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Photo courtesy Battelle.
It’s not the type of thing one expects to see lying on a conference table.
Then again, it’s a table at Battelle, the secretive research institute brimming with military contracts. And so beholding the large grappling hook launcher—flanked by a hulking former Navy SEAL and the engineer who developed it—should hardly come as a surprise.
A similar device is depicted in Batman comics and films, in which the Dark Knight routinely employs a small handheld grappler to make dramatic rescues of plummeting civilians and distressed damsels. This one’s a little different, though.
Called the Tactical Air Initiated Launch system (TAIL for short), it’s the baby of Battelle mechanical engineer Jim LaBine, who designed and built it in a measly nine months for the U.S. government. Additionally, it made a recent appearance on the Discovery Channel’s survival show “Man vs. Wild.” Mike McCarthy, program manager for Battelle’s special technology program office, even traveled to Norway to consult the show’s host, Bear Grylls, on how to properly use the device, which was designed specifically for Navy SEALs.
The four-and-a-half-foot-long, 20-pound TAIL is pneumatic, meaning it’s powered by compressed air rather than much-louder gunpowder to help maintain stealth. In fact, there’s even a valve just beneath the gun’s stock that hooks directly to the nozzle of a scuba air hose. “This method of shooting a hook allows the user to fire . . . without the noise, explosives or safety issues associated with powder-driven units,” LaBine says.
When launched, a lead SEAL climber can scale the Kevlar tow cable after the titanium grappling hook is secured and drop a caving ladder made of steel cable—which LaBine also developed—to team members below. Grylls, a former member of Britain’s elite Special Air Service, used the launcher to shimmy across a gorge in the wilderness outside the Norwegian city of Voss during a late October filming (the episode aired March 3).
A former SEAL, McCarthy has worked for Battelle for nine years as a liaison of sorts for the military clients with whom the institute does business. One of those clients, the U.S. Department of Defense, was in need of a grappling device that could launch at least 120 feet vertically for use during SEALs’ naval boarding exercises and operations (think thwarting Somali pirates, among many other possible uses).
But a grappling hook isn’t the only device TAIL is capable of discharging. Though still in its prototype phases, it also can be employed to launch “just about anything that can fit in its barrel,” McCarthy says. LaBine particularly sees big benefits for firefighters and says Battelle is working on “a less costly solution that will meet their needs.”
Next, perhaps, LaBine can develop a synthetic webbing that allows its operators to swing from skyscrapers.
