Recovery of Guided Weapons: Factors Influencing the Parachute Designer in the Choice of a Suitable System Available to Purchase

OF the various countries involved in the development of guided missiles, the United Kingdom has a unique problem. It is that, apart from the preliminary use of the small artillery range at Lark Hill for scaled down missile trials, the major development has taken place over a sea range, at Aberporth. The test vehicles are almost invariably lost and much use has to be made of information transmitted in flight to ground equipment. A huge amount of technical effort has been expended to develop telemetery systems with great success. Even the ability to recover the test vehicle in one piece, a facility which can be readily obtained on a land range, is not a substitute for the collection of information in flight, for the operation of vital equipment has to be checked in actual working conditions and subsequent ground examination does not, necessarily, show if and why a failure has occurred.