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First Emergency Use of Whole-Aircraft Parachute
Ahotasu writes "Over at SpaceFlightNow, there is a short NASA news release discussing the development of and first emergency use of a production parachute system for a general aviation aircraft. Whole-ultralight parachute systems have been available and used for some time, but this is apparently the first use in a "certified general-aviation aircraft". From the article: "In October 2002, a pilot released his single engine aircraft's parachute and landed safely in a Texas mesquite- tree grove. The pilot was uninjured, and there was minimal damage to the plane. The safe landing made aviation history, as it was the first emergency application of an airframe parachute on a certified aircraft." Here's the company's website. Looks like right now, they only have models for a select few gen. aviation aircraft, probably the most popular models."
...they can make this work in bigger aeroplanes as well. Put a para on a 747 and i'll be really impressed, and perhaps even a bit more confident i will reach the ground safe :-)
Probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities.
Aristotele
If this works as well as I've heard, look for it to eventually become mandatory on small planes.
I've seen these used on ultralights - when the aircraft is being used for aerobatics that stress it far beyond design tolerances. I guess the product is a good idea for pilots who push the limits.
But any pilot has to demonstrate the basics of unpowered flight to get their license. The engine dies - so what! Just look for a place to land.
How will they compensate for a plane that has spun out of control or is upside-down? Either way, it seems like the chute would get tangled up with the plane and not do much good.
Just because I doubt myself does not mean I find your position compelling.
for any sort of aircraft actually used in passenger airlines - I mean, it may be able to have enough lift to carry a small Cesna (or whatever's on the picture), but not even the smallest jet...
It'll have just as much effect as giving Red Bull to all passengers, i.e. none
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You're not the first person to laugh at the concept. In this article the owner of Cirrus Design Corp says that the rest of the industry harshly ridiculed the idea all through development. Now vindicated, he countered, "We spent more than $10 million developing our parachute system, and if this is the only life we save, it will have been worth it."
I fly gliders, no engine to fail there, but people still crash and die...
Controls can stick, birds can impact the plane in flight. The list goes on, and on...
This is useful for those situations
"I'll have a Guinness, no wait, make that a Coors Light" -Grad student I work with, who shall remain anonymous...
Rockets are a lot more common in aviation than you might first think. The Swearingen/Fairchild Metro III, a 20-passenger twin-prop plane popular for short-haul flights, actually has a solid-fuel rocket in the tail cone. That's because, when fully-loaded, the Metro would, under some conditions, be unable to climb on takeoff if there was an engine failure. Comforting thought.
When I was an air traffic controller, we referred to them as "aluminum lawn darts," for obvious reasons.
The chute on a small plane like a Cessna172 is already pretty big. Most planes these are fitted on are likely less than 8,000 lbs or so.
Airliners full of people and baggage and fuel are incredibly heavy and you would need multiple chutes of massive size.
To get an idea of how massive these things are, when I took a trip to Australia back in September, on the way there the captain announced that we were going to "burn 130 tons of kerosene on the way there". That is 130 *tons* of jet fuel for, in this case a 15 hour flight. Even a domestic flight of just a couple hours is going to have a lot of weight just in fuel. Add on the plane itself, passengers and crew and baggage and you start to see the problem.
So I don't see this working even on a small commuter jet such as the Embraer or the MD-88.
Now NASA does use parachutes to recover spent boosters from Shuttle launches and they are fairly heavy, but they are also different shaped and maybe its easier to slow them down than a large jet.
So it could be possible, but only time and research will tell.
--Won't that be grand? Computers and the programs will start thinking and the people will stop. - Dr. Walter Gibbs
The newscaster asked a company representative if this chute could help prevent lots of deaths in an airliner crash. The company rep just about laughed at the guy, and replied, essentially, that a parachute big enough to save an airliner would have to be so much bigger than the plane itself as to be infeasible.
My other thought on this (and I must admit that I am not a pilot and have never done any "flying" more realistic than flying a fighter plane in a number of "flight simulators" except the really realistic ones) is that it would seem to me that aviation accidents tend to happen in such a sudden and severe manner that this chute would have limited success. I question whether the chute can be useful in an uncontrolled spin. In addition, I suspect that most fatal aviation accidents (start to) occur under 500 feet, at which height I doubt the chute would have enough time to deploy effectively.
