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Hi Alex, The subject of escape from aircraft has been extensively
researched, and now there are "whole of aircraft" parachutes fitted to some
light aircraft, and one was successfully deployed recently saving all aboard.
Jetliners are a different ball game altogether. Personal chutes would be
totally impractical for several reasons. Imagine the chaos of hundreds of
people trying to don chutes within the confines of the aisles between the seats. Not to mention the people that would be panic stricken. Even if you could get out you wouldn't survive the cold and lack of oxygen at say
11,000 metres or more. Jumping out into a slipstream of say 850kph
would be catastrophic. This all means that for chutes to be deployable the
pilot must be able to come to a much lower altitude, and a much lower speed. In many/most emergencies this option would not be available to the pilot. You can also discount all the events where the plane blows up, or disintegrates from structural failure. A stricken plane frequently falls with a tumbling motion, which would throw the people around inside, making it impossible to use a chute.In many cases any survivors would land in the middle of the ocean, and wait in terror to be eaten by an ooh nasty of some sort, or in the middle of a desert, or mountain range, or a
jungle, and die of exposure. If there were a lot of survivors they would be spread over large distances, making the job of rescuers far more difficult.
Some of the above also applies to passenger/crew pods. They have been
experimented with, and the first thing is that you have to be able to slow the plane down to a speed that will not cause the chute[s] to be shredded
immediately upon deployment, the structure has to be considerably
strengthened at all the anchor points, the chute[s] would be huge, and need
a very large amount of storage space, and the chute[s] and the
mechanism needed to deploy them would be very heavy, making a
commercial installation economically unviable. Again, only in a reasonably
controllable situation could they be deployed; useless if the plane is tumbling out of the sky. A final note-- some of the people with individual chutes would die through being too shocked to activate their chute after jumping, and others through simply having never used one before, and
doing something wrong.
This was written as I went along, so I probably have things out of a
logical order.
raymo
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