Why are there no parachutes on passenger planes?

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Passenger airliners crash from time to time. In such crashes, in the overwhelming majority of cases, it is not destined to be the lucky ones who will return home safe and sound. For this reason, anyone who is more or less interested in a person has a natural question: why, with all the development of aviation technology, there are no rescue systems, ejection systems, or even banal parachutes in passenger airplanes?

A simple and short answer to the question: ordinary parachutes are corny not suitable for use in passenger liners. Here are just the most "fat" reasons that prevent you from doing this.

First, a parachute costs a lot of money: about $ 1,000. For comparison, the Airbus A320 has 180 seats for passengers - thus, the parachutes alone will cost almost 200 thousand additional dollars to the price of the complete set of the aircraft. And that's not counting the money for their maintenance.

Secondly, you still need to know how to use a parachute. This process may not be the most difficult, but rather long and filled with important texture.

Thirdly, in most situations, a passenger airliner moves in such a way that even a super-trained person cannot leave it with a parachute, and even if he could do this, such a parachutist will most likely die due to the high vertical speed of the aircraft when falling.

Fourthly, the overwhelming majority of crashes begin during takeoff or landing of an aircraft, when it is not possible to use a parachute corny. Finally, a plane crash rarely takes more than 90 seconds. Organized to leave the falling car even a third of at least 180 passengers is unrealistic.

Now, regarding the various evacuation and emergency rescue systems. One should not think that people did not try to create some kind of civilian rescue catapults for liners. We tried more than once.

However, the main problem for all such projects is only one - money. And not at all because greedy capitalist airlines are saving on the lives of ordinary people. It is simply much more rational to spend millions of dollars on improving the quality and reliability of aircraft so that disasters do not happen in principle, than to spend the same millions of dollars on very dubious and often not working in practice collective rescue systems.

After all, it is better to have just a reliable plane that will definitely not fall, than to have an unreliable plane that can fall, but at the same time has a dubious rescue system that may or may not work.

After all, if there is no direct need for technology and the possibility of creating duplicate systems, it is necessary to follow the path of reducing the number of mechanisms potentially breaking during operation. The simpler, the more reliable.