The rotary wing aircraft talked about a few days ago here could use one of these - one of the major drawbacks was that it couldn't glide in the event of an engine failure, but if it can just deploy a chute...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
This occured near the intersection of route 121 and Main in The Colony, TX. The plane landed near the edge of a golf course just into the trees. The BRS apparently work flawlessless as the guy walked away from the site. From the pictures I saw on the news, the plane looked salvagable too. I had no idea this was the first use of the BRS on something other than an ultralight. I figured the guy would at least have a broken leg (many BRS survivors have something broken because there isn't much protection in an Ultralight) but he walked away with just a few scratches.
There is nothing inherently safe about liberty. That's why so many people died protecting it.
For the unhappy alternative, go to www.ntsb.gov and look what happened to N837CD. As someone already pointed out, Cirrus aircraft come w/the BRS parachutes. N837CD was a Cirrus, and those guys are dead.
I'm all for safety, etc. I think it would be nice to have an option to pull the chute (even if it does destroy the aircraft). But I'm gonna fly the airplane, and I'm gonna fly it all the way down.
Flame away if you flew yourself to work today... I did.
An interesting note about this type of aircraft parachute: most of the ones that are deployed on GA aircraft are ballistic-assisted parachutes. Once triggered, the parachute is fully extended from a compacted state inside a tube by a small rocket. The chute itself reaches full extension in a little over 1 second. That short deployment time makes the chute more useful in the lower altitudes that a small aircraft would frequent.
Then there's the matter of "spillover" -- the state that a parachute will quickly find itself in if deployed behind a fast-moving heavy ballast. If this happens, the chute will collapse and begin to work a little more line a streamer than a parachute -- it won't inflate after the air gets forced out of it. To combat this, a "speed ring" -- essentially a small baffled airfoil attached to the chute harness -- blocks the air entering the chute from the bottom. As forward momentum decreases, gravity causes the ring to slowly fall downward, allowing the chute to slowly and safely inflate.
A really fascinating thing about the BRS type parachutes: Once they deploy the aircraft is totalled. It can never fly again. First, a deployment typically stresses an airframe in two ways that it usually never is stressed -- the wing spars are pulled backwards while in flight, and the vertical impact of the ground with the aircraft at a relatively high speed. The FAA will never allow the aircraft to be flown again.
The second reason: the parachute tethers are typically stowed under the skin of most aircraft, and in deployment can actually rip through the skin. Damage of this type is very difficult to repair, so the pilot that chooses to use the BRS system _knows_ that he will lose the plane permanently.
That usually keeps pilots looking for that tempting field or road if they have an in-flight emergency.
I highly recommend this company's aircraft to any pilot...
Well there is reason to be wary of these planes, and that reason has something to do with the parachute. Every other manufactured small plane has had to undergo a spin recovery demonstration. That is, the manufacturer has had to demonstrate in a flight test that the plane can be recovered from a spin. Not so the SR20 and SR22. Cirrus did not have to demonstrate spin recovery because their official spin recovery method is to deploy the parachute. Because they haven't had to demonstrate spin recovery, we don't really know how these planes behave in a spin. There have been a few accidents in the Cirrus that may be attributed to an unrecoverable spin condition. It's possible that by the time the pilot realized his situation he couldn't deploy the parachute.
Deploying the chute is a final act. Once you do that you have put your fate in the hands of the winds and chance. That's not something that pilots are comfortable doing -- we never want to give up flying the plane in any situation. So a pilot would want to be absolutely sure that there was no other reasonable course of action before pulling that handle. Because that will be his last act as pilot in command for that flight!
Mooney Guy N4074H
phliar's point is important -- most accidents happen because of fuel exhuaustion. aircraft gross weight occupied by a parachute instead of fuel isn't good.
I'll tell you what'll save lives, better than a parachute. Get some of friggin' paperwork and ridiculously expensive testing out of the hair of aircraft electronics manufacturers, and give them a measure of defense against lawsuits...that'll give more and more planes a sophisticated gps/terrain system, like the big boys fly, and it'll save lives.
If you want to see something really cool, check out Blue Mountain Avionics. I don't know if Greg Richter reads SlashDot, but companies like his should have the government beating down his door to help him test, for free his avionics suite. It's cheap, awesome, and could save a lot of lives.
In a single engine plane, you're landing, one way or another, and if you're smart, you just land straight ahead, trees or not. That rarely kills you, but it does mess up the plane. (Turning around is often fatal unless you have a lot of speed or altitude.)
In a twin-engine plane, you apply full power to the other engine (during takeoff, it may already be at full power.) This creates a large yaw force that tends to cause the plane to roll, sometimes so much that it can't maintain altitude and it becomes a lawn dart. It can all happen very quickly, and you're probably not very high up, so you don't have much time to correct for it.