Why commercial jetliners don’t have them.
I discuss this in the book. Many safety measures proposed for new space vehicles may be similarly pointless. Certainly the Shuttle “rescue pole” was. It was just for PR.
35 thoughts on “Parachutes”
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About 10 years ago my good friend, also a skydiver, did this. He was taking a flight in Europe to a skydiving camp, and he didnt want to check in his rig for good reasons. So he took it in cabin as carry on. He sat down next to an older woman who was flying long distance for the first time.
The woman went “whats that you are carrying ?” He goes “Why, its a parachute. They didnt give you one at check in ?”
Flight attendants were not very happy with the results.
One of my fellow paratroopers had never been in an airplane until he made his 5 jumps to get his wings. He told me of riding on an airliner for the first time not long afterwards. He was sitting next to an elderly lady. When she remarked that the loud engine noises during takeoff scared her, he admitted that they scared him, too. When the plane was descending and making the usual prelanding noises (extending flaps and landing gear), she stated how those noises scared her. My friend said that he’d never landed in a plane before so he didn’t know what to expect. She didn’t know what to make of that.
That’s a great story, whether it’s true or not.
It’s true. I was on board for 5 take offs in a C-141 but never landed in one. I have several more takeoffs than landings in the C-7, C-130 and UH-1. Back in 1975, airline travel was pretty expensive and it wasn’t exactly uncommon for someone to have never flown in a plane before going to jump school.
I can symphatize with that. I have jumped out of Antonov-2 quite a few times for fun, i would never want to land in one.
Long ago in my paratrooper days, people used to ask me how I could jump from a “perfectly good airplane.” I was jumping in the mid to late 1970s when the planes were almost all worn out from Vietnam. One of my jumps was from a C-130A with 3 bladed props. It was very tired. I figured I had better chances with two chutes than some of the planes we used. And I say that as someone who loves airplanes more than most people*
*A sentence that can be read two ways, both of which are accurate.
I took my rig with me on a trip to Hawaii in 1981, getting many stares from various people in the terminal.
“Is that a parachute?”
“Yeah, didn’t you get yours?”
“Why are you carrying a parachute?”
“I’ve flown with Northwest before.”
“Why are you carrying a parachute?”
“They don’t have a direct flight to Kailua.”
The 727 the DB Cooper jumped from had a rear door between the engines that could be lowered in flight. The FAA ordered airlines to disable inflight opening after that hijacking. A few other airliners (IIRC, DC-9) also had those doors so they could service smaller airports that lacked much infrastructure. Those are likely the only types of airliner that you could jump from (even if you could open the doors somehow) and survive.
When I was a paratrooper, we jumped from the rear side doors of the C-130 and C-141. We didn’t use the tail ramps because you could get jumpers out of two doors faster than out of one ramp. The planes had to be slowed to below 150 knots and the C-141 had a big metal air deflector in front of each side door. We were using static line parachutes, so if the plane was going much faster, opening shock would’ve been pretty violent. Airliners don’t have those blast deflectors, so even if they could depressurize the plane and open the exit doors, the plane would have to slow down a great deal. If the pilots have that kind of time and control over the plane, there really isn’t much reason to jump. Military freefall (HALO and HAHO) units use the tail ramps so they can exit as a group. Those are highly trained jumpers who know very well what they’re doing. Even then, what they do is pretty dangerous.
Imagine the chaos of having over 100 untrained passengers trying to chute up, exit without hitting the tail or wings, open their chutes when they’re likely tumbling all over the sky, and then land without killing themselves (powerlines, trees, and water make for dangerous landings). Then imagine trying to find all those people scattered over several miles. It was hard enough to regroup a bunch of trained paratroopers after a planned jump much less scores of untrained people.
Those are likely the only types of airliner that you could jump from (even if you could open the doors somehow) and survive.
I dont believe that. HALO jumps from commercial airlines have definitely been done in not so distant past.
My coworker who is former Delta Force described jumping from airliners in the 1980s. IIRC, they only did that from 727s with the tail door between the engines. You try doing that from a plane like a 737, 757, 767, 787 with only side doors (assuming you can get the doors open in the first place) and you’ll eat rivets down the fuselage and likely hit the tail.
I know, i have jumped from side doors and rear hatches, with high wings and low wings, and gotten my bruises at exits too.
BTW, there is a boogie, i think in florida where a 727 is taking skydivers up every year, mostly for bragging rights.
