Army tests new water, fuel bladders for airdrop

CAMP MACKALL, N.C. — Army para­troop­ers here com­plet­ed two of three test drops Nov. 10 to cer­ti­fy a new water and fuel con­tain­er sys­tem for air­drops in Afghanistan and else­where.

 -

Each drop of two Life­lin­er con­tain­er-uni­tized bulk equip­ment, or CUBEs, deliv­ered hun­dreds of gal­lons of water safe­ly to the ground under dual, 100-foot-wide para­chutes from over 1,000 feet, accord­ing to the project lead, John Mahon of the U.S. Army Nat­ick Sol­dier Research, Devel­op­ment & Engi­neer­ing Cen­ter of Nat­ick, Mass. 

A third drop sched­uled for the same day was scratched due to mechan­i­cal issues aboard the air­craft, said Mahon. 

The new con­tain­er, a polypropy­lene blad­der-like “blivet” nest­ed inside a recy­clable plas­tic box, was devel­oped to meet spec­i­fi­ca­tions request­ed by the 101st Sus­tain­ment Brigade cur­rent­ly deployed to Afghanistan, he said. 

The CUBE can be trans­port­ed by truck or slin­gloaded beneath a heli­copter, and unlike the old 500-gal­lon blivets, these 400-gal­lon sys­tems can be stacked sev­er­al high to reduce their stor­age footprint. 

To meet cur­rent rig­ging guide­lines and avoid delays, the air­dropped blivets were filled to less than their max­i­mum capacity. 

The CUBE is 40 per­cent the cost of the cur­rent mod­el, and when col­lapsed, can be han­dled by one per­son and stacked for storage. 

For the test drops, the team was aid­ed by sus­tain­ment para­troop­ers with the 82nd Air­borne Division’s 1st Brigade Com­bat Team, along with para­chute rig­gers and heavy-equip­ment oper­a­tors from the 82nd Sus­tain­ment Brigade, he said. 

Lt. Col. Paul Narows­ki, senior logis­ti­cian with 1BCT and com­man­der of the 307th Brigade Sup­port Bat­tal­ion, said that val­i­dat­ed air­drop-rig­ging pro­ce­dures will ensure that, no mat­ter where a force is on the bat­tle­field, 400 gal­lons of fuel, water or uni­tized sup­plies can be deliv­ered by sur­face, slin­gload or airdrop. 

A pio­neer of low-cost, low-alti­tude sup­ply drop tech­niques in Afghanistan, Narows­ki sees the CUBE sys­tem as anoth­er rel­a­tive­ly low-cost method of resup­ply­ing small bases. 

“Use of the CUBE will sup­port objec­tives to draw down forces and equip­ment in [Oper­a­tion Endur­ing Free­dom] by pro­vid­ing stor­age and dis­tri­b­u­tion capa­bil­i­ty to the warfight­er at a great­ly-reduced cost,” he added. 

The 11th Quar­ter­mas­ter heavy drop air­drop sys­tems tech­ni­cian, Chief War­rant Offi­cer 2 Ter­ry Wright, said that because many of the civil­ian engi­neers were for­mer rig­gers — Mahon served 31 years — work­ing with them went par­tic­u­lar­ly well. 

Where­as a typ­i­cal Army pro­gram from con­cept to oper­a­tional tests can take 6–8 years, because the project was fast-tracked, oper­a­tional test­ing was achieved in just over a year, Mahon said. 

To date, 200 sys­tems have already been field­ed to deployed units with more on the way, he said. He hopes to cer­ti­fy the CUBE’s air­drop capa­bil­i­ty and have a draft of air­drop pro­ce­dures ready with­in the next 30–60 days. 

Source:
US Army

Face­book and/or on Twit­ter

Team GlobDef

Seit 2001 ist GlobalDefence.net im Internet unterwegs, um mit eigenen Analysen, interessanten Kooperationen und umfassenden Informationen für einen spannenden Überblick der Weltlage zu sorgen. GlobalDefence.net war dabei die erste deutschsprachige Internetseite, die mit dem Schwerpunkt Sicherheitspolitik außerhalb von Hochschulen oder Instituten aufgetreten ist.

Alle Beiträge ansehen von Team GlobDef →