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

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-