There is a theory that Russians have installed a special well hidden unpressurized deployment tube in commercial airliners, and a bunch of other theories. Chuck Pfaffer and some others have written about it, and there are sometimes endless debates about feasibility of this on dropzone.com now and then, talking about stall speeds of the jets, sudden “turbulence ahead, we have to change flight path” stories etc etc.
Obviously we wont know the facts but I believe it’s feasible.
You’d have to build it like an airlock or diver’s port. The outside opening would have to be big enough for a man and his equipment to get through. It’s not impossible, just difficult, to build such a port and hide it.
That reminds me of the great Australian pilot Sidney Cotton. He was a WWI aviator who owned a color film business in the late 1930s. He owned a twin engined Lockheed airplane* that he frequently flew on business trips to Germany almost to the outbreak of WWII. His plane was fitted with cameras hidden inside of retractable panels in the fuselage. While flying over Germany (and once with a high-ranking Luftwaffe officer on board), he was taking very high quality aerial photographs of future targets.
Once the war broke out, the RAF tried to use their light bombers for aerial reconnaissance. They were almost wiped out. Cotton was the man who proposed fitting cameras into Spitfires. He removed the machine guns and added fuel tanks to the wings. He installed cameras behind the cockpit and removed ballast in the tail to keep the CG in the correct location. He performed other aerodynamic cleanups and turned the Spitfire from a short range interceptor into a long range photo reconnaissance plane. He did all that, and then got shoved aside so a regular RAF officer could take over the operations.
*A few years ago, I saw Cotton’s Lockheed Model 12A listed for sale. It not only still exists, it’s airworthy. I’d love to own a piece of history like that.
What about Martin-Baker “zero-zero” seats?
“Oh stewardess, the Saudi Arabian guy is fiddling with his ejection seat again.”
An ejection seat is sometimes describes as “attempted suicide to avoid certain death.” If you survive an ejection, you’ll likely be an inch shorter due to your spine being compressed. The seats need to be armed at the beginning of the flight and disarmed for each landing. Add to that the weight, cost, and maintenance of the seats, the fact that they’re pretty uncomfortable, and the need to be able to quickly cut openings in the fuselage above each seat. You’d also need to install a launch rail for each seat. Timing the ejections so people didn’t collide with each other (fire from the rear to front) and burn up each other would also be interesting.
Looking at the seats available on the Martin-Baker website, the minimum crew weight is about 70 KG. That wouldn’t work well with children and smaller people. They also tend to have an upper weight limit of about 115-120 KG. Many airline passengers are bigger than that. There’s also this: since 1945, Martin Baker has built about 75,000 ejection seats. A couple large US airlines would need that many seats just to equip their fleets.
I know that. I was making a joke.
I also know that combat aircraft have escape systems on account of the risk in their operation whereas an escape system on a civilian aircraft could end up harming more people than it saves.
But . . .
I remember one accident discussed in Av Week where the military crew saved themselves with their ejection seats whereas the civilians on the other plane perished. There was a lot of snark in the Letters to the Editor on that accident.
I also remember something about if you practice spins in a General Aviation aircraft, you are by the FAR’s supposed to have parachutes.
Spin training has been taken out of the Private Pilot Certificate syllabus. I trained on Pipers (Tomahawk, Warrior, and Dakota), their ailerons are rigged that we were told we didn’t have to do anything with the rudder (as in coordinate the rudder with aileron in turns — I took a glider lesson that required that coordination and I was so lost, sloshing that craft between slip and skid as I over compensated). The only time you use rudder in a Piper is that you step gently on the right pedal on takeoff rotation to counteract the propeller forces, and then there is the slip you do in a cross-wind landing that I never got comfortable with.
The idea is that you could enter a spin if you “horsed it around” making the turn to “short final” at low airspeed using the rudder, but we trained on Pipers making all turns with the ailerons anyway, the Pipers were supposed to be spin-resistant in their stall, the Cherokee models (Warrior and Dakota) weren’t even certified to demonstrate a spin, and your chances of recovery from a spin under those circumstances were remote.
I begged a flight instructor into demonstrating a spin for me, he took me in a Tomahawk way up high, pulled the throttle and pulled the yoke back until the stall warning made that whinny buzz (Pipers don’t seem to stall — they just set there and bleed off airspeed), and gave a rudder pedal a kick.
