|
At the very dawn of the 20th century Russia was devastated
by the tragic death of the popular pilot Lev Matsievich. One can easily
imagine how people felt seeing his plane coming down and being unable to
do anything to help him. A 38 year-old Petersburg-based actor Gleb
Kotelnikov was also among the huge crowd thronging the airfield. He was
not in any way involved in aviation, just liked watching the whole thing
which was very much “in” back in those days. Emotional and impressionable,
like all actors, he just stood there, frozen-hearted as the airplane came
down with a terrible thud and the air filled with hysterical shrieks of
women that abounded in the crowd. “Could something have been done
to prevent this tragedy? - Gleb wondered. Why didn’t they us the
parachute?” He had heard about parachutes already having been used
by aeronauts to exit their distressed balloons. Why couldn’t pilots use
the parachutes too? Until then airmen had never used parachutes, because,
back in 1908, planes barely managed to fly over the treetops, and that
was too low for the parachute to open up. And still, the planes were
climbing higher and higher and Matsievich’s death proved once again the
all-importance of this life-saving device. The umbrella-like chutes they
used on airships were too bulky to fit into the plane’s sleek body.
Which means that the pilots were flying without any means of rescue and
if something went wrong up there, like fire or some malfunction, there
was no way they could possibly survive...
Gleb Kotelnikov knew that pilots needed a compact parachute
that would depend neither on the make of the concrete plane they were flying
nor the speed it was traveling at. Then he recalled how, shortly
before that, one of his friends, an actress, took out a giant silk shawl
from her tiny bag much to everyone’s surprise. Eureka! He now knew
that the canopy should be made of strong lightweight silk and tucked inside
a small backpack arranged so that it could be opened by a static line fastened
to the aircraft.
Kotelnikov kept on experimenting, putting together new models,
testing them on dummies and on himself. Finally the whole setup was ready,
successfully tested in a real time situation only to be thrown out by the
inert bureaucrats who didn’t think the parachute was really needed. Later
on, when, with the outbreak of World War One, pilots started dying in numbers,
even the Generals asked the War Ministry to make the chutes a must element
of a pilot’s outfit. Still, the Air Force’s patron, Grand Duke Alexander
Mikhailovich Romanov, personally slapped down a resolution on one
such request saying that “Parachutes are very bad for aviation because
they encourage the pilots to bail out at the slightest
possibility of being shot down, dooming their aircraft to destruction.”
The royal opinion was enough to leave the pilots without any means
of survival.
The French company Jukmes got interested in Kotelnikov’s
invention and started making bad copies of his design. And still, alarmed
by the mounting losses in the Air Force, the Russian government decided
to import these bad copies from the French. It took a few more years
for Kotelnikov’s priority to be fully restored and his parachute to become
a trusty means of saving pilot lives.
The parachutes, just like aircraft, have since come a long
way, but Kotelnikov’s original design was so perfect that the underlying
principle still remains unchanged.
It’s really hard to say how many pilots owe their life to
the parachute! Thousands, maybe tens of thousands, and you can hardly find
any flyer anywhere who would not admire this amazing umbrella-like device…
These days parachutes are more than just a potent means of
survival. They are widely used in transport aviation, by paratroopers
and to guide down incoming space capsules. Moreover, it’s a great
sport too young people happily go for everywhere in the world. And
each jump they make is a resounding tribute to Gleb Kotelnikov who saved
the lives of so many airmen worldwide…
|