What is better one parachute or lods of parachutes?
When you’re dropping equipment, it’s different because the parachutes are vastly bigger. The Army’s most popular cargo chute is the G-11. It’s 100 feet in diameter, can bring down a 5000-pound load, and weighs 250 pounds. Now let’s say you needed to drop something that weighed 20,000 pounds. You could put four G-11s on it, or you could use a 200-foot parachute if you could get one. But a 200-foot parachute would need a lot more area to lay it out when you packed it, it would weigh much more so the riggers would have a harder time working with it, it would cost more than four G-11s, and you’d have the big worry of failure: if one G-11 failed the load would still land in one piece, but if the one 200-foot chute failed your cargo would make a crater so big you could sell tickets for people to look at it. So the multiple parachute setup is better.