Hoo boy! The nose just dropped and we were pointed straight down. Maybe that the instructor went full forward on the yoke so as to not enter an unrecoverable flat spin had something to do with it. I think the instructor gave it one full rotation and then “stepped on the ball” in relation to the slip/skid indicator, added power, and did the regular stall recovery.
“Do you want to try one?” “No o o ” I said with a quaver. “OK, we go back to the airport now.”
Oh, and we didn’t take parachutes. I wouldn’t know how to get out the door and then not get plastered into the tail if I had one, especially in a spin.
I guess they still do this in military “primary” flight training? And they have had accidents because the current primary trainer doesn’t recover from spins well?
While I’ve never flown one, I’ve heard of the Tomahawk being called the “Traumahawk” due to its spin characteristcs. I did my initial spin training in a Bellanca Decathlon back in the late 1970s. We wore parachutes and had a good time. I also did some spin training in a Cessna 172 while working on my instrument rating in the early 2000s. We didn’t wear parachutes. It was fun but not exactly comfortable.
At one time, I was considering buying half-ownership in a Cessna 175 (a 172 with a more powerful geared engine). It was an early 1960s model with manual flaps. The instructor had me drop full flaps and lower the RPMs to around 2200, then pull the yoke full back and keep the wings level with the rudder. The plane descended at a steady rate without any sign of spinning. It was taught as an emergency technique should you get caught in clouds without knowing how to fly on instruments. IIRC, the descent rate was significantly less than what you’d get in a Cirrus with the emergency chute deployed. I think Diamond teaches the same technique instead of putting a chute in their planes. Last year, I read that Cirrus requires repacking their emergency chutes every 10 years or so and it costs many thousand dollars to have it done legally.
OK, so the Cessna has the same kind of wing twist as the Piper, so you can stall the inboard section of the wing and maintain aileron authority, so the thing just “mushes down”?
The technique I was taught in the Piper with respect to dumping a lot of altitude in a hurry is the slip (a slip, not a skid, and important distinction because a skid can initiate a spin). You pull the throttle, step on the right rudder pedal, and dip the left wing — preferred method if you are piloting from the left-hand seat because you can see better. Would scare your passengers crazy, but at the controls, it was nothing like the spin demonstration.
Incipient stall as a descent technique? From stall practice, I believe that would work, but it sounds iffy. You really, really want to avoid stall, even in a craft with benign stall characteristics?
With respect to flying VFR into the clouds, I thought the second most dangerous thing you could do is fly into the clouds and risk collision with an aircraft flying IFR. The most dangerous thing you could do is descend and fly into the ground?
I know the “hood time” they give you in the Private Pilot Certificate training is far from an IFR rating and more an attempt to keep you from getting killed if you break the rules and fly into a cloud. I am told “the hood” is nothing like “hard IFR” because you are getting all of these visual cues of light and shadow whereas hard IFR is flying inside a cotton ball.
I also know there is a lot more to IFR flying than keeping the wings level using the gyro horizon. But for the video game generation, is keeping the wings level and altitude constant by reference to instruments really that hard, or does disorientation really set in that quickly? Something tells me it would be safer to fly level, get on the radio, and confess your situation rather than to descend quickly to find the ground, which might find you first?
The plane wasn’t really mushing, it was descending under control. All I had to do was keep the needle and ball centered with the rudder. I could even make shallow turns.
The most dangerous thing about flying VFR into clouds isn’t a collision with other planes, it’s spatial disorientation. It doesn’t matter who you are, if you go into clouds without instruments and the ability to use them, you’ll become disoriented within a minute or two. The most common outcome is the Graveyard Spiral leading to either an immediate crash or structural failure.
Getting an instrument rating requires you to not only remain in control of the plane without outside visual cues but to navigate it precisely. You have to learn how to do different types of instrument approaches such as localizer, ILS, VOR, DME and if your plane is so equipped, GPS. You have to be able to maintain the required altitudes, headings and speeds while operating the radios and other equipment (an autopilot helps a great deal) while ignoring any conflicting signals your senses may be giving you and yet being alert for failed instruments that can give false readings. It’s almost like learning how to fly all over again.
Unless you are talking about an ultra-light, maybe a glider, or perhaps an antique aircraft, your typical GA aircraft — Cessna, Piper — will have 1) two types of turn-and-bank indication, the needle-and-ball along with the “eight-ball” gyro horizon, 2) airspeed and rate of climb, 3) altimeter, and 4) both a wet compass and a gyro-compass. And nav and comm radios, with the nav radio showing a needle indication of deviation from a selected VOR radial.
