- To jump out, they would need to open the doors. There would be problems with decompression at above 10K.
- You have to deal with people unable to use parachutes. Children, elderly, disabled, afraid of heights, and panicked.
- There’s an assumption an airplane remains level enough. If it’s spinning or nose down, trying to reach an exit is another problem.
- If jumping out ahead of the wing, there’s a risk of getting sucked into the engines.
- Parqchutes are bulky. Trying to get them out of storage and distribute them to a couple hundred untrained people is a tall order.
- Putting on a parachute, correclty strapping it, knowing when and where to pull the cord, and knowing how to land without breaking bones, hitting tree branches, or ditching into water. These are all issues you can’t teach during preflight safety instruction.
Overall, everyone would be better off staying put, not panicking, and hoping a plane and trained pilots can get everyone on the ground, safely.
If a plane can stay level enough for long enough to get people into parachute gear and out the door, chances are good that the pilots can land that plane, which significantly decreases the chances of injury to the passengers.
Building them into the seats makes about all those problems go away. But decreases the amount of seats you can fit on plane and amount of money made per flight and therefore is never going to happen
You have to check them before every flight though.
So, some kind of detachable roof that doesn’t randomly detach when it shouldn’t? This also doesn’t solve the speed, air pressure, and cold problems for the people in the seats.
How do you envisage it working in practice? If a plane had a disaster that will make it crash in a matter of minutes, people wouldn’t form an orderly line to jump out with their parachutes. And if the malfunction is not making the plane crash in the next 5 minutes, the plane can probably land safely at the nearest airport.
So another reason is that first class passengers would be at the back of the queue? [ * for the ramp at the back when parachuting]
Not necessarily. I’ve flown on many flights where the first class has its own door at the front of the plane, and the lower classes have their entrances further down the fuselage, so that the first class isn’t bother by the boarding plebs. I fly pleb class btw.
I don’t think you can parachute from the front door (which would also put you in front of the engines) - the only airliner stairs to open in flight were at the back.
Haha that is such a good point!
Parachutes require pretty specific conditions to be able to use, and they require a fair amount of know-how. Expecting random passengers to be able to operate a parachute at all is basically a losing battle, and if you had people jumping out of planes that were on their way down, you’d have a lot more people dying (speculation but I’d wager money on it) than if they just stayed in the plane. Plus it’d be a horrible look for the airline - even worse than a plane crashing and killing everyone on it - if they had dead people raining down over cities and whatnot because they jumped and didn’t properly deploy their chute, or deployed it too quickly, or didn’t jump at the right time and got hit by the plane or any number of other possible problems.
Fighter jets and the like have ejection seats that specifically propel the pilot away from the plane before deploying the chute, and recreational (or military) planes that people are jumping from are designed for that purpose, and are moving a lot slower than commercial airliners. Opening the door on a plane to let people jump would cause more problems than keeping them on the plane. (People getting sucked out the door and the like.) Getting passengers safely clear of a plane that’s going down unrecoverably would be basically impossible.
Plus a lot of flights are above ocean or rough terrain a lot of the time, limiting the possibilities even more.
Ah, yeah this makes total sense actually. Thanks for the insight!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Piantanida
This guy was in a remote controlled, parachute equipped gondola at 17km altitude wearing a pressurized suite. His suit broke and even though the emergency descent of the gondola was immediately activated to descend safely, he later died from embolism (bubbles forming in the blood because of rapidly decreasing pressure). Passenger jets cruise at about 11km so i gather it would be similar.
Wtf, Felix Baumgartner’s Jump was over 12 years ago in 2012? That can’t be right, what wibbly wobbly time fuckery is this?? 😵💫
Just train random airline passengers on how to properly perform a HALO jump during the pre-flight safety briefing. I’m sure it’s fine.
Commercial airlines also fly really high up. If you were ejected at cruising altitude, the first thing you would do is pass out and fall for a few minutes. Hopefully you wake up in time to orient yourself and activate a parachute.
That’s not to say you couldn’t have an auto deploy mechanism at a given altitude. I haven’t skydived (skydove?) in years, but isn’t there an emergency deployment mechanism if the chute hasn’t deployed by a certain altitude?
There probably is, but that brings in another huge problem. Maintenance of all this stuff, parachutes can’t just stay packed indefinitely. Maintaining 100s of parachutes per plane is wildly impractical.
True, plus the liability. I’d also imagine the optics might be a bit better when you have the plane go kaboom into the ground vs having a number of people go splat in a populated area.
The emergency deployment system is your skydiving instructor grabbing onto you and pulling the cords of your primary (in case it was user error), then secondary (in case the primary failed) and finally just holding on while the instructor deploys their chute.
I know absolutely nothing about this, but aren’t there parachutes that basically just auto-deploy as soon as you jump? I seem to remember seeing something where people hop out and are followed out by a long piece of string that catches on the plane and yanks the chute when it hits a certain length, or something like that. Presumably they don’t work at 11km elevation though.
You’re describing a static line jump. You’re also right that it’s irrelevant to passengers jumping out at an extreme altitude and having a parachute open much later. Static lines are used for planes that are already flying at an appropriate altitude for the parachute to open.
