Help w 1927 Irving Air Chute Co Small Parachute – What IS it?

At this time of year H&S regs require that Santa issues one of those to each of his little helpers in the sleigh. Simple really ….. :angel:

I work as a volunteer at the Niagara Aerospace Museum, Niagara Falls New York. Irving Air Chute Co. was located just a few miles from where we are located. Coincidentally we happen to be doing research into the “Lesser Known Aircraft and Manufacturing Companies in Western New York”. The Irving Chute Company is one of those companies. I’ll look in our archives on Wednesday December 18 for a catalog. I also just happen to have on my desk a copy of “American Aircraft Directory 1927”. Irving Air Chute Company is listed. Because the musuem director has flown 93 different aircraft and owns three he may know exactly what the chute is. The director is extremely knowledgeable.

It’s probably a ‘chute used for an air-launched flare. Presume they had, or were experimenting with, such devices at that time?

Anon.

The depth is from crown to rim of the actual silk and doesn’t include the cords. I can measure the cords if that would be of any use.

So you’re leaning towards it being used to drop food/mail/newspapers to places difficult to access via roads? Likely privately done as opposed to government/military?

Ah. That was my original thinking. 99″ circumference = 31.5″ diameter. I have no experience with parachutes of any vintage, but from looking at images of them in use I’d have thought that was maybe twice the diameter of an early drogue.

Thinking about it, the size seems a bit on the large size in comparison with WW2 period examples of the drogue chute. 99 inches round (?) and 15 inches high? Is the latter the depth of canopy from crown to rim or crown to bottom of lines? Presumably the former??

What might have been dropped in 1927? Can’t say in detail for the US, but here in the UK there were a number of possible uses which had been well tried by then. Following the First World War food parcels were dropped to parts of Europe during the harsh winter of 1919 – war damage preventing sufficient supplies getting through by more traditional means. While the British government dithered about exactly how (and even if) to allow and regulate commercial aviation, a number of people with aircraft noticed that what regulations there were forbade almost everything but didn’t mention newspapers, so newspapers were flown, and sometime parachuted to their intended destinations (and sometimes who knows where they landed…) More civil and military experiments followed. The point being that almost anything can be dropped. You name it, in those days there was probably someone with a plane willing to try it. I think I’m right in saying that commercial (as opposed to government) flying of mail in the US started in 1926, so it may well be there was a period of experimentation in that time-frame too.

While typing this I see Andy Saunders has plumped for the drogue/pilot chute. I’ll go along with that.

Looks to me like a drogue ‘chute for the main canopy.

Thanks, Lazy 8! I found a great write up online about Irvin(g), but nothing that seemed to help with this in particular. Wonder to whom dropping packets would have been appropriate in the 1927 time period? It’s a touch early for stock brokers to have run away from NY to the Alaska tundra to be needing food drops, lol.

Welcome to the forum!

I think it could be one of two things: It might be a ‘pilot’ chute, used to pull the main parachute from the pack in an orderly fashion (Irvin(g) was one of the pioneers of this, shortly after the First World War – but don’t ask me when ‘shortly’ was!) It strikes me it’s a bit big to be a pilot chute, but I expect there’ll be a real expert along in a minute who’ll say for sure. I would rather believe it is indeed for dropping a small packet.