Passengers on airliners do not have parachutes...why?

I had this idea back in 99 when i was in service. A friend's dad worked at lockeedmartin and they done a bit of research. It was after that when the small plane was designed with a parachute. There was a football player that was killed in newyork in one of these planes and the whole idea was scraped.

My thought for commercial liners was to build the cabin in modules that would be released from the rest of the plane. Instead of people having chutes it was chutes for sections of the plane. They did not like the thought of a highjacker being able to crash a plane by employing emergency chute deployment falsely. However the process does work.

Here's one...

DO first class passengers get the better parachutes as they do pay more, and could you see the steward/stewardess trying to explain how to properly put one on and how to actually use them.

Something I would pay extra to see.

It's at least a 3 hour course you have to take to sky dive. Do you think every 80 year old ladies going to take a certification course before they fly off to Hawaii?
Landing is no joke, either.

originally posted by: tsurfer2000h
DO first class passengers get the better parachutes as they do pay more...

Yes. Theirs have no rips in them.

originally posted by: AugustusMasonicus

originally posted by: Fylgje
The pod, the cylinder that all passengers are sitting in, would detach from the plane...

How would it detach? What safe method is there to have 200' of aircraft fuselage separate from the remainder of the airframe?

I have two different ideas for this;
1. Imagine the plane but the passenger area is missing; Sort of like the top half of the plane is missing(seating area). That top half, whether one piece or two, in the event of a serious emergency, can be detached the same way a fighter pilot ejects, or by spring load. Either the pilot could activate it or onboard systems would.

2. Either each seat is a pod or each row of seats is a pod. Once passengers are seated, they simply close the door to the pod. If the plane is going down, again, either the pilot, or onboard system ejects the pods. Remember the wonderful movie: Twister? When all those pods were swept up in the tornado? Same concept. Each pod has emergency air and life-saving supplies. And peanuts.

I would rather have a chance then no chance at all when in an airplane.

originally posted by: Zaphod58
a reply to: Fylgje

What about accidents where the fuselage is compromised? Now your pod is compromised.

Maybe, but through tests you try and make that less likely to happen. How many fighter pilots couldn't eject? I'm sure there were a few, but I guarantee that problem was addressed and is almost fool-proof now.

Airlines are cheap asses for sure.

When they stopped allowing smoking, they cut back on the fresh air they had to cycle - which is why you get a dry sore throat on long flights. They recirculate far more than they put in fresh now. Why you ask? Because it saves them a few pennies, which with the price of air travel per passenger, is completely ridiculous.

a reply to: Fylgje

Most crashes occur on take off or landing. The odds are you'd have no chance, even with an ejection system. Not to mention the fact that, again, there's a good chance of an accidental ejection causing a problem and blowing a hole in the plane. It happens on military planes occasionally.

a reply to: Fylgje

Military planes also don't have things like overhead compartments, and wiring, and piping above the pilot.

a reply to: Fylgje

Neither one of those is practical as the added weight to the aircraft would make flying prohibitively expensive.

Not to mention the amount of explosive propellant required to propel the 'capsule' or fuselage clear would most likely kill everyone when deployed.

a reply to: Biigs

It has nothing to do with not recirculating air, it has to do with the lack of humidity in the air. The system circulates the same amount of air through it regardless of if there is smoking or not going on. Boeing has recently changed their pressurization system to add more humidity in the 787, and all aircraft going forward. They're also pressurizing at a lower altitude.

theres a reason why fighter pilots have oxygen packs and masks with them on their seat!!!

You suffocate on the way down from 36,000 feet.

#EDIT: also its extremely cold up there too, so that would probably kill you too.

double EDIT: also the wind speed if you left a craft at 500 mph would probably rip you up too.

a reply to: Biigs

There's generally a maximum speed to eject. At or above that speed, and the wind can actually cause physical injury, up to and including breaking bones.

originally posted by: Fylgje

originally posted by: Zaphod58
a reply to: Fylgje

What about accidents where the fuselage is compromised? Now your pod is compromised.

Maybe, but through tests you try and make that less likely to happen. How many fighter pilots couldn't eject? I'm sure there were a few, but I guarantee that problem was addressed and is almost fool-proof now.

