American paratroopers use a wide range of parachutes. Large formations use quick-snapping static line rigs whose designs date to the parachute regiments of World War II. Special operations teams train with highly maneuverable freefall canopies developed covert missions. We asked a pair of longtime paratroopers from both the regular Airborne and special ops world to tell us about the equipment they call their “ride to work.”
Sgt. 1st Class Eric Fair is the Operations NCOIC and the top jump master of the Airborne and Special Operations Test Directorate. Fair, with 22 years in the Army, has 114 static line jumps and 60 freefalls. But underneath them all, he said, is the same caliber of soldier.
“They choose to do it. They want to do this dangerous training, this dangerous part of the job — it’s just your ride to work is so much more dangerous,” Fair told Task & Purpose. “They’re willing to do that, and that separates paratroopers as a higher caliber of the individually driven soldier.”
But that ride to work starts at different altitudes and comes in all shapes and sizes.
Static line parachutes
If you’ve ever seen videos of a low-flying cargo plane filling the sky with parachutes on a single pass over a target, you’ve seen static line parachutes. These relatively simple parachutes deploy automatically when a paratrooper exits the aircraft. The soldier has no role in “pulling the ripcord” because the parachute is pulled out of its container by a long webbing — the “static line” — that is locked to a guide wire inside the aircraft. The line pulls the parachute out as the soldier jumps, and the parachute unfurls behind them immediately.
As a result, dozens or even hundreds of paratroopers can jump together, jumping within a second of each other.
“It’s for a mass tactical airborne operation, where you’re going to drop a battalion, a company, or larger at once,” Fair said. “You don’t want those people staring around in the night while they’re going into combat. Everybody drifts the same way, lands the same way, and where the release was is going to put you where you go on the ground, period.”
Fair pointed out that knowing exactly where paratroopers will land allows commanders to load machine gun teams onto a plane. They will be the first to land in the drop zone, and they can quickly secure the area.
Static line parachutes have evolved over the years, but still share obvious design principles with those used by the first paratroopers in World War II. The T-5 parachute was the main parachute used in that war. Several parachutes were tested before and after the T-5, but their malfunction rates increased as faster planes entered the service.
Today, paratroopers use the T-11 and MC-6 as main parachutes, while cargo is often dropped under a previous-generation T-10.
T-10
The T-10 was used for dropping paratroopers for over five decades. It became the primary parachute in the early 1950s and remained in use until 2014. The T-10 could deliver a paratrooper and their gear weighing up to 360 lbs. Fair said the standard combat drop altitude with the T-10 parachutes was as low as 500 feet above sea level.
That drop altitude is reserved for combat, and most training jumps happen at approximately 800 to 1,250 feet above sea level for fixed-wing aircraft but up to 1,500 for helicopters during training. Jumpers will use a 4,000 count before checking the canopy. If there’s a malfunction, they must immediately pull their reserve parachute cord when using the T-10.
The short altitudes only allow seconds before the paratrooper hits the ground, meaning major malfunctions demand immediate deployment of the reserve parachute. The most common malfunction is called a ‘cigarette roll,’ and the canopy does not correctly deploy due to the shape of a cigarette.
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“In the T-10 days, as long as you got out of that aircraft, because it was small, round, simple, and it opened so fast, you would get a cigarette roll if there was a little bit of a snafu in the packing, or, if it’s just older material,” Fair said. “It was ripping open so fast that the nylon would slide together quickly, causing friction, and it would actually melt to itself and not allow the canopy to open entirely. It looks like a wind sock or a floppy cigarette roll, where they coined the term.”
T-11
In 2015, the T-11 parachute replaced the T-10 as a paratrooper’s ride to work. It is much heavier, has a larger, square canopy, and has a slower rate of descent than the T-10. While the T-10 is controlled via ‘slipping’ —pulling directly on the straps, or risers, of the parachute — the T-11 has steering tabs that pull down on the canopy, allowing some sort of control over the direction.
It also opens slightly slower, meaning paratroopers must wait two additional seconds before deploying their reserve parachute if they believe something is wrong.
The T-11 can handle up to 400 lbs. of total exit weight. Though the malfunction rate is approximately less than one out of every 10,000 jumps, the corner vent crossover is a dangerous malfunction unique to the T-11. The difference is that once the reserve fills, the T-11 parachute will typically fix itself, with the pressure on the main canopy being released by the reserve parachute.
