This document was originally produced for the attention of Professor Colin Mills at the Rowett Research Institute, Aberdeen. It was the result of several attempts to get UK funding to explore the practicalities of using a marker system to enhance the accuracy of airborne humanitarian aid delivery.
Unfortunately very little funding was forthcoming so the project was shelved. This is a second attempt which put forward another delivery method. Once again no funding has been obtained but the various agencies that could help have also been stretched finacially in the last few years.
I am posting this on my website in the hope that someone may discover it and get the project moving again.
“A design for the delivery of humanitarian food aid from an airborne platform”
Pat Cooper, Microft Technical Services
Introduction
The provision of food aid to remote locations can be achieved by the use of ground transport (human or mechanized) or delivered by air. Ground communications are probably the first to suffer during a natural disaster such as an earthquake which means that aid will take a long time to get through and may arrive too late to help those that need it quickly. The air delivery option is the fastest method but can be hazardous when hostile action is taken in the form of surface to air missiles.
An aircraft needs to be able to deliver supplies from at least 20,000' and do so with a fair degree of accuracy. Current systems spread the supplies over a vast area making it difficult for survivors to locate and retrieve them. There are several high-tech military platforms available for the delivery of vehicles but these are generally expensive and the landing sites are difficult to predict when deploying from 20k'.
My original brief was to produce a drift marker system that used a dummy ration pack that was tracked during decent and allowed the aircraft to reposition and deploy the rest of the packs. The requirement this time is for a system that will free fall and deploy at 1000'. To produce a suitable parachute release system for perhaps thousands of packs is uneconomic so the packs have to be bundled in some form of container which needs to open for delivery at a predetermined height. To avoid injury to ground personnel container itself has to be retarded to a rate of around 20 feet/sec.
Naturally there are costs involved in the production of each container and it makes sense to keep as much of the container intact to provide shelter material. My design features a container that will not disintegrate, can be reconfigured as a shelter and is protected by a waterproof coating.
Please note that all drawings are for illustration and conceptual purposes. However a sense of scale has been incorporated to make things more realistic. Final designs may appear very different.
The system
I do not as yet have a name for the system so for the purposes of this document it will be called the “drop box” and abbreviated to DBX.
The DBX is composed of 5 main parts:
ContainerToggles
GPS & Telemetry
Release mechanism
Parachute storage and deployment
Container
The container is formed from Triwall cardboard packaging material. To survive handling, deployment and free fall the walls will be about 20mm thick. Naturally this is an estimate and the final thickness determined during testing. It is hoped that the DBX can be produced from a single sheet of Triwall, this will add to the overall strength. At present I do not know what the maximum size sheet Triwall can process.
Fig 1 shows the DBX as it would be supplied by Triwall. All drawings are to scale and the dimensions are : length 3m, width 1m, height 1m. These measurements are subject to change but it did simplify my drawing process to keep the sides & base the same size. The blue areas are fold up flaps that enable the DBX to take its form. Not shown in the pictures are two webbing straps embedded in the rear wall of the DBX.
Note pre-punched holes to accept toggle system.
Fig 1
Fig 2
Fig 3
Fig 4
Fig 5
