In 1999, the Australian military launched a major peacekeeping and humanitarian intervention into the tiny Southeast Asian country of East Timor, following Timor's brutal conflict with Indonesia. Australian aircrews began flying emergency relief missions, air-dropping loads of food, water and other supplies to the impoverished Timorese.
But the mission of hope turned tragic when a free-falling box of supplies, weighing probably hundreds or even thousands of pounds and falling at the rate of a speeding car, crushed a Timorese boy, causing him to lose a leg.
It was a humanitarian's worst nightmare, and the origin of a new tactic for air-delivering vital supplies to disaster zones. Today, the U.S. Air Force's Air Mobility Command, the world's biggest airlift force, is putting the finishing touches on a method of veritably carpet-bombing afflicted populations with food and water.
Instead of the heavy, potentially dangerous drops of the past, AMC is planning to scatter thousands of small, leaf-like foam packages, each containing a drink of water or six ounces of emergency rations. Call it: energy bars from heaven.
For airdrops over Afghanistan since 2001, the airlift command has been using the same "Tri-wall Aerial Delivery System" the Australians used in Timor. TRIADS is, in essence, a cardboard refrigerator box packed with up to 2,000 pounds of supplies. The box doesn't use a parachute: It free-falls at 50 miles per hour and crumples on impact, spilling the goodies like a busted piñata.
TRIADS works great over Afghanistan, Maj. Tom Lankford, AMC's tactics chief, tells Danger Room. "In Afghanistan there are a lot of places without a lot of people around." Aircrews don't have to worry about a Timor-style accident.
But in earthquake-ravaged Haiti two years ago, the Air Force had a hard time finding any drop-zones that weren't teeming with people. So Lankford's people went back to the drawing board. Working in conjunction with the Army (which actually owns most of the air-drop gear the Air Force uses) they did away with the refrigerator-size box, replacing it with individual, football-size foam packages. Inside each package is a single serving of water or an energy bar. AMC did some quick calculations to determine how many of the so-called "Humanitarian Operations Packaged Essentials" could fit into a C-17 cargo plane. The answer: 125,000 – enough to "literally blanket a city," Lankford says.
To make sure the HOPE packages don't hurt anybody, AMC engineers built what Lankford jokingly calls the "HOPE cannon," a device that fires the foam packages at a mannequin at speeds up to 20 miles per hour. That's several mph faster than the estimated top speed of HOPE packages as they flutter down to earth like leaves. Based on the tests, Lankford estimates a HOPE package has a 1 percent chance of hurting you – if it hits you. And the injury should be no more than a scratch, he says.
The Air Force wants to start dropping the lifesaving foam treats over disaster zones this year. But there are still some kinks to work out. For now, airlift crews literally tip a box full of HOPE packages out the open ramp of a C-17. Lankford wants a more elegant dispenser system that can be installed inside the airlifter to feed the foam packages into the open air. One possibility, Lankford says, is "some sort of conveyor system."