“The T-11, because it has the corner vents and all that silk in the long opening sequence, we had a corner vent crossover inversion. Basically, the riser groups get out of sequence, and it inverts the canopy while it’s pulled through a corner vent,” Fair said. “That will not allow the skirt of the canopy to open, and it looks very similar to the cigarette roll.”
The T-10 is a fast descent where linear winds won’t mess with the paratrooper too much, whereas the T-11, with its 40×40 canopy, is greatly affected by linear winds and can result in the paratrooper landing on their back or side. Under the T-11, paratroopers fall at an average rate of descent of 19 feet per second, the T-10 at an average of 22 feet per second, and the MC-6 at an average of 14.5 to 18.5 feet per second. The impact is felt heavier with the faster rates of descent.
MC-6
The MC-6 parachute is the other static line parachute currently in use, primarily by small special operations teams. It is much more steerable than the T-10 and T-11. However, it has more variables that a paratrooper must know how to handle.
If a paratrooper becomes oriented to the wind incorrectly, it will be towed by the wind and land far away from the drop zone. It can also experience similar malfunctions to the T-10 and T-11, where the parachute does not fully open, but like the others, it hardly ever happens.
Freefall parachutes
C.J. Ouimette is a former instructor at the Military Freefall School, located at the Yuma Proving Ground in Arizona. He retired after over 20 years of service, largely within SOF.
He started in the 75th Ranger Regiment and completed 37 static line parachutes before going to a unit where freefall jumps were common. He retired with 900 freefall jumps. He completed a combat freefall jump into Afghanistan in 2009, a rare mission over the course of the post-9/11 wars.
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Operating in the military freefall world, Ouimette says, is whole different ballgame than static line jumps.
“In the freefall world, there are so many more variables that go into each jump. When you’re talking about altitude conversions with MSL to AGL,” Ouimette said. “I mean, even just doing your calculations when you have declination on a map and converting your calculations from magnetic to grid in true. There are so many more things. So it takes an educated individual and a tight team to be good at this with a lot of practice.”
There are three main freefall parachutes to know. The Navy uses the MT2-XX, the Air Force and the Army primarily the RA-1, and the Marine Corps the PS-2.
“PS-2, in my opinion, is the most advanced parachute system out there,” Ouimette said. “It has a 5 to 1 glide ratio, versus, I believe, the non-standard parachute the Navy is trying to go to has a 3.5 to 1 glide ratio.”
Glide ratio is a function of lift and drag, which means that for every foot you move down, you move X number of feet forward. That translates to how far a freefall parachute can carry the operator from the point of parachute deployment. There are different body positions an operator can do to control their movement before deployment of the parachute.
The minimum pull altitude is the minimum altitude allowed before an operator must deploy their main parachute. The exit altitude for a military freefall insertion is a minimum of 6,000 feet above sea level, but there are more altitude classes starting at 12,500 feet to 20,000 feet above sea level.
Supplemental oxygen is required for jumpers aboard the aircraft starting at typical training altitudes of approximately 13,500 feet up to 20,000 feet — “except for C-130J models.” Anything from 20,000 to 25,000 feet requires pre-breathing of oxygen at an altitude lower than 10,000 feet for at least 30 minutes before they can jump. When a freefall insertion begins, the operators gauge their altitude as they descend using various wrist-bound altimeters.
Once they reach their pull altitude, they throw out the small pilot chute, which assists in pulling out and deploying the main parachute.
“The minimum pull altitude for the RA-1 is 4,500 feet. All those other parachute systems are 4,000 feet. Anything above 6,000 feet at deployment is considered deployment altitudes,” Ouimette said. Anything above 6,000 feet is considered a standoff. We don’t really call them [High altitude, High Opening] jumps as much anymore or [High Altitude, Low Opening] jumps. We’re now calling it a military freefall insertion because we use the same calculations for both.”
An operator can improperly pack the main parachute, causing a malfunction. A missing pilot chute handle is where it’s pushed up into the pack, where they cannot reach it while descending. There are several other mishaps that can happen, but they are rare. The primary emergency scenario is when a reserve is deployed, though Ouimette said there are over 20 other emergency procedures that can be implemented in one-off scenarios.
High, Low, or Hop-n-pop?
