GPS JUMPERS

He spent way, waytoo much time watch­ing an awful, sports-​​themed porno called Blowin’ the Whistle. But my col­lege house­mate Chris will be for­ever rad in my book. Because he would jump out of planes at 35,000 feet or higher — brav­ing sub-​​zero tem­per­a­tures, suck­ing on oxy­gen tanks, free falling for min­utes at a time. And then, when he’d finally splash down, he’d go res­cue sailors and astro­nauts lost at sea.
All that was bru­tal, of course. But there was an equally large dan­ger loom­ing that he’d miss his tar­get entirely. You see, guys like Chris, doing HALO (High Altitude Low Opening) and HAHO (High Altitude High Opening) jumps, have to leap out of their planes dur­ing fog and rain and woolly-​​thick cloud cover. All of which makes it awfully tough to stick a tar­get.
A new set of gad­gets being devel­oped at the Army’s Natick Soldier Systems Center should help the Chrises of the world. The Military Free Fall Navigation System con­nects GPS guid­ance con­trols to a hel­met heads-​​up dis­play “a tiny TV-​​like dis­play mounted to one side of [a] gog­gle,” Natick says. All of that is then plugged in to a PDA-​​based mis­sion plan­ner, which can recal­cu­late drop zones and redi­rect para­chutes in the sky, based on wind speed and direc­tion. Natick hopes to field a pro­to­type by 2006.
THERE’S MORE: The nav­i­ga­tion sys­tem for jumpers runs off of many of the same tech­nolo­gies being used to make pre­ci­sion cargo air­drops. Defense Tech pre­viewed that sys­tem called, no joke, the “Sherpa” here.

April 22nd, 2005 | Gadgets and Gear | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.