this post was submitted on 03 Sep 2024
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Parachute effectiveness is a very reasonable thing to study, it's pretty important to know how one parachute design performs compared to other designs and the obvious baseline is no parachute. A lot of things which appear to be self-evident have been extensively studied, generally you don't want to just assume you know how something works.
Though throwing people out of a plane at altitude with no parachute probably isn't the most ethical way to study parachute effectiveness.
I think we know enough about aerodynamics that we can probably simulate it in the computer if we really cared to. My point is more that it's probably never been studied at an academic level, I'm sure parachute manufacturers ans various militaries have studied all sorts of things. But none of that would have made it into a research paper.
Here's a study on cadavers to determine whether people have the same number of nose hairs in each nostril. In academia there is no such thing as too trivial.
There's plenty of studies on parachutes for spacecraft (eg, here's one on aerodynamics of parachutes for mars landing) so if you follow the references somewhere down the line you'll probably find studies on general parachute effectiveness.
You have to search using language that papers might actually use though. "Parachute effectiveness" means what the satirical paper is exploring, whether it prevents death or not. The only serious studies that might have used that language would be old WW2 studies that threw people out of planes with different parachutes to see how many survived.
If you want to know how to design an effective parachute, you should be looking at reference books like Parachute Recovery Systems instead.