A chance? Sure. A probability? Nah. But the look on your face will be priceless. Sort of like this:** :eek:**
Unless the roof peels off, like it did with that Aloha Airlines (?) 737, you’re not going to be able to exit the aircraft wearing a parachute, even if you were already wearing it.
I understand the safest place to be is seated over the wings.
When you say “before” do you mean pre-9/11? Because I’ve often wondered if they’d let you on an airliner if they found a parachute in your carry-on. Regardless of the practical (or rather impractical) realities of being able to use one in-flight, it would just seem incredibly suspicious.
Something no one has actually specified: All passenger (and most cargo) doors on an airliner are what is known as ‘plug doors’. They are designed so that even a tiny amount of pressure difference between the inside & outside causes the doors to wedge tight into their opening, making it physically impossible for them to open, regardless of any effort to do so. There is literally tons of force via air psi keeping them closed.
The old Boeing 727 had an “airstair” that opened at the back of the plane, and could originally be opened during flight – that, in fact, is how D.B. Cooper escaped from the plane that he hijacked in 1971. However:
- The plane was apparently flying at a very low speed and altitude (Wikipedia suggests it was 100 knots, and 10,000 feet)
- We don’t know if Cooper survived the jump
- The 727’s airstair was retrofitted after this incident so that it couldn’t be opened during flight
- There are very few 727s still in passenger service
Why? It’s completely useless on an airliner.
It was after 9/11, and only by a year or two (I’d have to check my log book for the date). I expected problems- I had a one-way ticket to LA, it was a self-printed e-ticket when that was still uncommon, and my only carry-on bag was a parachute.
They never said one word when my parachute went through the x-ray machine, I had no problems whatsoever and my trip was uneventful.
Skydivers fly with their gear all the time and lots of them take them aboard as carry-on. A new skydiving rig can cost several thousand dollars and people don’t want to take a chance on losing them. Sometimes there are delays while TSA employees check everything out but it is perfectly legal to carry a parachute aboard an airliner.
It took 23 posts before someone mention DB.
These boards ARE getting slow…
I am amused by the thought of the airport security letting you carry a parachute onto a plane.
However, it does make sense - there’s not a whole lot of metal in the things, and they aren’t very good as a weapon.
Although - how does the altitude based automatic release mechanism work? Does that use some sort of pyro charge?
On the most popular automatic activation device (or AAD) it is indeed a pyrotechnic charge that cuts the closing loop and allows the reserve canopy to open. The manufacturer, Cypres, issues an ID card to owners that explains what it is and what it does, and that it can be turned off and is not a hazard to the aircraft.
I don’t know if my link above is working, but if you google cypres AAD you’ll find all you want to know about automatic openers for parachutes.
Basically, it’s a tiny tiny bit of some explosive substance, just enough to cut the cloth line and not enough to cause a fire or release too much heat outside of the metal assembly it is installed it?
On the one hand, it’s impossible to exit an airliner in flight, and so long as it’s in one piece (and even if it isn’t) I bet you’d be better off with the airplane than without.
That said, it’s totally possible to survive a wingsuit landing. Here’s a guy doing just that.
so given a safe landing pad, is it physically possible to practise a soft landing like a squirrel does? is it your strength or the design of the suit that makes it impossible?
You weigh a lot more than the squirrel per unit of surface area. This is due to a simple rule of geometry : the surface area of any solid increases with the square of the dimensions of the object, while the volume increases with the cube.
Living creatures cannot have air filled voids inside them due to technical limitations of being water/carbon based organisms.
So you weight a lot more than the squirrel, and so a wingsuit’s wings do not slow you down enough. It is possible to land, as shown in the video, but the guy is decelerating using hundreds of feet of carboard boxes he is crushing.
It’s very easy really. Here’s Big Arnie to show how it’s done.
Yes, that’s pretty much it. It has sensors to tell it how fast you’re falling and what your altitude is. If you are going too fast (I believe it is set for 78 mph) when you reach a certain altitude (I believe it is set for 750 ft) it cuts the closing loop, which allows the spring-loaded pilot chute on the reserve canopy to deploy.
It depends on what the safe landing pad is. As Habeed pointed out, the wingsuit won’t slow you down enough to survive a landing on solid ground. There’s just not enough surface area to decelerate your mass to a survivable rate. That’s what the cardboard boxes are for in the video. Maybe a steep mountainside covered in deep snow would work. Personally, I’d go with the parachute.
To clarify on the wingsuits, they usually don’t show the end of wingsuit flights in those cool videos. People aren’t gliding to a graceful and safe stop with wingsuits, they use a parachute.