Is it possible to equip passenger planes with parachutes? In fact, it has already been done

Judging from the accident rate, airplanes are undoubtedly the safest means of transportation, but many people still have concerns about the safety of airplanes.

As a land creature, it is difficult to feel at ease without the feeling of being down to earth, so since the invention of airplanes, humans have been thinking about how to further improve the safety of airplanes. Some people suggest equipping passengers on airplanes with parachutes, which is a beautiful idea, but it is impractical. You may think that skydiving is not difficult. You can muster up the courage to jump down, and then open the parachute when it is almost time, and you can land safely. In fact, it is not as simple as it sounds. Skydiving is an extreme sport that requires very high skills. If you have not received professional training, the chance of surviving a high-altitude skydive is basically zero.

Equipping passengers with parachutes still raises the question of when to jump?

Should you parachute when the plane malfunction just happens? Of course not. When the plane is still under control, the probability that the crew manages to land the plane safely is much greater than the probability of surviving parachuting, so it is better to sit still instead of parachuting. So how about parachuting when the plane is out of control? If the plane is already out of control, there will usually be extreme situations such as a straight line fall. At this time, there are no conditions for parachuting at all, and you can't even stand up. How can you organize parachuting in an orderly manner? Therefore, it is unreliable to equip every passenger on a civil airliner with a parachute. Since it is impossible to equip passengers with parachutes, can the plane be equipped with a large parachute? This idea is still reliable.

Equipping an airplane with a parachute is not only a plausible idea, it actually already exists.

The idea of ​​an aircraft parachute actually appeared a long time ago, and soon after the idea appeared, someone began to design and study it. The earliest aircraft parachute system was designed in 1998. After 16 years of repeated design and debugging, it was finally put into use in 2014. This system was named "Cirrus Fuselage Parachute System". This is a fully automatic whole-aircraft parachute protection system. When the aircraft malfunctions and stalls in the air, the parachute will automatically pop out to help the aircraft land smoothly. Since the system was put into use in 2014, as of 2021, it has been ejected 123 times in 7 years, 104 times successfully, and saved the lives of 380 passengers, greatly reducing the mortality rate of aviation accidents.

Now you may have a question: this complete parachute system has been used for seven or eight years and has been deployed more than a hundred times, why haven’t I heard of it?

Because this parachute system can only be used on light aircraft, it has never been equipped on civil aircraft. So is it possible to design a parachute system that can be used on civil aircraft? Of course. In fact, the biggest difference between civil aircraft and light aircraft is the weight of the whole aircraft, so the parachute system used in civil aircraft only needs to increase the area of ​​the parachute accordingly. Take the Boeing 737 as an example. Its full load weight is 45 tons. To pull up such a behemoth, the area of ​​the parachute should be at least 2,000 square meters. This will be a giant parachute weighing several tons.

If civil airliners are equipped with such huge parachutes, the competitiveness of the aviation industry will be greatly reduced.

If civil airliners are equipped with parachute systems weighing several tons, the passenger capacity will be greatly compressed, but the transportation cost will not decrease, so the price of the ticket can only be greatly increased. In addition, the price of the parachute system itself and the future maintenance costs are very high, which will further push up the ticket price. The cruising speed of civil airliners is about 800 kilometers per hour, and the G-type high-speed EMU can reach a maximum speed of 400 kilometers per hour. There is still room for further improvement in the future. If the price of air tickets rises sharply, then unless it is necessary, few people will choose to travel by plane, so airlines are not particularly interested in equipping their aircraft with parachutes.

In fact, there is really no need to equip civil airliners with parachutes.

First, as mentioned before, airplanes are the safest means of transportation, and their fatality rate per million passengers is the lowest among all means of transportation. If airplanes are equipped with parachutes, then trains and cars should be equipped with passenger ejection systems to ensure the safety of passengers. Secondly, the stage when airplanes are most prone to accidents is not the cruising stage, but the take-off and landing stage, which means that most aviation accidents occur at low altitudes, and at this time, there are no conditions for deploying parachutes. Third, even if a malfunction occurs during the cruising stage, as long as the aircraft is controllable, it is still the best option to try to control the aircraft to land smoothly. In summary, although it is feasible to install parachutes on passenger planes, it is not very meaningful, and it will greatly increase costs, which is not worth the loss.

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