Pipistrel Virus pulls chute

[Marty_d]

Interesting article here discussing larger aircraft with chutes.http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20131223-should-planes-have-parachute

I get a "404 not found" error when I go to that link.

 

 

[PA.]

I get a "MH370 not found" error when I go to that link.

Found it, here you go..

 

Parachutes capable of carrying entire aircraft exist, so why aren’t they installed on more planes? Wouldn’t they save lives in emergencies, wonders Katia Moskvitch.

 

• By Katia Moskvitch
   
   
  

 

 

23 December 2013

 

John Farese’s plane engine quit without a sputter, and he began to plummet.

 

Farese, a US lawyer with 42 years experience flying his 1978 Cessna 182 plane, had failed to register that there was a problem with the fuel tanks. He was too slow in a banked turn, so the plane rolled left in a spiral stall. At 400ft above the ground, he was going down – fast.

 

Fortunately, his Cessna was equipped with a simple but clever technology. As the ground loomed, he pulled a handle just above his head.

 

There was a huge impact, and everything went white. “I thought I was dead. Then a second, more violent, impact, as the plane fell out of the top of the trees,” Farese recalls. He survived with a sprained back.

 

What saved Farese’s life was a parachute capable of carrying the whole plane – it slowed his descent just enough. This type of parachute is found on many light aircraft. Some manufacturers and engineers argue that if they were installed on commercial airliners, the lives of hundreds of people could be saved in mid-air emergencies. So why haven’t aircraft companies embraced the idea for all planes?

 

Before addressing this question, it is worth considering what may seem a more obvious solution: parachutes for individual passengers. Given that there is a life-jacket under every seat on a commercial airliner, it might not seem like a bad idea to stuff a chute under there too.

 

In reality, individual parachutes would be impossible to use in an emergency involving hundreds of people, says Guy Gratton, an aviation research fellow at Brunel University in the UK. After all, what are the chances that some 300 people on a plummeting plane have time to don their chute and leap from the plane in an orderly manner? “Frankly, I think not a chance,” says Gratton.

 

Whole-plane parachutes are arguably more suitable in a crisis because they can be deployed quickly. That’s why about 10% of all small general aviation planes are equipped with a single chute that carries the plane, with its passengers, cargo and all.

 

On small planes like those manufactured by Cessna or Cirrus, the parachute is stored in the fuselage, either behind the back seat or in the centre section of the wing, above the cockpit. In an emergency the pilot has to pull a handle in the ceiling of the plane. Once the large chute deploys, the descent rate is about 1,700ft per minute (518m) – so the impact you'd expect on the ground is equivalent to “jumping from a 4m tall ledge,” says Travis Klumb, Cessna’s director of flight operations. Planes are also equipped with other features that help cushion the drop, such as crushable aluminium inside the seats and landing gear designed for a controlled collapse during a crash-landing.

 

Making the plunge

 

One of the main manufacturers of whole-plane chutes is Ballistic Recovery Systems (BRS), based in Miami, Florida. Founder Boris Popov started his company after a glider he was flying as a young man spun out of control. He plunged into a lake from about 500 feet (150m). His survival inspired him to seek ways to make aviation safer.

 

The biggest planes equipped with the BRS parachutes are for five people, but Popov is planning to install parachutes on planes of up to 20 passengers within the next five years. He believes that, in principle, you could install them on much bigger aircraft, perhaps even large passenger planes. “There is no doubt that big commercial airliners of the future will be equipped with some kind of a parachute recovery system,” he says.

 

Yet is this a realistic prospect? There is no doubt that many are sceptical, citing reasons ranging from the potential bulkiness of the technology to lack of demand. Gratton says that technologically it’s possible to equip an airliner with a parachute, “but you’d have to ask whether there’s any real value in doing it. Certainly you would lose a very large amount of the airliner’s payload, so you’d have to reduce the number of passengers you can carry very significantly.” All the safety features available on an aircraft have been selected on the basis of “what is most likely to save lives for a given amount of money and a given amount of weight,” he adds.

