Airdrop

An airdrop is a type of airlift, developed during World War II to resupply otherwise inaccessible troops, who themselves may have been airborne forces. In some cases, it is used to refer to the airborne assault itself. Early airdrops were conducted by dropping or pushing padded bundles from aircraft. Later small crates with parachutes were pushed out of the aircraft's side cargo doors. Later cargo aircraft were designed with rear access ramps, lowerable in flight, that allowed large platforms to be rolled out the back.

As aircraft grew larger, the U.S. Air Force and Army developed low-level extraction, allowing tanks and other large supplies to be delivered, such as the M551 Sheridan or M2 Bradley. Propaganda leaflets are also a common item to airdrop.

The airdropping of weapons evolved to the concept of having the payload itself as one massive bomb. The 15,000 pound (6,800 kg) BLU-82, nicknamed the "Daisy Cutter" for its ability to turn a dense forest into a helicopter landing zone in a single blast, was used in Vietnam and recently in Afghanistan. The 22,600 pound (10,250 kg) GBU-43/B, nicknamed the "Mother Of All Bombs", was deployed to the Persian Gulf for The Iraq War. These palletized airdropped weapons are used by cargo aircraft like the C-130 or C-17 in the traditional role of a bomber aircraft.

Airdrop (disambiguation)

An airdrop is a re-supply tactic created during World War II.

Computing

AirDrop is a protocol developed by Apple to share files over a local network.

AirDrop

AirDrop is an ad-hoc service in Apple Inc.'s OS X and iOS operating systems, introduced in Mac OS X Lion (OS X 10.7) and iOS 7, that enables the transfer of documents among supported Macintosh computers and iOS devices without using mail or a mass storage device.

Before OS X Yosemite, the AirDrop protocol used was different from the AirDrop protocol used in iOS, and is therefore not interoperable with each other. However, OS X Yosemite and later support the iOS AirDrop protocol (uses both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth), which is used for transfers between a Mac and an iOS device as well as between two 2012 or later Mac computers. Legacy mode for the old AirDrop protocol (only uses Wi-Fi ) between two 2012 or older Mac computers is also available.

There is no restriction on the size of the document that AirDrop will accommodate. Apple users report AirDrop transmissions of video documents larger than 10 GB.