You’re on a commercial flight and wouldn’t you know it… the darn thing is going down. As you
sit amongst the chaos, with your life flashing before your eyes, you stoically think to yourself
“Crikey, a parachute would go down an absolute treat right now.
If only the airline had given me one.”
Well, unfortunate airplane passenger, you are certainly not alone in this train of thought,
but would having a nylon filled backpack be your ticket off of this falling winged tube
or would having a parachute actually make no difference at all to your current predicament.
Let’s find out!
I’m Stu, this is Debunked, and we’re here to sort the truths from the myths,
and the facts from the misconceptions.
This video is sponsored by NORD VPN
The notion itself certainly makes sense!
‘What a great idea it would be if airlines provided their passengers with parachutes,
granting further peace of mind to nervous flyers and perhaps a glimmer of hope to those
in malfunctioning aircraft hurtling perilessly towards the surface of the Earth.’
However, as well-intentioned as these notions might be,
the reality is that giving every passenger on a regular commercial flight
a parachute throws up quite a number of practical and logistical issues.
Problemo numero uno: parachuting isn’t easy. Although the concept of
parachuting - i.e. strapping yourself to a big fabric sheet in order to slow your
fatal freefall down to a survivable descent - is itself pretty simple,
actually doing it isn’t something anyone can just do with zero prior training or experience.
Depending on the type of parachuting we’re talking about,
on-the-ground training should take half an hour at the absolute minimum,
and that’s for tandem sky-dives in which you are literally strapped to a professional
who actually knows their stuff and is, frankly, doing all the parachuting for you.
Training to be able to parachute all by yourself can take around 6 hours over an intensive course,
plus you would need to complete a minimum of 7 supervised skydives before you’d be
allowed to jump solo and another 18 before you’d be licensed to do it on your own,
not something that you are likely to squeeze in between check-in and departure.
Not that it would really matter anyway.
Because even if every passenger was fully trained to use a parachute,
there are a number of significant differences between doing a regular sky-dive and parachuting
out of a commercial airliner, especially one that’s currently in the process of crashing.
First of all, planes used for sky-diving are
considerably different to the enormous jet-liners used in commercial air travel.
For one thing, it’s pretty unlikely that you’d even be
able to make it outside to parachute away from your crashing plane anyway.
Aside from the fact that the doors on commercial airplanes are physically locked prior to takeoff,
they are also designed so the pressurized cabin
effectively seals them shut, making them impossible to open while in the air.
Unless the reason you’re going down is that a massive hole has somehow appeared in the
side of your plane, or you just happen to be The Incredible Hulk,
getting outside is actually going to be extremely difficult in and of itself.
The exits on sky-diving planes on the other hand are designed specifically to allow for
quick and efficient egress while up in the air. They are big and wide, and the doors usually
slide right open; some planes used for sky-diving don’t have doors at all.
Exits are also specifically located at certain points along the aircraft,
such as behind the wing or at the very back of the plane, in order to make
leaving the aircraft as safe as possible. Not only that, in the interest of safety,
…sky-diving planes are, on average, flying 95 miles or 150 kilometers per hour when
their thrill-seeking passengers start flinging themselves into the atmosphere.
Not so with big commercial planes. Considering the fact that commercial airliners usually
travel at somewhere between 460 and 575 miles or 740 and 925 kilometers per hour,
simply exiting the plane could cause serious
injuries just from the force of entering the outside airflow.
At those speeds there’s also an extremely real possibility of
slamming into the outside of the plane on your way out, which increases the
likelihood of sustaining fatal injuries from “eminently possible” to “almost certain”.
Now, most of you won’t ever have to worry about the real world situation of needing an emergency
parachute as over 99.99992% of flights make it safely to their travel destination
where you can then sit back and relax and catch up
on some of your favorite shows on your favorite streaming service.
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Where we're we, ah yes, exiting a plane from the height of everest!
Another big difference between the planes
used for commercial air travel and those used for recreational skydiving
is altitude. Skydivers usually jump from heights of around 14,000 feet, while more
experienced sky-divers may go up to 18,000 feet in order to experience a longer freefall.