Yeah just looked it up and that’s exactly what I was thinking of! Aside from the obvious technical limitations and the part where you probably couldn’t teach average Joes to parachute reliably, I imagine the simple act of getting everyone to actually jump out of a plane is probably immeasurably difficult too. Like I know people who won’t even walk across certain bridges because their fear of heights just won’t allow it, getting someone like that to muster the courage to jump would be impossible.
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- Passengers airplane often fly too high and too fast to safely parachute from
- Passengers need to be trained to parachute
- Planes rarely crash
Jupp, fair reasons those
- If every psycho and their dog knew there was a parachute onboard for them it would happen often that some drunk asshole decided today was they day they’re gonna jump from a commercial flight
- It would take a lot of time to have 150 persons jump and people go crazy even when the plane safely lands, just to go off board
- (Or maybe addendum to 1. Or 3.) Most complications in flights occur near takeoff and landing. These are altitudes not conducive for parachutes.
No it’d be some Karen who got scared by turbulence trying to jump after convincing half the plane that she knew they were going to crash because of it. The same type of “do your own research” crowd that convinced half the population that COVID was a hoax because they know better!
Because imagine trying to, not only, put your own on. But then getting your kids into them…
Found Captain Kirk’s account.
That question got me thinking: In which major disaster would there have been time to get people off board and deploy parachutes? Any major disaster I can think of happened so fast or unbeknownst to anyone on board, or in unfavorable conditions for parachutes, i.e. takeoff or landing.
The only one coming to mind is the Gimli glider and that turned out fine.
There’s been tons of slow moving air disasters where there would have been time to suit up and jump from a safe altitude. Lots of electrical fires, jammed cables and shoddy repairs over the years.
I SAW A VIDEO ABOUT THIS 20 MINUTES AGO
lol I watched this like yesterday
Hahaha I didn’t think the odds for the life vest execution would be so bad, and that’s way more simple than a parachute.
I’m in your head 😈
I’m sorry for whatever you see in there 😭
Please send help… 😢
I’ve seen a concept of an airplane that can eject sections of it’s hull, each equipped with a large parachute. This can solve the problem of “how to put parachutes on each passenger including kids, disabled and panicked and teach them how to use it”. Also it doesn’t require the plane to maintain certain height, speed or angle for parachuting.
But of course it will add extra weight to carry, because not only they’ll need to install big parachutes, but also ejection system and something to seal off ejectable sections.
Ejectable doors are already a feature for Boeing airplanes.
Instead of a regular backpack can I just bring a parachute as my carryon?
Yes. TSA has special screening procedures for parachutes.
I want to rent one of those airport mall storefronts and sell parachutes to 737 max customers.
People don’t want to wear a facemask. Imagine a parachute. We are truly garbage.
I literally thought about this on my flight a couple weeks ago, if the plane loses power in the air most people in the plane are just gonna go down with it. I imagine most if not all passengers have no idea how to properly operate a parachute.
Some chance would be better than none right? Don’t they have parachutes that automatically deploy at a specific height?
At what cost though? Like a single parachute without an automatic release system costs hundreds, if not thousands. You multiply that by 150 and it’s infeasible. Now include an automatic deployment system, and we’re talking tens of thousands per unit. Not including maintenance and repairs, long-term storage costs, the added weight on the plane. All these costs would be added to passenger tickets at a markup, so that $450 flight across the country is now a $700 flight. The risk also still remains because of depressurization issues, even if you make it to the surface your blood might boil in your body and still cause you to pass.
Logistically, plane accidents that result in loss of life are so rare that it would make more sense to equip every car in production with ejector seats then it would to equip every plane seat with automated parachutes.
Or parachutes for the plane itself?
It works for the Cirrus because that plane is tiny. A parachute big enough to safely land a commercial jet is not feasible.
If a commercial plane has a failure, say an engine failure as in the news story, the pilots with fly the plane with the other engine to a safe landing.
If the Cirrus has an engine failure it becomes a glider. If there’s no airports nearby you’ll have to ditch in a field somewhere. There is a lot less redundancy in general aviation.
If you’re a new pilot buying your first plane, having a parachute on the plane is a nice feature.
It’s worth noting that all commercial aircraft that operate over water (so, the vast majority, excepting very small commercial aircraft and four-engine behemoths) have ETOPS ratings. [ETOPS, Extended-range Twin-engine Operations Performance Standards](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ETOPS#:~:text=ETOPS%20(%2Fi%CB%90%CB%88t%C9%92,%2Dengine%2Dinoperative%20flight%20conditions.) specifies the amount of time the aircraft can operate on a single engine, measured in minutes. ETOPS-180 is a pretty common rating.
If a comercial plane has both engines fail and can’t be restarted, it also turnes into a glider, a small wind turbine will deploy and power basic instruments and controls, check this out:
Cuz based on the type of accidents, it probably wouldn’t make sense. It is just adding extra cost.
You’re not counting children and babies, how will they go out? and besides all the passengers will have to be wearing the parachutes during the flight.
