Tipping the air out of a parachute at 28000

[General Savage]

Here is another true story of an allied pilot [ Lieutenant Felty] being helped by a German fighter pilot.
Feltys' 17th mission targeted the oil refineries in Brux Czechoslovakia. Over Frieberg Germany his B-17 was attacked by fighters and then hit by heavy flack. The engines and wings erupted in fire and and the order was given to the crew to bail out.
As pilot, Felty was one of the last to go and bailed out through the open bomb bay doors. They were at 28,000 and standard procedure was to free fall to a lower altitude where there was adequate oxygen necessary for survival. Felty inadvertently deployed his chute right out of the B-17 and was hanging in his harness at a high altitude where he was at risk of dying from lack of oxygen. Felty watched the B-17 nose over and explode. He was able to see the chutes of his crew mates, who all survived the bail out.
Felty saw a Messerschmitt BF-109 coming directly at him and assumed the pilot was going to open up with his machine guns. Lieutenant Felty was stunned to realize that instead the Luftwaffe pilot passed very close to him causing his parachute to collapse in the prop wash allowing him to free fall to a lower altitude. The Luftwaffe pilot did a series of figure 8 maneuvers around Felty bringing him safely to the ground.
Lieutenant Felty was sent to the famous Stalag Luft III near Sagan Germany on the Polish border.
Read the full story here in this great site.
http://northstargallery.com/Aircraft...arrenfelty.htm

[Jon]

Hi,
I can't speak as a verteran B17 crewman, but i can speak as a veteran of over 1000 sport parachute jumps a few hundred in my early days on round canopies.
28,000ft is a long way up and the crewman would not have been conscious for very long at all. Its certainly possible to collapse a parachute by pulling in on one of the risers and a roud parachute would soon stream and lose height rapidly. We always used to say we needed oxygen at 20,000 feet in the uk and i admitt to only every getting out several times at this height, usually 14k in Britain. A round parachute would open straight away after it had collapsed only falling a few hundred feet each time, thats a lot of passes by the fighter to get him down to a safe height. I am more inclined to think it was a game by the Luftwaffe pilot, i have read accounts of pilots doing this for fun over Malta and actually posted that quetion on this forum a few months back.
I think it was a happy Luftwaffe pilot having a bit of "fun" at a downed US crewmans expense.
Regards
Jon