Parachute  

From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia

(Redirected from Skydiving)
Jump to: navigation, search

“Both optimists and pessimists contribute to our society. The optimist invents the airplane, the pessimist the parachute.” --George Bernard Shaw

Related e

Wikipedia
Wiktionary
Shop


Featured:

A parachute is a device used to slow the motion of an object through an atmosphere by creating drag, or in the case of ram-air parachutes, aerodynamic lift. Parachutes are usually made out of light, strong cloth, originally silk, now most commonly nylon. Parachutes must slow an object's terminal vertical speed by a minimum 75% in order to be classified as such. Depending on the situation, parachutes are used with a variety of loads, including people, food, equipment, space capsules, and bombs.

Drogue chutes are used to aid horizontal deceleration of a vehicle (a fixed-wing aircraft, or a drag racer), or to provide stability (tandem free-fall, or a space shuttle after a touchdown).

The word "parachute" comes from the French prefix paracete, originally from the Greek, meaning to protect against, and chute, the French word for "fall", and it was originally coined, as a hybrid word which meant literally "that which protects against a fall", by the French aeronaut François Blanchard (1753–1809) in 1785.



Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "Parachute" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.

Personal tools