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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it would make the plane a lot heavier. there’s tons of things to keep in mind, like that a plane usually travels at a much higher speed and will generate much higher forces so the chute will have to be much sturdier, well-connected, which again means more weight, more fuel used (for each trip! and how often would a plane need this, every 5000th trip maybe? 10000th?) and just generally more cost.
it is much more practical to have planes attempt to do a “controlled” gliding-landing which requires basically no additional features and will work in 99% of emergencies just as well if not better.
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