Austrian manufacturer ULBRICHTS is already famous for its unrivaled helmets widely used by police forces and special units throughout the world. Now, the company is launching a helmet range based on its new lightweight OPTIO (three different cuts), a boltless upgrade of its First Responder model, with a strong motto: with heavy body armor, you protect your heart but why don’t you protect your brain with a helmet weighing only 1.2kg?To get more news about ballistic helmet, you can visit bulletproofboxs.com official website.
Army Recognition wanted to check what head protection ‘’common’’ army unit soldiers and police officers benefit from with their standard issue helmets, in terms of ballistic protection (perforation/penetration and trauma). The major helmet is a classical NIJ IIIA helmet, which can be a composite(aramid or polyethylene) helmet.The idea came up to compare some standard NIJ IIIA helmets with what ULBRICHTS, the ‘’champion’’ in this field, now proposes with its OPTIO. Survivability is at stake! By survivability, one must understand that for saving a soldier’s life, it is essential not only to stop a bullet but also to protect the wearer from a deadly brain trauma caused by the backface deformation of the helmet.
In a nutshell: ULBRICHTS offers with its OPTIO true protection beyond NIJ IIIA starting at 1,2kg, whilst common military NIJ IIIA helmets have a deadly backface deformation when hit by a handgun and a deadly hole when hit by rifle ammunition.
So, Army Recognition went to ULBRICHTS’ factory, located between Salzburg and Linz, and attended a series of firing tests on ULBRICHTS helmets, with and without additional shields, and on classical NIJ IIIA helmets currently issued to nearly all armies… which we shall prudently not name, considering the frightening results we personally assessed. The following tests were executed on November 23 at a distance of 5 meters for handgun ammunition, and 10 meters for rifle ammunition, with various helmets, put on a ‘’normed soap head – specified by VPAM HVN’’, the material commonly used to relevantly represent the human head density, with the results indicated after each test:
Engineers with various combined skills are working on a new material called POLYTANIUM (a special combination of polyethylene and titanium) that will further increase the currently unrivaled efficiency of ULBRICHTS’ helmets. Secrecy is naturally a duty. The serial manufacture of ULBRICHTS’ helmets is partly robotized but human intervention remains needed from some of the 300+ workers employed by the company working for two business divisions: Protection and Automotive.
The dramatic lesson taught by the tests assessed by Army Recognition is that most or nearly all NIJ IIIA helmets commonly issued to the army and police units efficiently protect against shrapnel but not against any of the most widely spread ammunition fired in current armed conflicts: When hit by a 9x19 handgun ammunition they cause a deadly trauma and when hit rifle ammo like 7.62x36mm MSCfired by Kalashnikov variants or 5.56x45mm fired by M4A1 variants, or the .308 fired by sniper rifles they are even fully penetrated.
ULBRICHTS’ new OPTIO helmet provides unrivaled ballistic protection and is at the same time extremely light and comfortable. The protection performance against back face deformation and trauma as well as against rifle thread is unreached.
For these reasons, the OPTIO is the perfect helmet for elite special forces in police and military as well as for police on patrol and common soldiers.