Loading...
Commercial airlines don’t have parachutes for passengers and crew, and this is all by design. It may make sense to have parachutes on board for all passengers that can come in handy in case of engine failure or other problems, enabling them to glide down to safety and avoid a nasty landing that more often than not means death. Several factors, however, related to both commercial jets and the passengers themselves, mean that it will be even more disastrous to give passengers parachutes than to risk a tough landing.
1. Speed and Air Pressure
The average commercial jet cruises at speeds of over 500 miles per hour. If you are unfortunate enough to be ejected out of the airline at this speed, air resistance would hit you like a brick wall and may tear you to pieces. The faster the speed of the plane, the harder the impact will be and the lower your chances of survival. Passengers who try to exit commercial jets at high speeds will therefore not even stay alive long enough to get to deploy their parachutes. High cruising altitudes of over 30,000 feet also mean oxygen is scarce; even if the speed of the plane is slow enough to allow one to exist safely, they simply will not be able to breathe.
2. Training on Skydiving
Skydiving, especially from high altitudes, requires a great deal of training that the average passenger does not have. One, for example, needs to know when to jump, when to deploy the parachute, how to steer it, and how to land. While these actions can look simple on camera, if you have no experience, you could easily get one or two things wrong. Out of over 200 passengers on a commercial jet, the majority would not know where to start even if they parachuted out on time. Injuries and deaths due to mishandling the parachute would therefore be too high. It's better to instead bet on a risky landing that could go well and save everyone.
3. The Nature of Plane Emergencies
Plane emergencies are almost impossible to predict, meaning there would be no time to prep hundreds of people to jump. If an engine fails, for example, the plane starts going down immediately; there would be no time to organize passengers to jump to safety.
Small Cabins
Even double-aisle planes are still quite small and can only have so many doors. It's difficult to envision a design that can have in place multiple doors that passengers can use to parachute out. Most exit doors that can open mid-flight are usually located at the rear end and are often not found in commercial jets that move at very high speeds. Opening a door at high speeds and altitudes would lead to such rapid decompression within the cabin that passengers may be torn to shreds. The design of the planes themselves therefore rules out the possibility of using parachutes safely in case of an emergency.
Space and Cost
Airlines hope to maximize seating capacity in the cabin and simply have no space for bulky chutes that can be issued to all passengers. Parachutes themselves are quite expensive, and if they are made mandatory, they will add to the already high cost of flying that passengers have to incur.
You will therefore never see a parachute on a commercial jet, because there is simply no method of using it safely at high speeds and altitudes. Airlines, however, have some very detailed safety guidelines that have been continuously refined over time to ensure that air travel is safe and emergencies that require immediate landing are exceedingly rare.
