Xjyuk

What is the record for the largest single solid item that has ever been dropped from an airplane at free fall to the ground?

1. Here, "free fall" means falling vertically, or nearly vertically
   
   falling allowing some leeway for expected horizontal movement such
   as the ground speed of the plane doing the drop, winds, or
   unintended Magnus effect among other things, and allows for normal atmospheric air resistance.



2. The object being dropped should be payload, not part of the vehicle
   doing the dropping.




3. The object should not be designed with the intent to generate lift.
   For example, the above mentioned Magnus effect would disqualify
   if a machine was purposely built to spin with the intention of generating lift. This includes things with wings, parachutes, landing thrusters, etc.




4. The object must have hit the ground in an uncontrolled descent in the past. In other words, satellites in free-fall orbit around the Earth do not count unless they fell to the ground and then got re-launched into orbit again (unlikely)




5. Objects that burn up in the atmosphere do not reach the ground as a single solid object, so they do not count unless any possibly remaining fragment that may reach the ground is still the biggest object to be dropped and reach the ground in its destroyed state (unlikely).




6. The item does not have to have been intentionally dropped. For example, if it were dropped with a parachute, but the parachute failed to deploy, that counts.




7. Bombs easily count as long as they don't have a parachute, thrusters, wings or any other design factor that is intended to generate lift.




8. Last, but not least, "largest" means greatest volume, not heaviest.

I can't think of anything dropped from an aircraft larger than the US Space Shuttle when it was dropped from a specially modified 747 during the testing phases of development.

If we're counting the Space Shuttle orbiter, then I'd say it's probably that's probably the winner at around 150,000 pounds. As Juan's answer describes, it was dropped from the Shuttle Carrier Aircraft for glide testing before the first shuttle launches. The orbiter 'glides' about as well as the average brick, so this seems like it should count.

Other possible contenders I can think of:

• Pegasus XL, an air-launched rocket. It is dropped from an aircraft, after which point its rocket motor ignites to launch a satellite into orbit. Approximately 51,000 pounds.




• The Minuteman 1b inter-continental ballistic missile. While normally launched from the ground, a test was conducted on 24 October 1974 in which one was dropped and launched from the cargo bay of a C-5 Galaxy. According to the USAF, the dropped missile stack weighed 86,000 pounds.




• The absurdly-large Russian fusion bomb RDS-220, better known in the West as "Tsar Bomba," coming in around 60,000 pounds.

It's also worth noting that all of these may be soon blown out of the water if Stratolaunch Systems gets their way. The Stratolaunch Carrier Aircraft is capable of dropping 550,000 pounds of rocket stack payload. The first test flight of the carrier aircraft has been completed, but it hasn't dropped a payload yet.

A good candidate here is the US T-12 cloudmaker (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-12_Cloudmaker) at 43,600 lbs.

If you consider the space shuttle an aircraft its self, the external tank was dropped after it was depleted and broke up on impact to the Indian ocean. The heavy early version weight 58,000 LBS empty and 1.68 Million LBS fully loaded. While not heavier than the shuttle it was volumetrically larger.

Not dropped from an aircraft, and was part of the vehicle but Saturn V’s first stage was jettisoned at the weight of more than 360000 lbs or 160000 kgs. On Apollo 11 the mass of the first stage was 363425 lbs when jettisoned. After that, it fell freely to the ocean.

Source: http://apollo11nasa.blogspot.com/2012/07/saturn-v-inert-weight-or-dry-weight-or_22.html?m=1