“SKYHOOK”: THE CRAZIEST EXTRACTION SYSTEM EVER BUILT
In the 1950s the CIA, the US Air Force and the Navy developed the Fulton Surface-to-Air Recovery System (STARS), a system for pulling people off the ground immediately. One or two men climb into a full-body suit that is connected by a line to a self-inflating balloon. A transport aircraft flies at the line hanging in the air and catches it with a V-shaped yoke. The connection to the balloon cuts automatically, the man is towed along behind the aircraft and can be winched on board.
The tests were based on a similar system that had already worked in World War II. Dummies came first, later live pigs, because their nervous system is close to a human one. When one pig was picked up off the ground, it started to spin while it flew through the air at around 200 km/h. It made it on board unhurt but disoriented. Once it came round, it attacked the crew.
STARS, also known as “Skyhook”, was finished in 1958. The system could be dropped from an aircraft and contained the equipment needed to recover cargo or people. The forces acting on a man are roughly those of a parachute jump, and the pickup takes up to six minutes.
The first operational use of Skyhook was Project Coldfeet, an investigation of the Soviet drift ice station NP-8 during the Cold War. Two agents parachuted in during May 1962 and were extracted three days later with the STARS system, Soviet equipment and all. The mission produced information on Soviet research activity in the Arctic, including evidence of work on systems for detecting and attacking submarines there.
Despite the high risk, there was only one fatal accident in 17 years of use. On April 26, 1982, SFC Strickland fell to his death because of a defect in the yoke on the aircraft.
Long-range helicopters became more widely available and made the system redundant, so it was officially retired in 1996. Civilian companies developed the idea further, and versions of it are still being tested today.
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