As I mentioned a couple days ago, a reader named Dave spotted this article and wanted to share it with readers. The article published in the 1960 edition of All American Word follows the All American Engineering Company Testing the air drop of a jeep by a pallet rather than via a parachute. To test this concept, the AAE built a special vehicle to mimic the landing of a jeep atop a pallet at speeds of 135mph. As you can see, the test was successful (at least the one captured in the photos).
Dave writes,”I was in Georgetown, DE recently which is a small town on the DelMarVa peninsula, and I ran across this very interesting use for a VEC CJ2A! I think it might fit your recent “museum” series of posts and I’m sure that your eagle-eyed readers will immediately recognize the historical relevance of this column shift speed demon! Apparently, this was a precursor to what is now known as LAPES or the Low Altitude Parachute Extraction System which is still taught, practiced and used today by our Military for forward area resupply missions. I watched C130 crews practice this (with varying levels of success)! at Whiteman AFB in western Missouri in the late 80’s. Fortunately by that point they were only destroying HMMWVs and military pickup trucks! The 8 of 10 or so operations that were succesful were really cool and you could certainly see the advantages of this type of operation.”
Click on the link below to see some closeups
In the May 25, 1944, edition of the Ogden Standard Examinier