And the Private Pilot Certificate syllabus had us using every last one of those instruments, along with the distinction between heading (what the gyro and wet compass read) and course (a VOR radial when the needle is centered), and hood practice, with full panel and with partial panel. I don’t think I even knew how to fly with reference to the view out the window because when I took a glider lesson, I was “all over the sky.”
I once was “vectored” hither and yon without the instructor saying anything except for heading and altitude calls until I was directed to take the hood off, and I guess I was “shooting a simulted GCI approach” because I was 100 ft AGL, starring at the runway numbers, smack on the centerline, going, “yikes, do I have clearance to land?” I was so focused on the gauges that I didn’t parse the conversation between the instructor and ATC.
I agree, the hood is not the same thing as the IFR cotton ball because you are getting light and shadow cues in your peripheral vision. You can at least judge you are in a turn by the shadows circling your head. And keeping the wings level is not the same thing as shooting approaches and holding at intersections. But what do they do in the IFR Rating syllabus — do they take you into hard IFR that you can experience the onset of vertigo, where the instruments say one thing, and your inner ear says something different? Does anyone vomit? The closest I came on an airplane to getting really sick was hood practice in some goodly amount of fair-weather chop.
I agree that the hood practice in the VFR syllabus is not IFR training but is a “life insurance policy.” But was all that hood practice a false confidence builder about not to panic
if you flew into a cloud?
When I was a teenager I thought of an invention where each passenger seat has an embedded parachute and is attached to rails that ran the length of the jet. If the jet gets in trouble, the passengers buckle up, the tail of the jet ejects and all of the seats slide down the rail and out the rear of the jet where their parachutes open.
For some reason the thought of 400 people streaming out the back of a jet on parachutes always amused me. Needless to say, I never became an aviation engineer.
The more time passes without suborbital spaceflight actually having any revenue, the more regulations and “safety” will be piled on it. Why? Well, it’s simple – every regulation is a threat from the parasites who make them to cough up the “contributions”.. the longer they don’t, because they simply can’t, the more threats will be made. So start flying people already. Start making money. Pay those bribes. Buy that favorable regulation.
Stampede!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6dwYmWhFBL4
15,000 feet in five minutes, yee freakin’ hah!
Those gigantic cameras strapped to their heads still used film. What a long way we have come since 1999.
Assuming all the problems with getting out of an airliner en route might be overcome, just what are the people supposed to breath at high altitudes after leaving the aircraft?
They mostly breathe adrenaline for the short minutes that it takes to freefall, but oxygen masks are standard issue for HALO jumps.
For a normal 12kft altitude jump, for rookies its very easy to forget to breathe for the entire duration of the freefall. Bad idea as it does not let your muscles relax as required for good body flying skills.
Way back in 1983, I had occasion to ride on the NASA KC-135 “Vomit Comet.” We had to go through altitude chamber training at Wright-Patterson AFB (I recommend a chamber ride for every frequent flier), and then parachute instruction by Bob Williams on the morning of the flight.
He showed me how to don the parachute (which wasn’t that difficult), and then said “Okay, pull the ripcord, but not the D-ring.” I immediately pulled the D-ring that actually holds the parachute harness on, rather than the much less obvious ripcord. Bob said “That’s okay, everyone does that. Just don’t do it if you have to jump.”
He also said that if you have to jump, the only way you will survive is through the belly door where we boarded. And he warned against pulling the ripcord inside the plane, because it would suck one out of any opening available.
I’m pretty sure that no one would really be better off with a parachute, unless they are a sky-diver. And only then if they have a clean exit…
I former coworker used to fly in RC-135s (Rivet Joint) back in the day. The plane’s belly was covered with antennas. The enlisted guys would select the junior LT and call him ACE, not explaining to him that ACE stood for Antenna Clearing Equipment. Let the LT jump first and take out the antennas, then you jump.
There were 3 passengers on a flight to a remote jungle location in Central America — a young relief worker, telecom magnate Carlos Slim, and Pope Francis.
Without warning, the one engine catches fire, and the pilot bails out with a parachute. There are only two parachutes left, and Carlos Slim grabs one and also bails out.
The Pope turns to the young man and says, “Here, take the parachute. You are young and your life is ahead of you; I am an old man, and I will place my fate in the hands of the Lord.”
The young man then says, “Holy Father, there is a parachute for each of us. The world’s richest man just jumped out of the plane with my backpack . . .”