 

The spokesman for the UK Civil Aviation Authority is not convinced that a parachute would always help either. “It is rare that all the engines stop, and if only one stops, the pilot can still, in the majority of cases, land the plane.” When a plane does stall, there might not be enough time to deploy a parachute anyway, he adds.

 

Finally, it would be difficult to design a parachute system big enough to carry the weight of a commercial airliner. The largest, the Airbus A380, can carry up to 853 people, and weighs nearly 400 times as much as a small personal aircraft. And that doesn’t include passengers and luggage. “Any parachute system [on an Airbus] would have to be very large indeed and comprise multiple canopies,” says Alizee Genilloud, a media relations manager at Airbus. “The system would be complex, bulky and heavy and require multiple safety devices to make unintentional deployment impossible.”

 

Still, if you were to build a parachute system that could carry a larger plane, what would it take?

 

To safely bring down a big commercial airliner such as a Boeing 747 with about 500 people on board, there would have to be 21 parachutes each the size of a football field, says Popov. “It takes about a square foot (0.1sq m) of material to bring down one pound (0.5kg) of aircraft.”

 

This would likely be unfeasible. So to decrease the number of canopies, one solution could be to ditch all the heavy parts of the plane in an emergency, such as the wings and the engines, says Popov. The parachutes would rescue the passenger cabin only.

 

Gratton agrees that shedding weight would be the best method, albeit an extreme one. “If you had to do it, then getting rid of the wings and the engines is the right thing to do – I just hope you don't do it over a city,” he says.

 

The idea has been considered before though: a detachable cabin was first proposed by a Russian inventor, Gleb Kotelnikov, in the 1920s. He is credited with inventing the first knapsack parachute, which was later used by the Soviet military in World War II.

 

Kotelnikov’s design never went beyond paper calculations, but the main Russian parachute-manufacturing institute, the Scientific Research Institute of Parachute Design and Production (NII Parachutostroeniya), is busy developing an aeroplane parachute recovery system that is partly based on Kotelnikov’s nine-decades-old idea.

 

One design consists of cutting the wings off with special blades, and then separating the passenger cabin into several modules, with a parachute attached to each.

 

These parachute systems can also be used to “drastically reduce speed and avoid human casualties during take-off and landing accidents,” says the institute’s chief designer Viktor Lyalin. The downside is that they won’t be available any time soon because they require extensive redesign of the aircraft.

 

So while parachutes appear to be unlikely to arrive on large planes any time soon, it may at least be possible.

 

Popov is adamant that within this century, all planes of all sizes will have parachute recovery systems – all it would take is public will. “A lot of people keep asking: ‘Why can’t I have a parachute system on a Boeing 737 when I fly to see grandma?’ Well, if enough people ask for that, it’ll force the aircraft manufacturers and the governments to make these revolutionary changes.”

 

 

[Happyflyer]

I get a "404 not found" error when I go to that link.

Oops, slight typo. Should have been http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20131223-should-planes-have-parachutes

Thanks to PA. for above post.

 

 

[red750]

Haven't read all the posts, but saw this on bookface:

 

 

 

[kasper]

Haven't read all the posts, but saw this on bookface:

https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=1085135574860567

Hmmmm

1. it will never work from a weight management persepctive - you are more than doubling the mass of the fuse tube by adding not just a skin but all the associated gear to have a rear opening system and roller system - and do not underestimate how STIFF that fuse tube remaining to crash will have to be to get a single passenger unit out the door - airliners bend a lot

 

2. it will never work from an operational perspective - the vast majority of commercial disasters involve structural issue with the airframe - break the fusealge up/open or disable key systems as woudl be a point where parachute looks viable and enough if the airframe is no longer working to allow this to roll out the back - it is exceptionally rare for an airframe loss to be the result of just an engine failure ...

