Commercial airlines also fly really high up. If you were ejected at cruising altitude, the first thing you would do is pass out and fall for a few minutes. Hopefully you wake up in time to orient yourself and activate a parachute.
That’s not to say you couldn’t have an auto deploy mechanism at a given altitude. I haven’t skydived (skydove?) in years, but isn’t there an emergency deployment mechanism if the chute hasn’t deployed by a certain altitude?
There probably is, but that brings in another huge problem. Maintenance of all this stuff, parachutes can’t just stay packed indefinitely. Maintaining 100s of parachutes per plane is wildly impractical.
True, plus the liability. I’d also imagine the optics might be a bit better when you have the plane go kaboom into the ground vs having a number of people go splat in a populated area.
The emergency deployment system is your skydiving instructor grabbing onto you and pulling the cords of your primary (in case it was user error), then secondary (in case the primary failed) and finally just holding on while the instructor deploys their chute.
I know absolutely nothing about this, but aren’t there parachutes that basically just auto-deploy as soon as you jump? I seem to remember seeing something where people hop out and are followed out by a long piece of string that catches on the plane and yanks the chute when it hits a certain length, or something like that. Presumably they don’t work at 11km elevation though.
You’re describing a static line jump. You’re also right that it’s irrelevant to passengers jumping out at an extreme altitude and having a parachute open much later. Static lines are used for planes that are already flying at an appropriate altitude for the parachute to open.
Yeah just looked it up and that’s exactly what I was thinking of! Aside from the obvious technical limitations and the part where you probably couldn’t teach average Joes to parachute reliably, I imagine the simple act of getting everyone to actually jump out of a plane is probably immeasurably difficult too. Like I know people who won’t even walk across certain bridges because their fear of heights just won’t allow it, getting someone like that to muster the courage to jump would be impossible.
Commercial airlines also fly really high up. If you were ejected at cruising altitude, the first thing you would do is pass out and fall for a few minutes. Hopefully you wake up in time to orient yourself and activate a parachute.
That’s not to say you couldn’t have an auto deploy mechanism at a given altitude. I haven’t skydived (skydove?) in years, but isn’t there an emergency deployment mechanism if the chute hasn’t deployed by a certain altitude?
There probably is, but that brings in another huge problem. Maintenance of all this stuff, parachutes can’t just stay packed indefinitely. Maintaining 100s of parachutes per plane is wildly impractical.
True, plus the liability. I’d also imagine the optics might be a bit better when you have the plane go kaboom into the ground vs having a number of people go splat in a populated area.
Skydiven.
The emergency deployment system is your skydiving instructor grabbing onto you and pulling the cords of your primary (in case it was user error), then secondary (in case the primary failed) and finally just holding on while the instructor deploys their chute.
I know absolutely nothing about this, but aren’t there parachutes that basically just auto-deploy as soon as you jump? I seem to remember seeing something where people hop out and are followed out by a long piece of string that catches on the plane and yanks the chute when it hits a certain length, or something like that. Presumably they don’t work at 11km elevation though.
You’re describing a static line jump. You’re also right that it’s irrelevant to passengers jumping out at an extreme altitude and having a parachute open much later. Static lines are used for planes that are already flying at an appropriate altitude for the parachute to open.
Yeah just looked it up and that’s exactly what I was thinking of! Aside from the obvious technical limitations and the part where you probably couldn’t teach average Joes to parachute reliably, I imagine the simple act of getting everyone to actually jump out of a plane is probably immeasurably difficult too. Like I know people who won’t even walk across certain bridges because their fear of heights just won’t allow it, getting someone like that to muster the courage to jump would be impossible.