No, it isn't... Two years ago a Red Arrows pilot (one of the best in the RAF) was killed when his ejector seat fired him out of his aircraft while on the runway... All because a bolt was made too tight by the maintenance crews. Imagine that, but times 200, or 300....

a reply to: stumason

We had an ORI crew out, inspecting HiANG one year, and one of the inspectors, while going up on a check flight managed to blow the canopy off, which armed the seats. He just about blew the out of the airplane.

And then there was a check flight a couple of years ago where the backseater was blown out of the airplane without touching anything.

I bet they won't even let you wear your own chute on a flight. They make disposable emergency oxygen tanks.

a reply to: Zaphod58

It could be funny, as long as no-one is hurt, but sadly all to often that isn't the case. I believe that Red Arrows chappy wasn't the first to be hurt by that type of ejector seat - it all stemmed from the manufacturer not issuing guidance on a known issue discovered in the 90's, so for years the ground crews had been performing maintenance that was risky - it was lucky that far more crew weren't killed.

originally posted by: Catacomb

So, we can do the following:

Engineer skyscrapers.
Split the atom.
Harness the sun's energy.
Detail the human genome.
Research and cure diseases.
Explore space, and other planets.

But, we don't have the intelligence to engineer solutions that would allow civilian airliners to have the capability to have a safety system in place that would take someone out of a catastrophic disaster, and bring them to the ground.

Gotcha.

Well, we can't build skyscrapers, split the atom, or build space rockets cheaply enough to give them to everyone. We also can't build skyscrapers that are guaranteed not to fall down, build nuclear power stations that are guaranteed not to blow up, or build space rockets that are guaranteed to get into space.

What we have already done, however, is to engineer a solution that would allow civilian airliners to have a safety system in place to get someone back on the ground in many cases despite a disaster. It's called... a "civilian airliner" - a unique piece of equipment that has multiple levels of safety and security features already designed into it from the start. They're not infallible, they're not guaranteed to work (but then again, neither are the skyscrapers, nuclear power plants, or space rockets) but by golly they do a pretty good job. The disasters that take them down with loss of lives tend to be the disasters that far eclipse any safety system available to modern technology, including your suggestion.

I'd rather take my chances on a current civilian airliner than one designed to break apart and fitted with explosive-propelled escape pods - it sounds suicidally dangerous.

a reply to: stumason

Oh yeah, it's incredibly lucky. I've seen everything from the wrong bolts causing them to malfunction, to the charges in them being hooked up wrong. It is pretty damn funny to read about the ones where they don't get hurt though. "On minute he was there, the next he was gone!"

The scariest one I ever heard though was a partial ejection out of an A-6.

www.gallagher.com...

They were the KA-6 for the carrier, and suddenly there was a bang, and the pilot was looking over at his legs, and he was laying back against the top of the aircraft.

The Lockheed S-3 Viking had four ejection seats. The ceiling of the cockpit was rigged with detcord to blow a hole through it to allow for ejection. THERE WAS NEVER A SUCCESSFUL FOUR MAN EJECTION FROM A VIKING.

The picture of the 747 with the parachutes is cute. One problem. There isn't enough chutes and if they don't open perfectly they will rip the plane apart. In engineering there is a term called the KISS principal. It stands for: Keep It Simple Stupid. By adding all of this to an aircraft, the chances of an accident is greater because there are more things to go wrong.

A few years ago there was a heavy rain in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania. A section of Washington Boulevard had a flash flood. A woman and her two children drown in their minivan. It was determined that the water shorted out the electric windows and locks. People who tried to get them out couldn't open the doors or break the windows before the van was swept away. The older mechanical locking system and hand cranked windows would have allowed them to escape. The newer system is considered safer because the driver can disable the back doors to keep children from opening them. As far as I know this is the only time that this has happened. I don't know how many children have been saved by the newer lock system, but I don't advocate going back to the old system because of this one incident.
2 Families suing

If you want to address a real safety issue, ask why cars are not equipped with a five point harness, instead of the current safety belt system?

By the way in October 1988 I jumped out of an aircraft, with a parachute, to save my life. I spent two weeks in the hospital with a wrenched back and a fractured ankle. I don't believe that we need parachutes on airliners.