There I Was.

It was in the winter of 1993 when my unit was directed to assist in humanitarian relief efforts over Bosnia and Herzegovina.  I was minding my own business, running the Crisis Action Team when the Director of Operations told me I was to be the mission commander for a three or four aircraft deployment of the 7th Special Operations Squadron.

We deployed to Rhein-Main AB, Frankfurt Germany.  It was the base we had left about 9 months earlier, so it was like homecoming, except we were all staying in this really nice hotel out the back gate.  The MC-130H the 7th SOS was flying was brand new and not all the capabilities were qualified yet.  For example its radar was still getting the bugs worked out and the aircrew couldn’t drop from high altitudes.

The mission of the Air Force was to fly down to Bosnia and airdrop resupply bundles to people who were starving.  The second job was to not get shot down while doing it.  So everyone was flying about 25,000 feet above the ground and dropping bundles with parachutes rigged to open up when they were about 2,000 above the ground.  This meant the aircraft had to fly to a precise point and then calculate the effects the wind would have on the bundle while it free fell and then the effect it would have while it was drifting under the parachutes.  What I thought  to be a premiere squadron, told me they couldn’t do what every C-130 crew in the AF could do, they had to fly in Low Level and airdrop from 1,000 feet or less.  So that is what they planned to do.  We briefed this foolishness up to the the three star Admiral in charge, before he finally explained to the squadron commander he was not about to put a valuable aircraft and its crew at risk from small arms fire and surface to air missiles just to drop beans.  The job was just to drop so the bundle landed near a city in the right country.  The squadron was convinced this was too hard to do, so they put their collective heads together to see what options might exist.

What they came up with was genius for two reasons.  It worked and it was a lot cheaper than what went before it.

One of the missions the 7th SOS trained to do was to drop propaganda leaflets.  This required they throw out cardboard boxes filled with small leaflets to inform the general population or entice the enemy to surrender.  They started to think of the humanitarian meals as if they were leaflets.  The meals are packaged just like the military meals ready to eat (MRE).  The have a very tough plastic bag outer wrapping and then individual components wrapped inside.  They asked themselves, why not throw out the MRE’s individually rather than in a box under a parachute. 

Once they figured this out, the General we worked for had two questions.  Would the boxes break apart and what would a meal do it it hit someone while falling from 25,000 feet. In his words we didn’t want to kill someone with a falling refrigerator.  We had some government engineers who were there to help trouble shoot the problems we were having with our radar so we put them to work on figuring out the terminal velocity of the meal and what it would feel like if it hit you.

MRE

I can remember driving up to the building we were working out of and seeing the engineers in this small control tower that was about 6 stories high.  One was at the top throwing down meals, the other was running around the ramp trying to get hit by it.  While I was there the security police drove up to ask me what was going on.  I told them it was a classified military project.  They watched for about five minutes before driving away.  Last I saw they were laughing and shaking their heads.  The verdict on question 2: if hit by a meal it would leave a welt like you were hit with a well thrown softball.

For the first challenge we got permission to drop a couple of boxes of MRE on a drop zone in Germany.  Grafenwoehr was about a hour east of Frankfurt and a drop zone the unit was very familiar with.  We loaded up a couple of hundred MRE’s into big cardboard boxes and flew over to drop them.  We had video cameras on the ground and in the plane to document the results.  It worked perfectly, the boxes left the plane and when they hit the airstream behind the plane they blew apart.  All the MRE’s looked like a cloud as the tumbled to earth.  We came home with a lot of back slapping.

I headed off to brief the General that we had a plan.  He liked the idea because it was something the French and Italian allies could drop.  His only question was who was cleaning up the drop zone at Grafenwoehr.  I told him we had that covered, so the next day a couple of sergeants and I headed down to pick up the 200 or so MRE’s.  Fortunately for us the German boars had found them, and apparently had no qualms about eating the pork patties.  We spent about three hours picking up the wrappers.

So there we where with a new tactic, we just needed permission to try it.  After about a week of briefings to senior officers we were cleared to give it a try.  We loaded two aircraft with about 15,000 pounds of meals each.  They were loaded in about a dozen large boxes specifically cut to make sure they broke apart when the wind hit them.  As sunset approached the aircraft taxied out and took off. The aircraft took off and headed south to Bosnia.  As they approached the drop zone they unpressurized the aircraft in preparation for opening the aft ramp.  It was then we discovered one thing we had overlooked.  What would happen to the packages when they were at 25,000 ft.

Like I said the packaging was a very strong plastic bag that was sealed to be air tight.  At 25,000 everything expands because the pressure is gone.  For example, at sea level atmospheric pressure is about 14.7 lbs/sq inch.  At 25,000 is is about 0 lbs/sq inch.  So these airtight containers puffed up, just like a popcorn kernel.  In fact, the box lids all blew open and meals popped out of them just like a box of Jiffy Pop.  Over the right point the loads were pushed out and began their 4 mile journey to earth.

The feedback we received was they were scattered all over, kind of like manna from heaven.  This had a unexpected plus of making it hard for the warlords to control the food and in turn the people.  Sometimes necessity really is the mother of invention.  This was the first example of a system that has become known as TRIADS (regardless of what anyone says it gets its name from the name of the box we used to carry the drops.


Information on Tridads