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Huge Parachute Saves Crashing Planes
theodp writes "When his small plane banked uncontrollably and began spiraling toward earth, Canadian rancher Albert Kolk and his three passengers were saved by a single parachute. Big-as-a-house parachutes made by Ballistic Recovery Systems are stored behind the rear seats in small planes and fired with a rocket through the rear windshield; they're attached with high-strength lines to the plane's wings, nose and tail. Deployment videos here."
Hi fellow /. readers,
I've been an FAA certified private pilot for a couple of years and read many of the monthly general-aviation magazines/websites/etc...
Just to give some real info about parachutes and small planes.
Myth # 1: Engine Failure ==> Crash.
This is very un-true. Reading usenet forums (rec.aviation.piloting/owning/student) there are a great deal of forced-landings involving full or partial engine failure. From the very beginning of flight training, you are tought to always have a place you can glide safely to. In reality, this is difficult - particularly on takeoff climbing out, but for most of the 'time' portion of any flight it is very doable.
Myth # 2: Personal Parachutes are easy - c'mon, we see them in movies all the time. Fact: it is *not* easy to jump out of a moving plane. I took about 5 hours of aerobatic lessons, and let me tell you - it's tough enough getting into small planes, but try it with a 15lb full-chair-back size parachute stuck to you. It was actually difficult getting in and out on the ground, stopped. Add to that, most airplanes have doors that open like car doors - opening to the back. Any idea what the aerodynamic forces are at, say 100 mph? The aerobatic plane I flew had an emergency full-door release that pulled out the door-hinge pins at the front.
Now, back to the BRS parachutes. These are being put mostly on Cirrus Designs aircraft - very sweet, beautiful planes IMHO. These aircraft are *very* capable, fast, and a bit tougher to fly than your average Cessna 182 (from the reports I've read). Most times an aircraft gets in trouble, it's due to the pilot making a bad decision, not due to engine failure. Bad decisions like: flying into bad weather (IMC), scud running below low overcast, etc... These are the places where BRS was intended to be used:
1. Inadvertant Spins - the Cirrus is highly spin resistant, but it is possible & people have died in Cirrus following a spin.
2. Full instrument failure in IMC (clouds,fog,etc). This could leave the pilot with few ways to save the lives of the people inside.
A last fact: from what I've read, the BRS does not in-fact save insurance companies money. It nearly totals the plane. Think about a house-sized parachute attached to your average family sedan, deployed by rockets at 120mph. The planes are mostly totalled, but the avionics & engine (most expensive parts after the airframe) are likely salvagable.
The problem with marketing systems like this is that if you save someone's life, you get a thank-you note, and if you don't succeed, you get sued for 20 million dollars.
My father-in-law invented and marketed a device that automatically deployed a parachute if a skydiver did not pull the rip-cord and the alitude is less than N feet above MSL. He got out of the business in a hurry after he was sued because the device did not work when the parachute partially deployed - which slowed the descent enough not to fire the safety mechanism, but still fast enough to kill on impact.
So while an insurance company might save money, the manufacturer has a strong disincentive to deploy imperfect mechanisms for saving lives.
I concur. I see these as a last resort/second chance sort of thing.
On a side note if you read closely you'll see that the pilot still has faith in the parachute. It is the passenger who says that he'll never rely on one again. I guess he just needs to stay the hell out of airplanes.
From the article:
That's common on search & rescue helicopters that spend a lot of time over water. Things like Sikorsky S-61s and Sea Kings have them so that the helicopter can land on the water if it's really necessary. They're fitted to the outriggers that hold the wheels on the ones I've flown in.
I don't see this being more practical in small planes than simply having individual passenger parachutes in small planes, and letting them bail.
I personally knew the man who died in the Oct 29 plane crash in Rhode Island. That article is a bit inaccurate, but all the news reports were in regards to the crash. He had built the plane (Adventure Air Amphibious 6-seater) in his garage over the course of almost 15 years and it had only been in the air for about a month when it went down. During that entire time he studied to get his private pilot's certificate and all the relevant certifications to properly fly his plane. He was a very good pilot by all the accounts that I had heard (my father - he's also a pilot, and other friends of his).
Anyways, the plane went down about 2.5 miles off the end of the runway, which is about a minute of flying, and by my guess (I am a student pilot with 47 flight hours logged), maybe 1000' or 1500' of elevation AGL. I don't yet know what went wrong that day, but I get the impression from the eyewitness report that the plane was intact until it hit. The bigger factor for me is that I saw how much detail he put into the plane... he was a stickler for perfection and he knew his stuff (he studied mechanical engineering before going into law). So this leads me to believe that the plane was OK as far as the airframe. With a huge parachute like that and even just 500' elevation to pull it, he just might have survived the crash.
The cockpit of that plane and the big harnesses that he had in there would have taken more time to get out than he had. Whole-plane parachutes give pilots more time to react, rather than having to aim the plane away from (as was the case in Paul's crash) a shopping mall, unbuckle yourself, open the canopy (not an option in certain planes where you'd have to push the door against the air resistance), bail, and pull your chute. This is a big problem because most crashes happen in the very first or the very last minutes of flying (when the plane is flying slow and is more susceptible[sp?] to stalling). It can save lives.
Just my $0.02.
- "Nobody came out that night, not one was ever seen. But Old Man Stauf is waiting there, crazy sick and mean!"
"f a similar idea could be used to save a sinking boat."
This idea has BEEN reality for years. These "float bags" are deployed using CO2 canisters, and deploy INSIDE the boat,
thus preventing water from occupying enough of the boat's interior to cause sinking.
Next time you "wonder", why not use Google ? You'd be amazed what exists already.
These BRS systems may be useful when the pilot gets a heart attack and dies leaving the passengers in IFR weather.
The one time I worked from home a few months ago, I saw this.
I heard a plane doing flips which I didn't think much of at first as I grew up near Oshkosh, but then I realized that this was in downtown Atlanta in very bad weather. I tried to find the plane and shortly found it spiraling out of the clouds. It was a 6 seat twin engine airplane with two people on board (from later news reports). After about 5 seconds, I saw the fire-ball explosion.
The BRS system or even better planning by the pilot (before it happened, the WX weather map showed a fast moving small strong cloud over this area which they should have noticed as they took off from an airport less than 20 miles away).