Why can’t safety features like parachutes, be added to airplanes to help ease them to the ground, when its inevitable that the plane will crash?
In: Physics
Some stunt planes do
As for an airliner, they’re too big for a parachute to be effective, due to the cube sqaure law. If I scale a plane up to double the size, it’s mass increases by a factor of 8 (x2 in length x2 in height, x2 in width = x8).
A parachute works by producing a drag force to counter weight. The force of drag the parachute produces is proportional to it’s surface area, but the surface area only increases by a factor of 4 if it’s size is doubled (x2 in width, x2 in length).
So if I want to equip a plane with a parachute, the size of the parachute relative to the plane has to be larger the heavier the plane is. Once you get to an airliner size, there is no parachute that can actually slow it’s descent enough that could actually fit inside the plane.
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