And a Solution Was at Hand...

As it turned out, the US Forest Service had developed a chute for its smoke jumpers that perfectly met the Special Forces requirement. The initial requester, 10th Group, got them in April, 2002, and they have since been fielded throughout Army special operations. Along with a slower descent, the Army got a lot more controllability with the FS-14 parachute -- it turns 180 degrees in about four seconds, as opposed to nine. This also meant that canopy control was more important than ever -- so the Army adopted not only the Forest Service's chute, but also its simulator.

The simulator is part of a three-stage training process for canopy control: a block of well-presented video instruction (when this guy retires from the Forest Service, John and Martha King need to look him up), the simulator, and then actually jumping the chute.

Which is how I came to be standing in a warehouse looking at another soldier hanging in a parachute harness with a set of weird goggles on his face. The simulator is not elegant or polished; the parachute harness is suspended by springs from a sawhorse-like arrangement made of steel structural beams of the sort that hold up the shelves in warehouses. The goggles look like the ones used by video gamers -- the jumper stands up and kicks off a crude plywood box -- the computer graphics, visible on the instructors' screens, look like something out of Microsoft Flight Simulator -- the version that ran on a Commodore 64 in 1984. This is not overburdened with realism, and I instantly developed a cynical view of the "simulator." The more so when the instructor, who had come from a higher headquarters, told me that the Army paid $25,000 each for these simulators.

Sigh... your tax dollars in action.

So I wasn't expecting much when I donned the goggles and stood on the plywood box. "Go," the instructor said, and I kicked off the box and hung free in my harness, counting... one thousand, two thousand, three thousand, four thousand. (The real chute is usually open well before that). Looked up to check canopy, and there it was. Looked down, and saw "my boots". Saw the DZ, the smoke on it telling me what the wind direction was... I flew a rectangular pattern -- downwind -- base --and then right up the smoke to touch down 20 feet from the target. I had done better than that in the MC1-1B and -1C at the Leapfests run by the Rhode Island National Guard. So I wanted to do it again.

My second "jump" was not as successful -- I tried to do a fancier turn and was still turning when I hit the ground, which meant I landed somewhat sideways -- no big deal in the real parachute, actually, but a major no-no in the simulator. The instructor was happy anyway... he took the printout of the first jump and had me initial it. Somewhere it goes into a file, no doubt to cover someone's hiney if I conclude some future meatworld jump with my hipbones in my eye sockets. I wanted to make a third "jump"; one of the scenarios available in the sim is a whimsical "carrier landing," which was landing most of the guys in the virtual drink when they didn't allow for the motion of the ship -- but I had to be somewhere else (that dang major again!) and so I very reluctantly hung up the virtual reality goggles and released the harness straps.

But When I Took The Harness Off...

And then I realized something... I had been surging with adrenaline the whole time. Yes, the simulator looks primitive. Yes, the graphics are as crude as a Grandma Moses painting. Yes, it doesn't have the nine or twelve knots of wind in your face, the sounds of canopy rippling in the wind, the bizarre acceleration forces you get in the various parts of a real jump. And yet, and yet... it feels real.

That is one test of a simulator. The best test came the following morning, when the other members of the unit piled into a CH-47 Chinook cargo helicopter, and piled out of it at 1,500 feet above ground level at Turner DZ -- appropriately enough, the DZ that was used by 10th SF Group before it moved to Colorado.

Results? No one was hurt. Most of the men raved about the improved performance of the FS-14 chute vis-a-vis the MC1-1C that they had been jumping. Most of the men landed much closer to the turn-in point -- an important measure of success.

Of course, there was one exception. "Pete," a HALO-jumping "sky god" who usually jumps a higher performance square canopy, wound up in the trees. How did that happen, Pete? "Uh... the tree chased me down. I swear, it grabbed me in a tractor beam. Yeah, that's it, a tractor beam...."

So, with one dissenter, who ultimately did free himself from the clutches of the kite-eating tree, the men of the unit give the FS-14 chute, and the parachute simulator, a thumbs-up.

if you had asked me a month ago, how to simulate a parachute descent, I'd have questioned your grip on reality, but now I have experienced it myself. What will they simulate next?

FMI: www.arng.army.mil