They often fly close to other gliders - most commonly when circling together in order to climb in the same thermal - and thus occasionally make contact.
Some time ago I was involved in a midair collision that caused me to lose part of my right wing. My parachute got put to the test, and passed with flying colors.
Yikes! So structural failure was involved- but hey, you’re a member of the Caterpillar Club. I hope you bought your rigger a case of beer!
“Flying colors”- I see what you did there.
Former beer - aka scotch whiskey.
In case of power failure. 
That would really suck- hey, wait a minute! 
For a twist on the more common “airplane emergency, had to bail out”- I was in a Cessna 206 one time with some other skydivers when we cracked a cylinder head just after take-off. We had to stay with the plane (it was too low to jump; we never got above 500 feet). Our pilot kept his cool and didn’t try to put it down in the empty field in front of us. He brought us around in a big 360 and landed on the runway we had just taken off from. We were less than 100 feet off the deck when he turned onto final.
Glad it worked out - turning back to land after a low-altitude engine failure often doesn’t.
Oh, I know- but landing in a farm field with a full load doesn’t always work out either. I was sitting on the floor beside the pilot, and he asked me if we could get out. “No, we’re too low” I said.
Here’s the airport where my home dropzone was located. We were taking off to the east on 9-27. When the pilot started to turn I thought he was going to land on one of the grass runways (heading 180 or 225, is that right?).
I kept checking my wrist-mount altimeter and before too long I realized he wasn’t planning to land in the grass. I wasn’t sure we had enough altitude for a full 360, but we made it, so I won’t criticize the pilot. All’s well that ends well!
It occurred to me that my little airplane emergency would make an interesting hypothetical for pilots, so I started a thread about it here.
Why are airplanes better than relationships?
I’ve never had to bail out of an airplane.
Good one!
Another factor Cecil didn’t address was altitude. Commercial airliners fly well above the heights skydivers jump from. Anyone jumping from 30000 feet would die during the descent unless they had an oxygen supply.
Presumably any airplane that is in trouble is going to eventually descend below 15,000 feet. Also, it is not true that you would die from lack of oxygen. Hypothermia, yes, but not hypoxia. You might lose consciousness within a few seconds at 30,000 feet, but you would continue to live and breathe relatively normally for at least several minutes – long enough to descend to where there is more oxygen. Personal parachutes could automatically deploy at 10,000 feet whether you were conscious or not.
The bigger problem is the cold at altitude, coupled with the wind chill from falling at terminal velocity. It might even get colder as you pass through the tropopause. Considering that most airliner passengers dress rather lightly, it is probably not a good idea for them to be subjected to sub-freezing temperatures, especially when they are not taking in enough oxygen to keep those calories burning. Depending on how long you were exposed to it, you could suffer permanent brain damage, severe frostbite, or death.
I think you are both a bit too pessimistic about survival at low temperatures and with little oxygen.
Here’s a famous story about a paraglider pilot who flew too close to a thunderstorm cell and was carried to an altitude of over 32,000’. She passed out from hypoxia and suffered frostbite from temperatures as low as -58 F. But after close to an hour she landed intact (though covered in ice) and subsequently made a good recovery.
… which is not to say that I think bailing out of an airliner is practical.
One point is that at airliner speeds an ejection seat - and a rather high-tech one at that - is required for a decent survival rate.
True. You’re never going to get a hundred inexperienced people into parachutes and out of a plane in any reasonable amount of time. The only way it would ever happen is if there’s an automated system where all you need to do is have everyone strap themselves into their seats and then the pilot pushes a button and all the passengers with their seats and built-in parachutes get dumped off the plane.
Of course, the whole premise of needing such an emergency system is that sometimes planes have problems. So what happens the first time the ejection system has a problem and accidentally dumps the whole load of passengers off a working plane flying over the ocean? Oops.
And if the plane is flying at normal cruise speeds, passengers are likely to sustain serious injury unless protected from the air blast.
Based on documentaries I have seen on researching the cause of in-flight breakups (such as TWA-800), normal clothes are ripped off at jet speeds. The bodies are usually found naked. So our parachute passengers will be will be floating down naked in -30 temperatures to then be left in the ocean/wilderness with just the parachute as protection.
Also, sorry about my incorrect information on repack times, I must have been remebering the FARs from back when I got my license. The 180 days will save me some money once I get my RV done.
There are some problems with that. First, each passenger would have to be wearing a properly-fitted harness. (Those prongs sticking up near the shoulders are the Koch fittings for a USN parachute. The parachute is attached to the pilot, not the seat. The seat detaches from the pilot.) Passengers would either have to have the parachute connected to their fitted harness at all times, or else they would have to know how – in an emergency situation – to secure the fittings. It’s hard enough to get them to wear seatbelts.
Secondly, ejections are violent. Broken bones are common. And pilots have to be trained to assume the proper position. True, there are straps in some seats that pull the legs in (Oh, yeah, the passengers will need to wear leg straps that are attached to the seat), but you need to position yourself to protect your back.
Assuming that each passenger can be fitted with a harness, and that they’ll remain seated and strapped in for the duration of the flight, and that they all know and are capable of assuming the proper ejection position, and that they know how to activate the seat, there’s still another problem. Look at the picture that starts the video closely, and try to imagine that scene happening with a hundred or two hundred or three hundred seats all at the same time in a confined tube. :eek:
