This got me wondering… is there any regulation against passengers carrying-on a parachute onto an airplane? If not, what would be the practical hurdles someone would have to overcome to use it if the plane were going down?
I have to wonder if any nervous fliers have tried this already.
The practical hurdle is that airplanes use inward opening doors and pressurized cabins, which means you won’t be able to open the doors at all until the plane is fairly close to the ground. The doors also move inward and then swing forward, so even when you get close enough to the ground for the air pressure to equalize, you will be pushing a huge surface against a very high wind (actually it’s the plane moving, not the air, but hopefully you get the point). You probably won’t have anywhere near the strength required to get the door open.
D.B. (or not D.B.) Cooper managed to get away with it because he went out through a rear stair/door that opened outward. Most planes don’t have any doors that open outward these days.
So aside from the fact that in an emergency you can’t get out of the plane to use it, there’s no actual problem with bringing a parachute on a plane. The TSA allows you to bring skydiving gear on a plane, either as a carry-on or as checked luggage.
Getting the chute on the plane isn’t the problem. The problem is getting out of the plane and using it.
ETA: Also, if you do somehow get out of the plane, popping the chute immediately at the speeds a passenger plane usually travels at will most likely cause the chute to be ripped open or torn off of your body. If the plane is in a dive or traveling at close to cruising speed, you’ll need to get out of the plane at a high enough altitude that you slow down to something close to the normal terminal velocity of a human body before pulling the chute. On the other hand, if the plane is in a stall (like Air France 447), you have a much better chance of getting the chute open and keeping it intact.
Among other things, time? The “going down” portion of a crash is usually seconds, not minutes.
(TL; DR version) In other words, you’re fucked.
Besides what Lord Felton said, unless you have an altimeter, you are likely unaware that you’re falling from the sky, and if you were aware, you likely don’t know what your altitude is. Jump at 35,000 feet? Good luck. It is -60 °F out there, and only ¼ of the oxygen at sea level. If you could pull the cord and the chute doesn’t get ripped off,you’d be a cryo-popsicle stiff log.
You should note that if your parachute has a flare or smoke bomb or similar explosive device, it will not be allowed. Also if you have an emergency hook knife, that will not be allowed on board.
Of course, you must comply with your airline’s carryon baggage size, weight, and quantity limits.
Here’s a thread from a few years ago where we discuss carrying a parachute onboard a commercial airliner. As people have mentioned, it’s perfectly legal. I’ve done it myself. So have some other Dopers.
Here’s another thread where we discuss bailing out of an airliner. The OP wanted to know if a wingsuit would help (it wouldn’t) but we also discuss the problems involved in just getting out of the plane.
Nitpick: while the indicated airspeed (per the black boxes) for this disaster was indeed low, the actual vertical airspeed was rather high. You probably still couldn’t open the doors.
If you were on a 737 built in the last 20 years, you might be able to get out of the over wing emergency hatch. The hatches open outward and have a strong spring assist to open the hatch. The first time I ever opened on I didn’t let go of the lower assist handle and was pulled out onto the top of the wing. But you would need some other things to happen to get a hatch open.
The odds of any of the above happening in flight is not very likely to happen. In case of an landing that would require use of the hatches, the preferred method to unlock the hatches is #5.
My father actually tried this back in about 1975. He and I were in a small private plane crash in mid 1974, which left him in a neck brace contraption for some time. In early 1975 he was well enough to work and travel for the first time, despite still wearing his elaborate bracing.
Well, he needed to make a business trip, and it happened to be to another city where a pilot friend of his lived. He had an old parachute we no longer needed and that his friend was interested in having, so he took it to the airport to bring it along.
So there he was, at the check-in counter, with neck brace, and parachute. The woman working the counter said she’d check the parachute, but my dad said “oh no, I’m wearing this! The last time I flew, I didn’t, and look what happened to me!”
