Ok so No parachutes for commercial airliners, but what about escape capsules?
Ok the terrain makes parachutes dangerous for the people landing and an ocean is even worse.
So how about escape capsules. There could be five or six (depending o aircraft size) basic cabins that hold around 50 poeple and each capsule would have a giant chute attached to it to glide the people to safety.
Answers:
An escape capsule impacting with the ground after a fall of 30.000 fett will not protect anybody inside it, regardless of how and where it lands.
Give it up.
You're plane has a problem, you die.
Luckily for us, planes very rarely have problems.
More people die from toothpaste, or curtains, than die from plane crashes, check out the stats on the net
The idea of having capsules would add to the overall weight of the aircraft, therefore increasing fuel burn. and not making the airline's wallets happy.
Perhaps in the future someone will come up with some sort of mechanism that would allow an aircraft to land safely (say, extension wings or jet thrust stabilizers).
-Sarah
Didja ever notice that most airplane crashes happen within just a few feet from the ground? If you could just figure out a way to keep the airplane from touching the ground, it would never crash! It would be even better than parachutes under the seats or escape capsules!
An escape capsule would be prohibitively heavy, and likely to be almost as large as the passenger cabin istelf. As for the JAL flight, I recall that it was a controlled flight into terrain, and had every hope of landing safely if it were not for adverse weather conditions.
If every passenger or group of passengers had an ejection pod the plane would weigh too much it would never get off the ground and if it did manage to get off the ground its performance would be so badly degraded it would be more likely to crash. Then we introduce the problem of having ejection rockets or explosive bolts how are we to safely store the flammable and explosive materials what about malfunctions what if we have a short circuit in one of the pods the rockets fire or the explosive bolts sever the plane in halve it just wouldn't work. Planes are the safest form of transportation changing anything would only make them less safe!
Thanks for giving up on the parachutes. At least you appear rational (unlike just about every other person who asks the parachute question).
I'm not going to argue with you about whether the segmented-pod (set-of-capsules) aircraft idea could work; it probably could. It would, as others have pointed out to you, add so much weight that it would substantially decrease the number of passengers per flight. This would add further to the already increased cost of aircraft redesign. But, maybe people would be willing to pay 3 or 4 times as much for each ticket; I don't know.
More importantly, how many lives would this really save. A search of the NTSB accident database showed only two accidents in the last 10 years in which the capsules might have worked. One of these was the Alaska Air MD-83 which went into the ocean off California in 2000. The other was American Arlines A300 that shed its tail over New York, and in this case I think it's questionable whether there would have been time for the capsules to deploy from something around 1,700 feet of altitude. So, in ten years, at most two accidents which could have been helped.
Here's the trade-off. Your capsules might have saved the people who died in those accidents, but every passenger on every other flight would have had to pay substantially higher ticket prices. Furthermore, you should note that the MD-83 accident could have been prevented by a better maintenance plan or better design of the particular system. The A300 accident, again, could have been prevented by a better design of the control system (or different piloting technique, if you believe the Airbus story that the fault was in the pilots using the controls too vigorously).
Either way, much less expensive and extensive options were available for preventing the two accidents in which the capsules might have been useful. For now, I'm voting against, but I'm all in favor of increased safety so don't give up on the principle.
First, there would be an incredible expense passed on from developing them that any airline that decided to buy and use them would go bankrupt. Plus if the plane experiences problems at 35,000 ft there is no way that a gigantic box falling out of the sky is going to save anyone when it hits the ground. Again, there is the ocean problem. If you land in the ocean there is no way to get out in time if the force doesn't kill you on impact. I hope this makes sense.
The cynical answer relates to economics. Airlines, in common with motor vehicle manufacturers and a host of other industries operate on a basis of risk analysis. If the risk is high enough, they do something about the problem, but otherwise they simply let it go. (Isn't there a wonderful statement on this in Fight Club, from memory?) So, the bottom line is that an awful lot of planes would have to crash, and an awful lot of airlines be hit with really expensive compensation claims before they did something to amend the safety of their commercial airliners.
If you think I'm joking, reflect for a moment upon Concord(e). For three decades, the aircraft flew without a single fatality, with a safety record that beats any commercial airliner currently in the skies. One accident, and associated payouts later, and the two airlines operating the aircraft both made modifications to their fleet, before shortly afterwards taking the decision to retire them from service - aided in part by the withdrawl of its air certificate by its manufacturer. The cynical interpretation of this would be that the aerospace industry assesses risks and rewards and reacts accordingly.
