I definitely have a five year old’s understanding of aviation and engineering but I’m envisioning a system in which the wings/tail section are intentionally designed to break away in the event of a catastrophic failure, and a parachute deploys to carry just the fuselage back down at a safe speed.
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A system called Ballistic Recovery, using parachutes, is available on a few small planes.
If you ask an aircraft designer and a statistician about using these on airliners, I’d bet they would say you would cause more overall deaths in transportation than you would save. Fatalities in U.S. Scheduled air carrier operations are essentially zero. If you exclude losses due to landing and departure, and sabotage or murder, you are left with a small handful of recoverable incidents. *Over the entire history of aviation.*
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