Stupid question here, I guess, but why isn’t there a system to potentially deliver commercial passengers and crew to the ground in case of a crash? Military jets have ejection seats and parachutes, so why don’t we have at least something required for commercial aircraft in the same vein?
Is it the money that it would undoubtedly require?
Between the training required for a solo parachute jump, and the cost (and more importantly) weight of the equipment, plus the relative safety of commercial flights, it’s simply not justified.
In more than a few cases we’ve seen airliners make emergency landings that are gnarly, but the majority survive. In more cases than I can count, there’s checks and balances that ground flights because of safety concerns either at the departure point or at the destination (icing, high winds, etc), or due to mechanical concerns.
It’s rare that a fully inspected and functional aeroplane will fall out of the sky, and we do everything in our power to ensure that all planes that leave the ground are fully inspected and functional. Short of a freak occurrence, like a fast forming weather phenomenon, there’s so many checks and balances that airliner crashes are exceedingly rare.
So not only is a crash rare, there’s no guarantee that a crash will be fatal, usually the pilot can at least get the plane on the ground without killing everyone aboard, and the fact that it’s a massive amount of extra weight that requires training that the average person doesn’t have, there’s little point and nearly nothing to gain from doing something like that, while it would have significant downsides on flight efficiency and increase the costs of fuel per flight due to the extra weight.
Then there’s the consideration of, even if they were able to successfully parachute to the ground, what then? It’s pretty much a guarantee that nobody has a radio, and that you’re far enough away from civilization that your cellphone doesn’t work, so now you have hundreds of people spread out over potentially thousands of miles of terrain/water/whatever that you now need weeks to search and rescue everyone. Taking weeks on search and rescue, pretty much guarantees that you’ll find people who landed safely, then died from exposure to the environment.
On the flip side, if everyone is in the plane when it crashes then all you need to do is find the plane; everyone will be in that general area, whether alive or dead.
There’s just too many downsides to having parachutes on board to make it feasible.
Honestly, I do understand that ejector seats are not a good idea, but I was thinking something more like this. It’s more like a lifeboat and would be equipped as such to address the same sort of concerns a disaster at sea would require to allow folks to survive and be tracked.
I get that the expense and weight appear prohibitive, but it’s insane to me that we put people 30,000 feet in the air with no plan other than prevention and measures that don’t completely address all dangers.
I know nothing will likely ever be done in this vein, and probably rightfully so, but it sure feels like airlines are the ultimate “you pays your money and you takes your chance” experience. Given my own limited experience with flying, it increasingly scares the hell out of me personally. I didn’t have occasion to fly until I was in late middle age, and I found the experience thoroughly terrifying.
That’s a very normal reaction. You’re putting your life in the hands of technicians and engineers, to build, maintain and service the aircraft so it functions, qualified inspectors to certify that the plane is safe to fly, and pilots to fly the aircraft, and you, safely to your destination. Pretty much everyone you’re putting your life in the hands of, you’ve never met, never will, and it’s unlikely you’ll even know their names.
It’s a lot of trust to put into people you don’t even know, to keep you alive in your chair in the sky.
If that reality doesn’t at least give you pause, or some concern, then I’d be worried there’s something seriously wrong with you.
Rest assured that statistics are on your side. It’s far more likely for you to get to your destination without any significant complications then it is for any complications to happen, including any that might lead to a crash or a fatality.
Statistically, it’s comfortably one of the safest, if not the safest, method of travel.
There’s nothing wrong with having some apprehension, fear, or worry, over placing your life in the hands of complete strangers; despite how qualified each and every one of them might be, they’re still strangers.
All I can say is, if you’re bothered by it, learn how to parachute solo. It’ll take a while, but learn it. Then just pack your own parachute any time you fly. Problem solved. If you lose confidence in the pilots to keep you alive, bail.
You gonna bail me out when I get arrested for trying to open the door mid-flight? 😂
Seriously, though, all you guys here are right about everything you’ve said. I’ll undoubtedly be forced to fly again, and I’ll remind myself of these things when I do.
Of course, if I’m on the one flight that does disintegrate in midair, well…my last thoughts of y’all might not be terribly charitable. 😉
Throwing untrained people out of a commercial airliner at high speed in the middle of a emergency is a good way to ensure no one survives. The equipment would add a significant amount of space, fuel and maintenance burden too, and require major compromises to the aircraft design itself. All to resolve a problem that effectively never happens.
An explosive release canopy for an ejection seat system on an airliner would just release the entire top half of the plane, and don’t forget that fighter pilots are both wearing flightsuits and get specific training for the event.
