I know we have a few aircraft that can drop sky divers. The Noratlas was the first one I recall. However, these sky divers immediately pull their chutes and drift down ... and the skydiver/chute model is very simplistic ... optimized to be viewed from the drop plane and optimized to have bunches of these in the sky at one time.
Has anyone developed a more detailed model of a sky diver? I'm especially interested in the free fall phase. (My brother is up to his 38th jump now I think.) A detailed jumper with articulated arms and legs (even with just a cannon ball FDM to start out with) could be the start of an interesting training tool. My brother speaks of some of the training classes he has gone to where different failure scenarios are presented, but you are sitting (or perhaps lying) on the ground with no real urgency (except some false urgency of the instructor yelling at you.) If some of these failure cases could be cooked into a FlightGear scenario with a free fall sky diver, there could be some good virtual urgency and good training value so students can instinctively learn the right things to do in various scenarios without forgetting key steps or key aspects of the situation. I know we have some nice pilot figures that people include in some of our aircraft. How hard would it be to develop a nicely detailed sky diver model that can be posed in typical free fall positions? Thanks, Curt. -- Curtis Olson: http://baron.flightgear.org/~curt/
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