Commercial airliners usually cruise at somewhere around 35,000 feet, well over double the altitude.
This creates some issues for any would-be parachuters hoping to jump free of their doomed
aircraft. First of all, the air at that altitude is so thin that it isn’t even breathable, so you
would also need some kind of additional oxygen supply, likely in the form of a mask and a tank,
in order to not pass out. Fingers crossed you regain consciousness before… well, y’know.
Of course, this is assuming your lungs haven’t exploded already, which is what some experts say
would happen if you tried to take a breath at such altitudes without a pressurized air apply.
Professor Jason Kring, points out that the volume of a gas is inversely proportional to the pressure
exerted on it. At that height, according to Boyle’s Law, the air pressure is sufficiently low
that taking a breath would cause the air inside your lungs to expand so quickly that
“they would, for lack of a better term, explode.”
Yikes.
There’s also the minor issue of temperature, which at 35,000 feet is somewhere around -30 degrees
fahrenheit, or about -34 degree celsius, at least, and that’s not even including the wind-chill you’d
experience from jumping out of a plane at 500 plus miles or 800 plus kilometers per hour.
So on top of a parachute and an oxygen tank, you’re probably going to need some kind of
specialized clothing to protect your fragile human body from the inhospitable cold on your way down.
Beyond that, the sheer impracticality of getting everyone suited up and out the door is itself
a logistical nightmare.
Even if we ignore the obvious pandemonium that would erupt in such a situation and presume
that everyone is able to remain perfectly calm in the face of fiery insta-death,
the idea that you could safely and efficiently evacuate hundreds of passengers from a plummeting
airliner before crashing is what we in the business like to call “a big ask”.
While the FAA only approves a plane that can be evacuated in 90 seconds,
those time limits are only tested in organized drills on land,
where all participants are aware of the situation.
As you can imagine, real life emergencies are often a tad more chaotic.
A 2020 study of real life emergency evacuations
found a host of examples exceeding the expected 90 seconds…
with a 2012 incident taking 3m 38s to get everyone off board…
and that's when the plane was on the ground and without everyone getting parachuted up!
But how long do we even have before the plane hits the ground?
During the infamous Air France 447 crash in 2009 for example,
the airliner practically fell out of the sky, falling 38,000 feet in 3 minutes; even the most
optimistic evacuation times wouldn't get everyone suited and booted and out the door in time.
By comparison, in 1983, the crew of Air Canada Flight 143 managed to keep their
Boeing 767 in the air for a whopping 17 minutes after running out of fuel.
They safely glided to an emergency landing saving all passengers and crew onboard,
so you'd have been a fool to jump plane in that scenario.
Last of all, we of course have to consider the sordid topic of
coin. In order to facilitate a policy of parachuting during an emergency,
a lot of things would have to change about not only planes themselves, but the entire
commercial aviation industry. And things have this rather annoying habit of costing money.
Parachutes, oxygen masks, and sky-diving apparel aren’t cheap,
and to provide a full set for every seat on a plane would cost a lot of moolah,
not to mention the likely cost of developing and redesigning a version of these that would
be better suited to commercial air travel. They would also take up a lot of space in the plane,
which means less space for passengers, which means less money.
As discussed the design of the doors would need some rejigging, and requiring everyone
to be parachute trained would be an enormous undertaking that would also cost a penny or two.
As you can imagine, all of these costs would naturally be passed onto the passenger,
which would cause the price of air travel to skyrocket and profits to dwindle.
So yeah, on top of everything else that is practically and logistically problematic
about parachutes on commercial planes, they’re also financially unfeasible too.
This is especially true considering the fact that in the last couple of decades,
almost all fatal plane crashes - more than 90% - happened during take off and landing,
when a parachute would be pretty much entirely useless.
To answer the original proposition, the reason why airlines don’t provide
passengers with parachutes is because it is, for many, many reasons, highly impractical,
logistically mind-boggling, extremely expensive and, fundamentally,
unlikely to save enough lives to be worth doing it in the first place.