There are many problems of safety in paratrooper drops. Many times night jumps are done or drops are made into the battlespace under low visibility. This is good and bad. It is good because the enemy cannot see you as easy to kill you, but bad because you cannot see anything either. At night it is often considered a blessing to make a jump into enemy territory because you do so under cover of darkness. Since modern day soldiers have GPS gear and wrist watches; I propose using them to help prevent entanglements, stealing of air flow to another soldiers canopy and burn-ins. There is an off the shelf technology used in fire fighting called AFF. AFF stands for Automated Flight Following System, which is used in aerial fire fighting to insure that the fire retardant is dropped in the drop zone even though with the smoke the visibility is very low making it difficult to see. As one aircraft goes in another follows in behind it. This off the shelf technology has been used for over a decade now and with the advances of GPS accuracy and GIS modeling of surface terrain by satellite its uses should be incorporated into the laying of smart dust and probably will be soon. When paratroopers are deployed in the battlespace each GPS unit will have a buzzer allowing the parachute operator to know he is too close to the next nearest chute or that a chute is rapidly approaching his/her airflow. This will improve safety in night jumps and under zero-zero visibility or near so. Due to the number of aircraft dropping and the number of paratroopers this data can also be sent back to the command and control of the Blue Force for tracking. Once this technology is implemented in practice jumps that data can be set onto an ERSI platform and 3D grid to help in simulator training for troops, thus we can train more with less actual jumps and save the major injuries to our soldiers and risk deaths which can occur. Think on this. |
