From San Diego in 1916, Smith won the Aero Club of America's Medal of Merit by setting three altitude records, flying a Martin S seaplane reaching that aircraft's ceiling of 12,333 feet.

During World War I, he formed the Floyd Smith Aerial Equipment Company in San Diego, California.

In May 1920, he won a patent for the first back pack, free fall type, ripcord operated parachute, designed in response to his wife Hilder Florentina Smith's near fatal static line jump in 1914.

Smith's original ripcord parachute is on display at the National Museum of the United States Air Force at Dayton, Ohio.

[5] In 1938, Smith helped start and run the Pioneer Parachute Company of Manchester, Connecticut, working as vice president and chief engineer.

At the peak, 3,000 employees made 300 parachutes each day, making Pioneer one of the largest suppliers for American servicemen who jumped behind enemy lines on D-Day.

[7] Prevost Smith made chutes for astronauts, military weapons drops, the US Navy, the USAF, and large defense contractors.

[1] In April 1914, after his wife Hilder's near fatal static line jump, Smith worked to improve parachute design.

[12] On 28 April 1919 using the "Type A" 28-foot backpack parachute, volunteer Leslie Irvin, flying in a Smith piloted de Havilland DH9 biplane at 100 mph and 1500 feet above the ground, jumped (with a backup chute strapped to his chest) and manually pulled the ripcord fully deploying his chute at 1000 feet.

On 20 October 1922, Lieutenant Harold R. Harris, chief of the McCook Field Flying Station, jumped from a disabled Loening PW-2A high wing monoplane fighter.

Harris' lifesaving chute was mounted on the wall of McCook's parachute lab where the Dayton Herald's aviation editor Maurice Hutton and photographer Verne Timmerman, predicting more jumps in future, suggested that a club should be formed.

Two years later, Irvin's company instituted the Caterpillar Club, awarding a gold pin to pilots who successfully bailed out of disabled aircraft using an Irving parachute.