Drogue parachute

A drogue parachute is a parachute designed to be deployed from a rapidly moving object in order to slow the object, to provide control and stability, or as a pilot parachute to deploy a larger parachute. It was invented in Russia by Gleb Kotelnikov in 1912.

A drogue parachute is more elongated and has a far smaller area than a conventional parachute and therefore provides less drag. This means that a drogue parachute cannot slow an object as much as a conventional parachute, but it can be deployed at speeds at which conventional parachutes would be torn apart.

The drogue parachute's simpler design allows for easier deployment. Where a conventional parachute could get caught in itself while unfolding or fail to inflate properly (thus not slowing the falling object as much as it should), the drogue parachute will inflate more easily and more reliably to generate the expected amount of drag.

The drogue parachute was used for the first time in 1912 by Russian inventor Gleb Kotelnikov, who had introduced the knapsack parachute a year before. On a road near Tsarskoye Selo (now part of St. Petersburg), Kotelnikov successfully demonstrated the braking effects of parachute by accelerating a Russo-Balt automobile to its top speed and then opening a parachute attached to the back seat.

Drogue chutes were first used in aviation in 1937 by the Soviet airplanes in the Arctic that were providing support for the famous polar expeditions of the era such as the first manned drifting ice station North Pole-1, which was launched the same year. The drogue chute enabled airplanes to land safely on smaller ice-floes.

One of the earliest regular production military aircraft to use a drogue chute to slow down and shorten the landing was the Arado Ar 234 reconnaissance-bomber of the Luftwaffe, as both the trolley-and-skid undercarriage series of eight prototypes for the never-produced Ar 234A series — one on the aircraft, and a separate system on the aft surface of the trolley's main axle — and the tricycle undercarriage-equipped Ar 234B production series were fitted with drogue chute deployment capability in the extreme rear ventral fuselage.

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Wikipedia