I don't even think they care about direction. They just need some horizontal velocity to make capture easier.

According to my jumpmaster that was an 82nd Airborne veteran, the round chutes don't give you much control at all. There's a slight horizontal motion component and you can swivel into the wind to negate some ground speed, but there's not enough control to land where you want.

In fact, they don't want regular paratroopers to be able to steer, unlike special forces with ram air chutes, because there's so many of them in the same space at the same time. There would be a lot of collisions. In addition, the round chutes are more reliable which is important in low level jumps, and they do pack smaller for the same amount of decent rate. Between cost, reliability, and package size, that's why most civilians opt for round reserves instead of ram air, or at least used to when I was fooling with it.

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I love sanding.

Does not have nearly as much forward airspeed and has a shallow descent angle compared to a parafoil/wing type of parachute.

Trying to land near the site at 5 mph glide speed, into a 10 mph wind, won't end up so well.

Shortly after I got into the hobby, I actually converted an Estes chute into a gliding chute. I cut two "flaps", into the canopy, each trapezoidal, with the upper narrow end NOT cut, to act like a hinge, while the rest of each flap was nearly horizontal when deployed, billowing "behind" the chute. Glide was something like 45 degrees, at best, maybe 60 degree descent (worse glide).

But I did not have a practical use for it, beyond a novelty thing. So I did not do anything further with it.

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I figured someone must have done this since conceptually it wouldn't be hard to do, so I did a keyword search:

Build a Rogallo Wing, Rocket boosted glider part 1

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LABk96aucdM

I'm not saying that this would be practical for commercial booster recovery.

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The other day I sat next to a woman who has a profound fear of flying. I wanted to comfort her, so I said, "Don't worry, we're not gonna' crash. Statistically, we got a better chance of being bitten by a shark." Then I showed her the scar on my elbow from a shark attack. I said, "I got this when my plane went down off of Florida." - Dennis Regan

Model Rocket Flex-Wing gliders have been around for a LONG time, years before I got into it. I made my first ones around 1972-73. Learned a lot, became a "flex-wing whisperer" to trim them. Wrote articles about them, and most of the ones people have built have been based on my articles/plans one way or another, even if they didn't know it, such as people who read my stuff then made their own version and documented their versions, then people read about their versions, and so on (the one in Tim's very good video is pretty much what I had by 1974).

This in The Model Rocketeer in the early 1980's:

In the photo above that shows two gliders, the larger one at right had a "Dethermalizer" to cause one wing to fold up and fall quickly once a smoldering DT fuse burned elastic thread to release it at the desired time range. Those were "E" sized, to fly at the 1980 World SpaceModeling Championships in Lakehurst, NJ. Spars 24", 36" booster using 2 staged D12's. Had two perfect flights. But it was very windy and by the time the model hit the Max time (5 or 6 minutes), and the DT brought it down, both were in deep woods and could not be returned despite an excellent US Recovery crew. The rules only allowed 2 models for 3 flights. If I'd gotten one back, and it worked as well, I'd have been in a 3-way tie for the flyoff and sure to get a medal of some color. That was not even my most advanced flex-wing.....

I do not think there is anyone in the hobby that has built and flown more, or been more successful with them over the years.

Here is video of an A powered low altitude test of a C sized glider (18" spars), preparing for NARAM a few years ago.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=A_N6JAAHI9E

And a couple of Rocket Glider flex-wings, where nothing separated. 13mm size model left (1/4 mil mylar wings), and 18mm size model at right (polyester lining wings). From about 1976 or so.



Also there were plans to land Gemini spacecraft using an inflatable Rogallo. But it had some reliability issues and time ran out to solve them before they had to freeze the design and go with a regular chute.

No point in getting into the Gemini Rogallo stuff here, you can Google "Gemini Rogallo" for the history, pics, and so forth. Also there is an excellent relatively recently made video by The Retro Space on Youtube that covers that VERY well (It is Amy's favorite Space project, she has a tattoo of it). https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=sKt-UyNwQHw

__________________
Contest flying, Sport flying, it's all good.....
NAR# 18723 NAR.org
GeorgesRockets.com
Georges'CancerGoFundMe:
https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-geo...ay-fight-cancer