Even beyond the material and engineering costs it’s a difficult ask, probably better to just focus on reliability in the first place.
Ok but what about instead of an explosive release canopy, the crew just sorta loosen some of the bolts holding the top of the plane on, then the pilot flies upside-down to gently tip everyone out of their seats
I remember seeing an article back in the 90s or maybe even 80s that was exploring the possibility of the entire passenger compartment separating from the wings and rest of the fuselage and parachuting down in the event of a major failure. The thing is, it would be ridiculously expensive to implement, and there are very few situations where such a system would be any better than keeping the plane in one piece.
Yeah, escape pods have been implemented in some aircraft in the past, but the idea has always ended without wide scale adoption for the reasons so many have stated here.
Some valid answers are already given by other commentators. Just want to highlight that commercial airlines are operating barely cost positive. Every extra bit of cost added has to be at least covered by some other stream of revenue. How much more money can a seat in these crammed airliners make to cover the cost of R&Ding and maintaining additional safety measures?
Just like so many other businesses the money never makes it to the rich CEO, board members, affiliate’s pockets, and is definitely being paid to the pilots, flight attendants, and ground crew.
That’s why they have so little profit and tax payments!
Rigging a commercial airline with that many ejection seats would add significant weight to the plane. You’d probably triple the cost of commercial airflight if you did this just from reduced seating capacity, and even assuming that it could be implemented without that overhead I still don’t think this would actually help much.
Imagine you’re on Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 in a 737 Max nosediving towards the ground and the roof just opens up and launches you and all 148 of your fellow passengers out of the plane at 400MPH. Somehow I imagine that you just end up scattering the mangled corpses over a wider area.
Just carrying a few hundred escape chutes would add significant weight to the plane. Have you ever worn an emergency escape chute? I have. It’s like having a chair strapped to your back and ass.
Parachuting isn’t as easy as pulling a wire and gently floating to the ground. Those who parachute professionally take hundreds of hours of training. If you’re brand new, you’re required to strap yourself to a professional.
Stupid question here, I guess, but why isn’t there a system to potentially deliver commercial passengers and crew to the ground in case of a crash? Military jets have ejection seats and parachutes, so why don’t we have at least something required for commercial aircraft in the same vein?
Is it the money that it would undoubtedly require?
Edit: misspelling
Not a stupid question.
Between the training required for a solo parachute jump, and the cost (and more importantly) weight of the equipment, plus the relative safety of commercial flights, it’s simply not justified.
In more than a few cases we’ve seen airliners make emergency landings that are gnarly, but the majority survive. In more cases than I can count, there’s checks and balances that ground flights because of safety concerns either at the departure point or at the destination (icing, high winds, etc), or due to mechanical concerns.
It’s rare that a fully inspected and functional aeroplane will fall out of the sky, and we do everything in our power to ensure that all planes that leave the ground are fully inspected and functional. Short of a freak occurrence, like a fast forming weather phenomenon, there’s so many checks and balances that airliner crashes are exceedingly rare.
So not only is a crash rare, there’s no guarantee that a crash will be fatal, usually the pilot can at least get the plane on the ground without killing everyone aboard, and the fact that it’s a massive amount of extra weight that requires training that the average person doesn’t have, there’s little point and nearly nothing to gain from doing something like that, while it would have significant downsides on flight efficiency and increase the costs of fuel per flight due to the extra weight.
Then there’s the consideration of, even if they were able to successfully parachute to the ground, what then? It’s pretty much a guarantee that nobody has a radio, and that you’re far enough away from civilization that your cellphone doesn’t work, so now you have hundreds of people spread out over potentially thousands of miles of terrain/water/whatever that you now need weeks to search and rescue everyone. Taking weeks on search and rescue, pretty much guarantees that you’ll find people who landed safely, then died from exposure to the environment.
On the flip side, if everyone is in the plane when it crashes then all you need to do is find the plane; everyone will be in that general area, whether alive or dead.
There’s just too many downsides to having parachutes on board to make it feasible.
Damn. That was thorough.
Thanks. I think a lot.
Probably too much
Like a parachute on an airline
Honestly, I do understand that ejector seats are not a good idea, but I was thinking something more like this. It’s more like a lifeboat and would be equipped as such to address the same sort of concerns a disaster at sea would require to allow folks to survive and be tracked.
I get that the expense and weight appear prohibitive, but it’s insane to me that we put people 30,000 feet in the air with no plan other than prevention and measures that don’t completely address all dangers.
I know nothing will likely ever be done in this vein, and probably rightfully so, but it sure feels like airlines are the ultimate “you pays your money and you takes your chance” experience. Given my own limited experience with flying, it increasingly scares the hell out of me personally. I didn’t have occasion to fly until I was in late middle age, and I found the experience thoroughly terrifying.
