Recent Advances in Parachute Technology

To the layman the parachute is often no more than a large pocket handkerchief which brings men safely to earth without a bump, but to the aeronautical engineer it is a complex aerodynamic decelerator, which has a large number of degrees of freedom and dynamic characteristics which are often difficult to account for by classical aerodynamic theory. Whichever view one may care to take of the parachute what is certain is that advances in parachute technology are nearly always the result of a balanced programme of both theoretical and experimental work, and for this reason equal attention will be given in this paper to both the experimental and theoretical aspects of parachute technology.