The classic freefall mission for most teams is a High Altitude-Low Opening, or HALO, mission. A team flies on a plane at 10,000 feet or higher, invisible from the ground and clear of any danger from small arms fire (anti-aircraft missiles are a separate issue, addressed in mission planning). Once over a target, a team jumps together, freefalls until safely close to the ground, then deploys their parachutes together and flies quickly to a target. HALO jumps — with about a minute of freefall and close to five under canopy — are the jumps most similar to civilian “skydiving.”
But other missions can require other skills. A High Altitude-High Opening, or HALO, is used for more covert approaches to a target, or when their jump aircraft cannot approach directly over a target. A team might jump from their plane 20,000 feet or higher, and many miles away from a target. But by immediately deploying their parachute, they can fly together in a tight formation for dozens of miles before landing almost silently.
Such jumps require at least one jumper to fly with a compass and other navigation tools strapped to their chest, so they can navigate the team to the correct landing spot.
The hang time for a military freefall insertion can range from 30 minutes to 45 minutes depending on how high they jump from and how high they deploy their parachute.
“Let’s say, roughly, it takes about five to six minutes for a HALO jump. It all depends on the thermals. The longest I’ve been up is 45 minutes,” Ouimette said. “But that’s exit at 25,000 and pull at 1,500 feet of separation from the plane. Then you have however long it takes you to get to where you’re going. Whatever weight you have, and if it’s warmer out with warmer air rising, you’ll get more distance out of it.”
He explained that aggressive canopy pilots can get down faster, while a very light, passive canopy pilot can stay up longer. Military freefall jumps are designed for the clandestine insertion of SOF operators into a target area.
Lastly are low altitude jumps usually called “hop-n-pops” in which a team’s airplane flies directly over a target at just a few thousand feet. Jumpers leap out and, as soon as is safe, pull their ripcord for a quick flight to the target below.
Hop-n-pops are typical when a team is jumping with cargo equipment under its own, non-steerable parachute. The jumpers will essentially “chase” their cargo across the sky, landing as close as possible. The same technique is typically used in mid-ocean jumps, when teams are jumping to reach a ship below.
Qualifications
Ouimette said there is nothing in common between static line and freefall parachute operations.
“Other than the fact that you’re jumping out of an aircraft, they have nothing in common. You can literally train a monkey how to use a static line parachute. It’s not hard,” Ouimette said. “The Navy static line course they subcontract is only five days long. They get that shit done in five days, and the army takes three weeks to do it.”
However, a parachute is only one of many tools paratroopers will use to accomplish their mission. Each one serves a purpose, and depending on the mission, parachutes are chosen based on their capabilities and how they can serve the mission.
Soldiers must volunteer to attend Airborne School to join an airborne unit. Jump status comes with an additional $150 in the monthly paycheck, and paratroopers must complete one static line jump every 3 consecutive months to maintain jump status, though later amendments to Executive Order 11157 allowed commanders to waive one missed jump a year. Generally, the army expects paratroopers to jump at least every 90 days, and going more than 6 months without a jump might cost them their jump status and extra pay.
The Yuma Proving Grounds is where service members will attend the Military Freefall School. It’s located in Arizona, smack dab in the Great Sonoran Desert, where temperatures can regularly soar above 100 degrees. Service members on freefall jump status receive $225 dollars extra per month.
HALO-qualifed paratroopers generally make far more frequent training jumps than static-line paratroopers. Most paratroopers in airborne infantry units like the 82nd Airborne jump only in large formations, which usually involve elaborate training events, with support from large Air Force aircraft, often coming from far away. Teams that jump HALO can jump far fewer jumpers at a time, and generally have more frequent access to aircraft dedicated to their unit. Air Force pararescue teams, for example, routinely jump from HC-130 tankers from their own rescue units.
But regardless of the mission or jump types, says Fair, the key to every successful parachute mission is the paratrooper.
“I’ve spent minimal time outside of the airborne world, but the little bit I had, you can see a marketed difference between the two types of units in your overall formation — more individually driven, higher motivation, and more willing to go that extra mile,” Fair said. “If you’ve ever had the privilege to do anything in combat with these types of guys, it’s an amazing thing. They’re not going to shy away from things. They’re going to get the mission done. They’re going to help each other. I have never seen anything like it in my life.”