Eli5: How do they air drop heavy military vehicles and tanks using parachutes?
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Nothing worthy of the name ‘tank’ is getting airdropped and landing in operable shape, I don’t think. Russia’s BMD is an air-droppable version of the BMP infantry fighting vehicle, and that’s one of the heaviest things I’m aware of that can be parachuted. It uses special rocket chutes and I shudder to imagine what the drop is like for the crew.
It’s just over 8 tons combat-loaded. Main battle tanks are 40 to 60-ish tons.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BMD-1
There’s a limit to what can reasonably be airdropped. Humvees and other vehicles just use real big parachutes.
Light tanks can technically be airdropped by using them to yank the tank out the back of a low flying cargo plane. It essentially just falls a few dozen feet down and is built to survive the drop. But this is only light tanks like the M551 which weighs about 16 tons, and these kinds of tanks aren’t really useful nowdays.
An M1 tank is like 60 tons. Those aren’t air droppable -at all-
They use special aircraft with a very large door, usually at the back, and rollers on the floor. They attach a very large parachute or set of parachutes to the vehicle.
When the time comes, they release the floor locks and let a small drag chute called a “drogue” out the back. That catches the wind and hauls the vehicle out the back. The ripcord is attached to the aircraft so the main chute comes out when it exits.
After that…gravity and air drag.
They pack the vehicle on a tray with a bunch of cardboard. Then several large cargo parachutes are attached. It gets loaded in a cargo plane and pushed out with a tiny parachute, or daisy chained to other bundles. The cargo parachutes static line is attached to the aircraft and as the whole load comes out the chutes open.
This keeps the bundle mostly upright and slows the speed of falling down.
Then the bundle hits the ground, all the cardboard compresses and absorbs the impact and then people go and recover the vehicle.
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