 

3. if you are seriously thinking of something like that it would be better to have a go at just bringing the fuselage down - set explosives in the wings to remove them and all the fuel lowering mass and ignition sources (don't worry about the flames when you blow them, the gale as you plummet will blow them out) and treat the fuselage as 3-4 sections that if they break up will still come down under individual canopy clusters and rockets - yes you will lose a few people but thats the luck of the seat draw.

 

for me I will avoid the plane with the massive explosive rockets fitted that could misfire/be triggered by people out for no good in the air to actually bring the plane down in the first place - much easier to figure out how to use an exsiting system, on the plane to blow it up than try to sneak enough bang stuff on board to do the job

 

 

[Marty_d]

Thanks PA - yes that accords with my thoughts - technically possible but financially extremely unlikely.

 

 

[PA.]

Don't drop the passengers out the back like a pigeon at take off, use the cesarean method.

 

 

This is the go.

 

Notice how similar to a modern F1 car Thunderbird 2 looks?

 

 

 

[Dieselten]

Under no circumstances are we going to see entire passenger airliner fuselages being lowered to earth under huge parachutes. It's commercially untenable.

 

Airlines accept the statistical probability of lising a few hundred people at a time and factor it into their business plan. They pay for it in insurance and lawsuits from aggrieved relatives after an accident. It's just one of the many costs of doing business. The fact that the travelling public still is prepared to travel by air in ever-increasing numbers is a tacit acceptance of the fact as well.

 

 

[facthunter]

What choice do they have? The average passenger wouldn't even check up the safety record of the airline they are flying on. They just go for the cheapest, but not so when they buy a car. When your life is at stake one would expect a bit more imagination.. Nev

 

 

[eightyknots]

What choice do they have? The average passenger wouldn't even check up the safety record of the airline they are flying on. They just go for the cheapest, but not so when they buy a car. When your life is at stake one would expect a bit more imagination.. Nev

...and therein lies the problem. Quite a number of African "airlines" (as well as some South East Asian ones) offer very competitive fares. However, they lack relatively basic safety practices and insistence on proper maintenance schedules and records. This has led to a number of unnecessary losses of aircraft and the lives of passengers and crew. BUT, because people keep buying their tickets, they are able to keep flying with very old, high-hours aircraft.

 

The European Union has learned from this and now has a blacklist that prohibits such airlines from travelling in their airspace.

 

 

[facthunter]

True. Garuda was banned for a period.

 

CHUTE CATCHES VIRUS would put you off them.Nev

 

 

[Oksinay]

A long ago Saturday night session around the drop zone fire debating this scenario came to the conclusion that if you were on an airliner that came apart at height and you didn't freeze or pass out from lack of oxygen then the 5 minute plus freefall should be long enough to find the baggage bin that has your rig in it and put it on.Maybe the hardware free base jumping rigs that are low profile and designed to get around metal detector security might be better insurance these days.

A long ago Saturday night session around the drop zone fire debating this scenario came to the conclusion that if you were on an airliner that came apart at height and you didn't freeze or pass out from lack of oxygen then the 5 minute plus freefall should be long enough to find the baggage bin that has your rig in it and put it on.Maybe the hardware free base jumping rigs that are low profile and designed to get around metal detector security might be better insurance these days.

Gotta laugh Ozzie. All those nights sitting around the dz fire, how big a wedge would we need to build to be able to land it, what's the lowest height to get out if an engine fails, and the perennial question, if the airliner breaks up in flight what formation will we build?

 

 

[Guest ozzie]

Yeah you would spend 4 minutes rummaging around and finally find the bag with your rig in it then realise the key is in carry on bag in the overhead bin, DOH.

 

 

[smokeybear]

It's amazing that virus pilots rarely know how to use their air brakes, the virus should be landed as a true glider, glide approach using air brakes, not powered with a 3 degree ( or less ) approach.