She looked at him, stunned, and eventually blurted out “we can’t let you do that!” Dad went on to tell her about the plane crash and why he needed the parachute, while she just stared at him. Finally he took pity on her, said he was kidding, and checked the parachute.
there is a small plane with a big parachute that can be activated if the plane engine fails to let the plane down. It has been used at least a few times.
In post #2 engineer comp geek mentioned D.B. Cooper, who famously (or infamously) jumped out of a Boeing 727. Back in the 1990s and early 2000s the organizers of the World Freefall Convention would bring in a 727 for the skydivers to jump from. This was a cargo plane, with no passenger seating. I went to the convention in 1993, 1994 & 1995 and made a jet jump each year.
I had a helmet cam and shot skydiving videos for a few years. This was before the days of GoPros and other digital cameras, so the image quality on videotape wasn’t too great.
Here is a link to my second jet jump, in 1994. Those are my friends (Ken, Tim and Tina) linking up with me. The airport is at Quincy IL.
Jebus Ficking Crikes! The part right after you jump where you see the 727 above you is amazing.
I did most of my skydiving at a small drop zone out of a Cessna 182. I was accustomed to watching it get smaller as I fell away. The 727 stayed big for so long it was unreal.
On my first jet jump in 1993 we were going about 155 mph- slow for a 727 but much faster than the 182 would typically go. I went tumbling head over heels and it took several seconds to get stable. On my second jump in 1994 (the one in the video) I knew what to expect and did a much better job of turning into the relative wind.
The Mercotan clan: three generations (at least) of cool.
If I’m half the man my dad was, I’ll still be pretty good! 
My brother carried on his parachute frequently, the reason being that he wasn’t going to have his life depend on what airline cargo loaders would do to it if it were checked. I don’t think he ever had a problem, and he was a smartass.
And rather short.
Ballistic parachute - Wikipedia.
Not necessarily for engine failures. In most of those cases an off-airport normal landing is safer. But for loss of control, midair, incapacitation of the sole pilot, or engine failure over unlandable terrain the ballistic parachute is ideal. Collectively they’ve saved a bunch of people.
It won’t do you any good to have a parachute. The majority of commercial airline crashes happen while the plane is attempting to take off or attempting to land. Consider the crash at SFO a couple years ago, where they came in too low because the auto throttle got disengaged and it took them a couple seconds to realize they were in trouble. There was pretty much zero chance that anyone in the passenger compartment could have known that there was a problem at all, let alone had more than one or two seconds to do anything about it. Plus the plane was too low to the ground to make a jump anyway; the chute whouldn’t have had time to open.
Consider this. You’re in a plane and the plane is having problems. Suppose that, by some miracle of clarivoyance, you (a mere passenger) determine that there is a 90% chance that the expert pilots in the cabin will be able to safely land the plane without fatalities and a 10% chance you’re about to crash and die. Now ask yourself what are your chances of being able to put on your parachute, open the door, jump, deploy the chute, and land, all in a VERY limited time and without killing yourself in the process. Unless you think your probability of success is better than 90%, you’re better off staying inside the plane and betting on the pilots to bring you down safely.
And that’s assuming that you have some magic sense that allows you to know what’s going on without looking at the instruments. In the case where Air France plummeted to the ocean in the middle of the night, not only did the passengers not have a clue that anything was wrong, even the pilots themselves didn’t really know what was going on because the instruments seemed to be giving conflicting information.
The rare situations where a parachute might do you some good (like running out of fuel too far from the nearest airport) almost never happen on commercial flights.
OTOH, if all 200 passengers brought their own parachutes with them, I’d say the odds are WAYYY higher that some yahoo in coach would get nervous when they hit turbulence during the decent and then try to open the emergency exit, thereby making things LESS safe for the other 199 passengers who weren’t previously in any danger.
This reminds me of what they taught me in the Boy Scouts about snake bites in the USA. Cutting a snake bite to bleed/suck out the poison is more likely to kill you than the bite itself would.