“I am ashamed to see what a shallow village tale our so-called History is. How many times must we say Rome, and Paris, and Constantinople! What does Rome know of rat and lizard? What are Olympiads and Consulates to these neighboring systems of being? Nay, what food or experience or succor have they for the Esquimaux seal-hunter, or the Kanaka in his canoe, for the fisherman, the stevedore, the porter?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)