That’s a very normal reaction. You’re putting your life in the hands of technicians and engineers, to build, maintain and service the aircraft so it functions, qualified inspectors to certify that the plane is safe to fly, and pilots to fly the aircraft, and you, safely to your destination. Pretty much everyone you’re putting your life in the hands of, you’ve never met, never will, and it’s unlikely you’ll even know their names.
It’s a lot of trust to put into people you don’t even know, to keep you alive in your chair in the sky.
If that reality doesn’t at least give you pause, or some concern, then I’d be worried there’s something seriously wrong with you.
Rest assured that statistics are on your side. It’s far more likely for you to get to your destination without any significant complications then it is for any complications to happen, including any that might lead to a crash or a fatality. Statistically, it’s comfortably one of the safest, if not the safest, method of travel.
There’s nothing wrong with having some apprehension, fear, or worry, over placing your life in the hands of complete strangers; despite how qualified each and every one of them might be, they’re still strangers.
All I can say is, if you’re bothered by it, learn how to parachute solo. It’ll take a while, but learn it. Then just pack your own parachute any time you fly. Problem solved. If you lose confidence in the pilots to keep you alive, bail.
You gonna bail me out when I get arrested for trying to open the door mid-flight? 😂
Seriously, though, all you guys here are right about everything you’ve said. I’ll undoubtedly be forced to fly again, and I’ll remind myself of these things when I do.
Of course, if I’m on the one flight that does disintegrate in midair, well…my last thoughts of y’all might not be terribly charitable. 😉
Throwing untrained people out of a commercial airliner at high speed in the middle of a emergency is a good way to ensure no one survives. The equipment would add a significant amount of space, fuel and maintenance burden too, and require major compromises to the aircraft design itself. All to resolve a problem that effectively never happens.
An explosive release canopy for an ejection seat system on an airliner would just release the entire top half of the plane, and don’t forget that fighter pilots are both wearing flightsuits and get specific training for the event.
Even beyond the material and engineering costs it’s a difficult ask, probably better to just focus on reliability in the first place.
Ok but what about instead of an explosive release canopy, the crew just sorta loosen some of the bolts holding the top of the plane on, then the pilot flies upside-down to gently tip everyone out of their seats
Sounds perfect, no notes.
“You’ll find lifejackets and parachutes under your seat. In case of an emergency, hold on to your butts.”
I remember seeing an article back in the 90s or maybe even 80s that was exploring the possibility of the entire passenger compartment separating from the wings and rest of the fuselage and parachuting down in the event of a major failure. The thing is, it would be ridiculously expensive to implement, and there are very few situations where such a system would be any better than keeping the plane in one piece.
Iirc, when experimented on, these ‘escape pods’ would enter a spin so violent it would turn the whole thing into a lethal centrifuge.
Yeah, escape pods have been implemented in some aircraft in the past, but the idea has always ended without wide scale adoption for the reasons so many have stated here.
Some valid answers are already given by other commentators. Just want to highlight that commercial airlines are operating barely cost positive. Every extra bit of cost added has to be at least covered by some other stream of revenue. How much more money can a seat in these crammed airliners make to cover the cost of R&Ding and maintaining additional safety measures?
Commercial airlines make a fuckton of money, but not in economy passenger travel. Cargo and elite passengers make the money.
E: Delta made over 50 billion last year.
That’s revenue, their profit was closer to $4.6bn which, whilst a big number, is a margin of under 8%.
Just like so many other businesses the money never makes it to the rich CEO, board members, affiliate’s pockets, and is definitely being paid to the pilots, flight attendants, and ground crew.
That’s why they have so little profit and tax payments!
Rigging a commercial airline with that many ejection seats would add significant weight to the plane. You’d probably triple the cost of commercial airflight if you did this just from reduced seating capacity, and even assuming that it could be implemented without that overhead I still don’t think this would actually help much.
Imagine you’re on Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 in a 737 Max nosediving towards the ground and the roof just opens up and launches you and all 148 of your fellow passengers out of the plane at 400MPH. Somehow I imagine that you just end up scattering the mangled corpses over a wider area.
Into the middle of the Atlantic ocean
Just carrying a few hundred escape chutes would add significant weight to the plane. Have you ever worn an emergency escape chute? I have. It’s like having a chair strapped to your back and ass.
Parachuting isn’t as easy as pulling a wire and gently floating to the ground. Those who parachute professionally take hundreds of hours of training. If you’re brand new, you’re required to strap yourself to a professional.