Statistically speaking, flying remains safer than driving a car or travelling on a train, so there's little incentive for the airlines to do anything. The train operators however, started investing quite heavily in passenger safety, in door locks, in printed advice cards in carriages, in considering seat belts etc shortly after ladbroke grove. We still however do not have an automated train protection system covering all the trains that travel on our national network, despite several crashes which have killed and injured hundreds of people and brought tragedy to many families.
What conclusions should we draw from this? Perhaps, cynically, we should accept the fact that when the market delivers goods in a largely unregulated manner, it will tend to put profit before people. Only if government were to intervene and increase the regulatory requirements on things relating to safety would affected industries have a reason to comply. However, doing so would impose a price which could well put travel beyond the reach of many, imposing costs upon the economy as whole, therefore it remains in the interests of both government and individual private companies to allow risk assessments to determine the health and safety policies of our now privatised airlines, train operating companies, etc.
Airforce One has one!!!!
Look, sport, there are a few things you need to take into consideration. First, all the ideas that you are talking about with escape capsules adds three bad things to an aircraft: Complexity, weight, and operating expense. Such capsules would require incredible amounts of complex componentry to get them to work. Such componentry ads buttloads of weight and maintenance issues. All this maintainance costs more money because airlines would need more people to maintain such things. Second, your ideas take away some key things as well, such as reliability, economy, and convenience. The more parts on an aircraft, especially complex systems, the less reliable it is. Building a plane with these capsules would cost a lot more than a conventional plane, thus costing airlines more, and as a result, passengers pay more. And imagine an aircraft with separate capsules. Each one would have to be sealed, requiring multiple flight crews instead of just one. This is not to say that your idea doesn't work. There are a military aircraft that use escape capsules, such as the B-1B, and the space shuttle as well. Such capsules are designed for only a few highly-trained people, though. keep thinking. You'll hit on something sometime.
What the FAA and other regulatory agencies learned from the incidents that you referenced, Sioux City and JAL, have been written into the design, maintenance/inspection and operation regulations for all new designs. No aircraft that is designed today really has the chance of such a catastrophic event due to design, because we learned from each incident, which is apparent from the extremely low number of fatalities due to design problems. www.ntsb.gov
When you introduce a system like escape pods, etc., you also introduce a new set of possible failures. More parts mean a greater chance of a failure in total to the entire aircraft from each part. Also, when you introduce multiple airframes mounted on a single aircraft frame, you require each of those escape aircraft to meet regulatory standards, their pilots (which would be required for each craft) to meet standards, and their operation to be checked on a regular basis. It would be physically prohibitive and extremely cost prohibitive.
The repeated statistic that you are more likely to die in your daily drive to work than on a commercial airliner is absolutely true. Many of the accidents you see today (in countries that have regulatory standards comparable to the FAA) involve pilot error and maintenance error--nothing that a proper design could have accounted for. You're better off designing an escape pod for a minivan than an aircraft
They would have to increase the size and weight of aircraft to incorporate these capsules. A complete restructure of the wings to take more weight, and probably reduce passenger numbers onboard. The new A-380 idea would have to be scrapped. 555 passengers would need a LOT of capsules!
Fuel efficiency would be reduced by extra drag, and so ticket prices would soar!
Not a chance mate.
Forget it !! We don't have the technology to built one usefull one
I congratulate you on your insistence and raising such brain storming and evoking questions! I think of the same possibilities to overcome crashes in air, sea and on the road.
From the answers given, I see that the # 1 reasons for no parachutes, ejection pods or capsules is the cost!! We need to establish the idea, if it possible in principle, but not cost effective, may be some billionnaire could afford all his wealth to survive a crash?? Could it be a solution on smaller private jet planes? Or in a double-passenger plane?
Military aircaft pilots and co-pilots eject their seats no question where they are: whether very high in the sky or just a few feet from the ground.
As an ex paratrooper the training to jump from moving Aircraft is immense, the death toll would be colosal as people fight their way to the doors of a jet liner to be the first out.. so if a fat bird gets stuck in the door what happens then ??
EVERYTHING could be done -- for a price.
To do what you're suggesting -- to segment the airframe -- would possibly triple the cost of the craft -- and make it more vulnerable to fracture in flight.
Would you pay triple the ticket price to select such a craft? (That's not counting the first-class surcharge, of course.) I think not.
Most people fly BECAUSE of the relatively low airfares.
Now looky here Mr.Dreamer - Cod Liver Oil capsules would be more use.
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