One of the hazards of jumping out of perfectly good airplanes is that every once in awhile a paratrooper gets stuck, being dragged along with the aircraft by his static line or other piece of equipment. This is referred to as a “towed jumper”. Generally, they attempt to reel the jumper back inside the aircraft with a hydraulic system which I can only imagine feels like being beaten by a pillow case full of doorknobs as you’re smacked against the side of the aircraft and back in through the troop door. An alternative is the cut the jumper away if he is conscious and allow him to manually his reserve parachute.
Now, there’s a twist on that latter course of action which inserts a backup parachute between the aircraft and jumper before cutting his primary static line. The Towed Jumper Release System from Airborne Systems, is a modification of a British system known as the Hung Up Parachutist Release Assembly, or HUPRA.
The system uses a static line to deploy a T11 main canopy over the jumper and he retains access to his chest mounted reserve chute and his main doesn’t deploy but rather remains within its deployment bag on the packtray.
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“One of the hazards of jumping out of perfectly good airplanes…”
There’s no such thing as a perfectly good airplane in the Air Force. 😉
That is a really genius solution. I had no idea the HUPRA system existed, and I would’ve liked to have known such a backup was a thing when I got my wings.
How do they attach that I wonder?
As a rigger I was thinking the same thing as the guy above me. What if they are a towed jumper cuz of their kit getting caught up. You can cut that free and they will be g2g until their chute is deployed. But if you cut the static line then what does this clip or attach to? And if you have ever seen a towed jumper. The jump is stopped, the plane starts making as tight of a turn towards the jumper so they are not slammed against the aircraft. Then the retrieval system is used to pull them back in. We had a guy that a brand new JM get his static line wrapper around his 1959’s weapons case and became a towed jumper. He was ok minus the fact it was a c-17 so they couldn’t do super tight turns so we signaled that we were cutting his away and to pull his reserve. The JM was in huge trouble but it was also a company commander at Airborne School House. I was a black/red hat. Coolest duty station ever. I never worn a black hat. Sorry for the ramblings!
Also as a former Rigger curious how this works
In my 7 years we never had a towed jumper, and heard of like in at Bragg
It has its own static line which isn’t shown. It’s attached to the aircraft at a floor ring and to all of the USL snap hooks. Then, the anchor cable is cut releasing all of the static lines as well as the jumper from the aircraft. The TJRS parachute then deploys and the paratrooper rides his now useless main in, undeployed.
That’s a long line to be dangling from, thinking the pendulum swings could suck really bad. Kind of at the mercy of the winds and other jumps as you aren’t able to do anything other than ride it down and prepare to conduct one outstanding PLF.
Inherit issue still to this day, something even folks that are no longer in the military and still conducting static line jumps using .mil chutes have to deal with..