The U.S. Army and Air Force have available to them a well-proven emergency food air-drop system that will allow us to quickly deliver emergency food rations directly to the starving Haitians without the need for secondary ground transport from the recently established air-drop zones. It was used widely during 1993-1994 in Bosnia, and again during 2001 in Afghanistan.

It is called TRIADS, for Tri-wall Aerial Delivery System, can be used with both C-130 and C-17 cargo planes, and is documented in U.S. Army Field Manual 4-20.147/Air Force TO 13C7-37-31, “AIRDROP OF SUPPLIES AND EQUIPMENT: Humanitarian Airdrop”, last updated in January of 2005. Chapter 2 of this manual details the complete rigging details.

The method is simple–simply drop foil-wrapped packets of food, such as granola bars, candy bars, and MREs (military Meals Ready to Eat) from the cargo ramp of a plane. Terminal resistance assures that these lightweight food packets will not harm anyone on the ground, and that they will remain sealed and edible, even if dropped from thousands of feet.

You can watch a 4-minute YouTube video showing an actual 2001 TRIADS mission in Afghanistan at http://bit.ly/TRIADSvideo

You can download the official Field Manual at http://bit.ly/TRIADSmanual

TRIADS relies on the geometry of the foil pouches the MREs are contained in to flutter them to the ground, directly over the population in need. Because of the wide dispersion, the starving children and adults have as much of a chance to get some food as do the thugs running around with machetes, and it becomes impossible for those thugs to take-over and hoard entire pallets of food.

This system was used in Bosnia and Afghanistan, and can distribute over 32,000 MREs per C-17 drop (816 MREs in each of the 40 TRIAD boxes it can carry). Because a TRIAD package can be assembled, rigged, and loaded far more quickly than the parachute-based air-drops we have seen used this week, and because there is no additional ground transport required, TRIADS can deliver far more food to far more people in less time than any other method that can be deployed in Haiti over the next week.

It also is much less costly than the parachute-based air-drops, which means far more food can be delivered for each donated dollar.

Please forward this message to anyone you know who might be able to get a high-ranking disaster relief official, military official, or politician to start using this system ASAP!

For those interested in more details of this “food fluttering”, here is some additional background:

• Dr. Bill Wattenburg’s pitch for dropping food from planes:
  http://www.kgoradio.com/Article.asp?id=1662660&nId=0&spid=33179
• YouTube video of Afghanistan airdrops of individual meal packets:
  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kCxwprZekpM
• Dropping food from airplanes — without parachutes?–class notes of U.C. Berkeley professor Richard Muller (author of Physics for Future Presidents)
  http://muller.lbl.gov/teaching/Physics10/old%20physics%2010/chapters%20(old)/7-DroppingFood.html
• High-Tech Cardboard Boxes Used In Afghan Food Airdrops–Describes the Tri-Wall Aerial Delivery System used in Bosnia and Afghanistan to deliver tens of thousands of MREs
  http://www.defense.gov/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=44648
• U.S. Air Force Airdop News Page ((from the Internet Archive, because the military deleted this site)–has a ton of news items about the 2001 TRIAD air-drops that delivered 2 million packets of food in Afghanistan.
  http://web.archive.org/web/20060222040836/www.usafe.af.mil/airdrop/news.htm