Photo: Travel 3Sixty
Parachutes for air passengers?
Why don’t airplanes have parachutes for passengers?
Benjamin David from Quora asks the above question.
Well, some people think that jumping off a plane with a parachute is a simple and easy task. In reality, this is impractical and fraught with difficulties.
For a start, it is not easy to operate a parachute and land safely without some basic training.
At high altitude and speeds, commercial planes are not designed for easy exits because the doors cannot be opened unless depressurized and be at below 10,000 feet.
Even if it were possible to jump out strapped to a parachute, due to the high speed and turbulent air flow, any passenger who attempts this would get hurt during the exit, including hitting the plane or getting sucked into the engines.
The temperature at 40,000 feet is extremely cold at about –56 degrees Celsius.
The lack of oxygen at such altitudes may also cause the jumper to fall unconscious very quickly.
Most of the time, the captain wouldn’t know if the plane is going to crash because he is making every effort to save it. By the time a crash is imminent, passengers will not have time for the parachutes anyway.
However, there have been at least three occasions where planes have successfully crash landed.
In 1983, an Air Canada Boeing 767 ran out of fuel and landed safely on a disused runway where go-kart races were being held. All on board survived.
In 2001, a chartered Transat Air A330 made a forced landing at an Atlantic Ocean Island when both its engines failed because of a fuel leak. 306 lives were saved.
In 2009, a US Airways Airbus A320 ditched into the Hudson River in New York. The plane had to make a controlled water-landing onto the river after losing power in both engines due to bird-strikes at about 3,000 feet.
This happened just three minutes into the flight after a normal take-off from LaGuardia Airport. Miraculously, all 155 passengers and crew survived.
Within those three minutes, it would not have been possible for all onboard to jump out in time, even if there were parachutes available.
Most aircraft accidents occur either immediately after take-off or just before landing. There is usually no time, like in the case of the Hudson River ditching, to get all passengers, including the old and young, to put on their parachutes in an orderly fashion.
A commercial airplane cruises at about 450 knots. Standard parachutes are made to open at speeds around 110 knots. Jumping out at such high speeds would rip the fabric of the canopy to shreds unless the plane is flying at a much slower speed.
Overall, it would be an exercise in futility as very few have ever experienced sky-diving with parachutes.
For the reasons above, commercial airliners are not designed with parachutes on board.
Statistically, flying is safer than driving. As George Bernard Shaw said, “The optimist invented the airplane, the pessimist, the parachute.”
See a video on Learning to Sky Dive here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QyViaTCx_C8