New, Faster Airdrop

Posted 29 April 2013

TAGS:

Photo by SrA Scott Saldukas

The 772nd Expeditionary Airlift Squadron, the deployed C-130J unit at Kandahar Airfield, Afghanistan, executed the first combat Extracted Container Delivery System, or XCDS, airdrop on 29 April 2013. The new airdrop method is designed to pull the bundles out of the aircraft at a faster rate than the current airdrop process, which improves the overall accuracy of the drop itself. With XCDS, an additional parachute attached to a group of bundles pulls them out of the aircraft together and at a faster speed, resulting in about a two-thirds smaller dispersion area on the ground. The first mission was carried out by a joint Air National Guard and active duty crew flying a C-130J deployed from Little Rock AFB, Arkansas.

Comments

U-2 Articles
U-2 News
U-2 Video
U-2 Photos

View All Articles

U-2 Anniversary
7/16/2015
For sixty years, the U-2 Dragon Lady has been America's eyes, ears, and nose in the sky. Code One looks back at the U-2 program on the anniversary of its first flight.

U-2 Pilot Describes Earliest Missions
4/30/2015
Vito’s mission took him directly over Moscow and its extensive network of newly built air defenses, which ringed the city in three concentric circles at twenty, forty, and sixty miles from the city center.

Today's U-2 Fleet
9/14/2014
The end of U-2 production in 1989 marked the beginning of a host of evolutionary upgrades.

U-2 Factoids
9/13/2014
Facts, figures, and other essential details about the U-2 Dragon Lady.

Interview With U-2 Stats Keeper
9/12/2014
Reliability maintainability, and supportability lead engineer, tracks statistics for the U-2 program.

U-2 Life Support In Palmdale
9/8/2014
Mark Schroeder has had the responsibility of prepping, maintaining, testing, and inspecting survival equipment for U-2 missions.

U-2 Early History
2/15/2002
The U-2 reconnaissance aircraft, though designed and developed in great secrecy in the 1950s, has somehow never fully emerged from the shadows even though it has outlasted one successor, the SR-71 Blackbird.

View All News