Eli5: How do they air drop heavy military vehicles and tanks using parachutes?

Question

Eli5: How do they air drop heavy military vehicles and tanks using parachutes?

In: Other

Answer 1

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.