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Also, the airplane has to be designed for it, and the chute is custom designed for the airplane. Just like any system on an airplane, pilots have to be trained in its use, and they need to maintain that knowledge; and the chute itself needs to be maintained. The whole thing is covered by much FAA paperwork, and anyone who's a pilot knows how expensive that is. There are a couple of airplanes that BRS has an "STC" (Supplemental Type Certificate, i.e. FAA permission to install) for the chute, but they are smaller training aircraft like the Cessna 152 and 172.)

The number of people that can afford a new Lancair is small. Pilots like me will continue to fly older and cheaper airplanes, and if there's an emergency, we will just land the airplane. Structural failures are rare, and there is not much country where a forced landing will result in injuries to occupants. Prudent pilots won't fly at night over hostile terrain. (In an emergency, I don't give a shit about saving the airplane; at that point it belongs to the insurance company, and I'd rather save life than their money.)

I seem to remember a report of the first successful real-world use of a emergency parachute for light aircraft. A cessna-like plane had its engines cut own and the pilot was able to parachute his entire plane to safety.

I think the first came to simulate an auto-rotation maneuver was MicroProse's Gunship. Get shot up by a ZSU23 or a few SAMs and you quickly found how useful autorotation became on the way down.

But then, i don't think too many cars will be encountering anti-aircraft batteries on the way home from work any time soon. And how big a deal is auto rotation, really? When you could have something like this?

Technically, you don't need a parachute for the bus, just the people inside..

Also, they have parachutes for small planes such as cesdna's, but I don't think its feasible to put parachutes on larger planes.

One of the reasons why I gave up flying and sold my plane was because of so many pilots who simply did not know how to look out the window. Or how to properly enter the airport traffic pattern. So many morons in the air, and let me tell you from both a pilot perspective and an air traffic control perspective (yes, I've done both), too many pilots depend on their computer gadgets to get from point A to point B.

Here's some perspective: Check out the NTSB aircraft accident site. Follow the links for monthly synopses. If you read enough of the accident reports (I've read many of them), you'll discover navigation is the least of the problems facing pilots today. Most pilots die for one of two reasons: They run out of fuel, or they fly into weather they aren't equipped or trained to handle.

NASA has been at the forefront of the Aviation Safety Reporting System (ASRS), and for that I commend them. But you're sadly mistaken, Timmy, if you believe we'll see general aviation become as simple and safe as "driving your car," as you put it. There are way too many other obstacles GA pilots face than how to get from Madison to Detroit. You do your readers a disservice by pretending navigation is the biggest problem us pilots face in the world.

I don't know about you, Timmy, but I think I'd much rather have a parachute recovery system for my small plane than a new nav system: The parachute will be far more useful to me when I'm involved in a midair collision with a pilot who's busy starting at his new cockpit computer rather than looking out the cockpit window.

There are NO such parachutes. Let's do some real simple calcs. I believe a standard human parachute is 28 feet in diameter, for a human weighing 200 pounds. A fully loaded 747 is around 800,000 pounds, 4000 times as much. Let's see, square root of 4000 is roughly 64, and 64 * 28 = 1770 feet -- ONE KILOMETER!

Right! And Wrong. There is a company called Ballistic Recovery Systems that makes parachute systems for small general aviation planes. The system are designed to slow the descent of a powerless plane enough to make the impact survivable. They have proposed a similar system for airliner consisting of five 1600 pound chutes. The goal is not to let the airliner fall vertically, but rather to cancel enough weight to slow the airliner's best glide speed. Slowing the glide speed greatly increases the distance it can glide and makes the subsequent landing slower and more survivable.