salon.com — Maybe this will sound like a crazy question, but why don't commercial planes carry parachutes for each passenger? Life jackets are pointless, but wouldn't parachutes occasionally save the day? Granted, a novice skydiver would be risking life and limb, but it's a better option than hitting the ground at 400 miles per hour.
Oct 19, 2007 View in Crawl 4
duri3lOct 20, 2007
I love to think that they would rather have everyone die and pay wrongful death suits than have to pay disability and rehab for those passengers for the rest of their lives if they survived and receive an injury from the parachute landing.
minorlemmingOct 20, 2007
my parachute has no cord. It has an itty bitty parachute in the bottom that I throw into the wind.
brundlefly76Oct 20, 2007
The idea of jumbo jet parachute evacuation as a safety measure represents a fundamental misunderstanding of how, where, and how quickly airline fatalities happen statistically, and replaces that with an ideallic scenario where the pilot orders evacuation over survivable terrain and weather (like, not a transoceanic flight) at a stable and decompress-able altitude, because he has clear forewarning that if he does not do this people on the plane will certainly die.This scenario rarely presents itself - one example I can think of is the sioux city crash where the pilot lost his rudder - the expectations of a survivable landing were extremely low but he amazingly had usable control over direction and altitude in the air and he had hours in the air to make the decision in good weather over his selection of terrain - for example, he had ability to route the plane for evacuation over a large field near a prepared trauma hospital with standby ambulances and an overstaffed mass-trauma-ready ER.
fixedcomaOct 21, 2007
That's why you use pods that eject out the side of the plane with about 4 people per pod! heck you can even make the pod float in water and have the c**kpit eject like the EF-111 c**kpit where the whole c**kpit ejects the pilots out safely, but only i have wonderful ideas like this, wonder who is going to steal them for profit and give me none of the share, let's see and find out! Prick ass world!
redividerOct 23, 2007
The shuttle doesn't deploy it's chute until it's near the ground (or on the ground...) I'm no spaceship expert, but I'd say that's quite a different situation than an airliner opening a chute at 20,000 ft and expecting it to hold the entire weight of the plane.
swollentikiOct 24, 2007
Also, if someone does make it out of the plane but injures themselves when they hit the ground, they will probably sue the airline.
wormwoodsMay 20, 2009
There's always that one poor guy who was on his way back to his seat from the bathroom.