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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> I’m envisioning a system in which the wings/tail section are intentionally designed to break away in the event of a catastrophic failure
You generally don’t want the wings to be *able* to break away, because once they can do that you have to worry about them doing so at the wrong time. It’s better to have wings that will stay on *no matter what*.
Aside from that, there are several challenges. One is that an aircraft is quite a lot bigger and heavier. SpaceX’s Dragon capsule weighs around 10 tons on reentry. A modern commercial aircraft might weigh 20-50 tons on its own, but it probably has hundreds of passengers too, so the total weight is quite a lot higher.
The next problem is that parachutes are quite complex. You don’t just press a button and then they *magically* unfold in just the right way. With a spacecraft we can control the angle and speed and everything to make sure it is oriented correctly so the parachutes can unfold, but with an out-of-control plane we can’t predict what it’ll be doing. Is it spinning? Upside down? Falling sideways? Will the parachutes work in all these cases? Probably not.
But sure, we could put big clunky parachutes on every plane. But when was the last time an aircraft at normal cruising altitude suffered the kind of catastrophic failure where a parachute would help? It pretty much never happens. The thing about plane crashes is that they always happen at ground level. And the thing about parachutes is that they *don’t* really help if you’re already at or near ground level. You have to use them when you’re several kilometers up in the air, and at that altitude you’re probably not going to trigger them because the situation is not yet critical.
So sure, we could put parachutes on every aircraft, adding a significant amount of weight, increasing fuel consumption and perhaps lowering the number of passengers that can be carried. All of this would cost money, but we could do it. But why? Just to create a system which will virtually never be needed, and even if it *is* needed, it is so complex that it might not work, or the plane, having suffered some kind of catastrophic failure, is tumbling through the air in a way that the chutes get tangled up and everyone dies *anyway*.
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