Originally Posted by
megan
National Safety Council of Australia planned to use pigeons in aircraft for search and rescue, don't know how far they got with it before the organisation went bust. Also engaged in fire fighting in the mountains, among other things, one proposal they had was to parachute horses into the back country from a C-130 so the fire fighters had a means of transport, believe it or not.
My late uncle served with the RAF (on the ground) in India and Burma in WW2. He told me about one episode where resupply trials were held, where mules were dropped in parachute equipped crates from very low level. Some of the parachutes didn’t open and the crates rolled over and over, breaking apart. They went over to the drop zone expecting to have to deal with battered mule corpses but they were all up on their feet and calmly eating grass!