18/10/2024
A Brave Woman who saved Thousands of Lives by Inventing the Ripcord
Georgia “Tiny” Broadwick was the first woman to jump from an airplane.
She completed over 1,100 jumps between 1913 and 1922. She invented the ripcord and is the only female member of the Early Birds of Aviation.
In 1914, she demonstrated parachutes to the U.S. Army, which at the time had a small, hazard-prone fleet of aircraft.
The Army, reluctant at first to adopt the parachute, watched as Tiny dropped from the sky.
On one of her demonstration jumps, the static line became entangled in the tail assembly of the aircraft, so for her next jump she cut off the static line and deployed her chute manually, thus becoming the first person to jump free-fall.
This demonstrated that pilots could escape aircraft by using what was later called a ripcord.
