Otto Heinecke, a German airship ground crewman, designed a parachute which the German air service introduced in 1918, becoming the world's first air service to introduce a standard parachute. Although many pilots were saved by these, their efficacy was relatively poor. Out of the first 70 German airmen to bail out, around a third died, including aces such as Oberleutnant Erich Löwenhardt (who fell from after being accidentally rammed by another German aircraft) and Fritz Rumey who tested it in 1918, only to have it fail at a little over . These fatalities were mostly due to the chute or ripcord becoming entangled in the airframe of their spinning aircraft or because of harness failure, a problem fixed in later versions.