I first heard that joke with Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, a hippy and an old padre on Air Force One. It’s still a good joke.
What’s the difference between a good and bad four-way formation team ?
*thump*
vs
*thump* thump thump *thump*
In the early 70’s my brother was flying home from Texas (to Ohio) on a 707. The passenger next to him was looking under his seat and asked out loud, “Where’s the parachute?” My brother told him, “Don’t worry. If you need one we’d hit the ground before you could get it on.”
The passenger was sick for the entire flight.
To give you guys some spreadsheet fun this weekend, there’s another way to safely exit a moving aircraft, which is to accelerate rearwards until your final velocity is zero. For example, if the entire passenger section of a Boeing 787 accelerated backwards at 3 G’s for about 2 seconds, taking up the length of the 787 fuselage, the exit velocity would match the 787’s stall speed. Unfortunately it would only be useful if you’re about to touch down anyway.
But what might be useful (or at least fun) is if you rigged up a launch-rail/rear-facing seat structure for a C-17, which has an 88 foot cargo bay, so you could make a low pass at 100 kts and shoot a hundred soldiers backwards at 5 G’s, and they’d just drop onto the runway like they stepped off a ladder, probably in an intact tactical formation. If you enhanced the system by having a launch boom that telescoped out the back of the open cargo door, extending the acceleration distance by an additional 88 feet, they’d only have to accelerate a 2.5 G’s to make the zero-velocity drop, and if cranked up to 5 G’s they could exit from a 140 knot low pass. Both methods also work for C-130’s.
If the fuselage was at a 15 degree positive angle, the extra 88 feet of the rear boom would have its back hanging 22 feet lower than the door, and by adding some simple control to it, the boom system could compensate for variations in aircraft height so that each soldier only free drops a foot or two.
If you pushed it to extremes, using a much longer aircraft and boom and higher accelerations, you could easily eject troops at 250 or 300 knots in a low pass, allowing you to do rapid airborne insertions with transport aircraft that are staying underneath radar coverage.
My idea was inspired by my friend who has built several human catapults. One day I said that if we stuck one on the back of a flat bed trailer, we could drive down the highway and just “eject” rearward, which would make a pretty fun little video. Then I wondered how on Earth such a thing could actually be useful for something.
Isn’t/wasn’t there this Special Forces technique of doing a drop/extraction of either a package or a person? Something where a C-130 orbits a point on the ground and pays out a cable, and if you do it right, the end of the cable just “hangs there.”
Was this something I saw in the John Wayne/George Takei movie Green Berets, where they captured a Viet Cong general and were going to winch him out of the jungle, or is this “for real”?
That’s the Fulton surface-to-air recovery system.
I thought of a pickup variant of my rearward acceleration method of dropping people off (which itself could easily be prototyped and tested off the back of a speeding flatbed semi-truck, first landing sand bags till it’s debugged and then trying it with people).
For a pickup, you’d have a grabber near the nose of the aircraft, hanging down, which can very rapidly accelerate rearwards to quickly cancel the aircraft’s forward velocity, so it can make a zero-speed position match with the person on the ground. Then it grabs the person (in a variety of possible ways, though I’ve already ruled out using the hand of a giant gorilla), and relative to the aircraft begins to try and catch back up. To the person, it’s a forward facing acceleration of 2.5 to 5 G’s as they end up about 60 feet behind the aircraft on the end of a boom, still facing forwards, which then pulls them inside in a few seconds. However, it means the boom, or catapult, is underneath the aircraft instead of contained mostly in the cargo bay, so you’d really want a specialized aircraft for the role, and the longer the better.
With a fuselage length of maybe 200 or 250 feet, plus almost as much length in the boom towards the rear, you could probably develop a system with multiple parallel booms that could grab half a dozen people off a battlefield by buzzing them at 200 knots, giving the enemy little warning time or opportunity to intervene. Of course the actual operation would have to be highly automated because some of the moves would have to be done very quickly and with great precision.
Among the benefits of the crazy rear-acceleration, rapid insertion technique would be that, for example, you could have four aircraft buzz near a target from the four points of a compass, and in seconds the target would be surrounded by four intact, pre-oriented hundred-man firing lines, perhaps ejected complete with sand bag firing positions. Another is that if your plane trailed smoke on its low level pass to obscure what’s happening in back, nobody could tell where the actual infantry insertion occurred along the low-level flight path, so they couldn’t immediately target the drop zone.