Development of a Helicopter Sling Load Unmanned Hookup Device

Helicopter Sling Load (HSL) missions pose significant safety risks to the ground personnel involved with hooking up payloads to the helicopter. The goal of this project is to develop a materiel solution to increase the safety of an HSL hookup team by eliminating the personnel subjected to the hazards of the HSL mission. The research reviewed in this paper discusses two concepts that were evaluated for HSL auto hookup capabilities: a grapple hook design with three spring articulating arms and a system that used a cone on cone design. For this project, flight evaluations were conducted on prototypes of the two concepts with the following Army helicopters: LUH-72 Lakota, UH-60 Blackhawk, and CH-47 Chinook. There are two modes of HSL that were looked at for this project: single point sling load and dual point sling loads.