C L I C K

C LI C K

It’s part of the appeal

I was watching one air accident documentary where the plane dropped so hard that people who were unbuckled were launched into the ceiling and people found their phones and laptops in the back of the plane.

I read this horrible post a few years ago where a PoS passenger didn’t buckle up. So the car drove off a cliff, her body flew and killed people in the back seat who were buckled up. The driver survived since he was buckled in.

For sure, anyone who has seen some of the videos of drink carts and luggage bouncing off the cabin ceilings during crazy turbulence shouldn’t have any questions about the utility of seatbelts in less than catastrophic events… Which of course is the goal even in ‘crash’ landings. There are crashes where seatbelts would obviously be worthless, but in anything short of that, you’ll be happy that you weren’t in a box with 300 human shaped dice being shaken up.

So if you crack your head jumping out you are still awake enough to pull the cord, plus if you land hard you don’t smash your head on a rock.

The super high altitude jumpers had altitude devices that would automatically deploy their chutes in the event that their air supplies failed and they passed out.

The roof tearing off was a Boeing. an Aloha Airlines 737.

Or keep you from bouncing and hitting the ceiling in cases of extreme turbulence. Or yo help on cases of lower-speed crashes (cases where the plane goes into some nosedive are less likely), etc.

Not a stupid question.

Between the training required for a solo parachute jump, and the cost (and more importantly) weight of the equipment, plus the relative safety of commercial flights, it’s simply not justified.

In more than a few cases we’ve seen airliners make emergency landings that are gnarly, but the majority survive. In more cases than I can count, there’s checks and balances that ground flights because of safety concerns either at the departure point or at the destination (icing, high winds, etc), or due to mechanical concerns.

It’s rare that a fully inspected and functional aeroplane will fall out of the sky, and we do everything in our power to ensure that all planes that leave the ground are fully inspected and functional. Short of a freak occurrence, like a fast forming weather phenomenon, there’s so many checks and balances that airliner crashes are exceedingly rare.

So not only is a crash rare, there’s no guarantee that a crash will be fatal, usually the pilot can at least get the plane on the ground without killing everyone aboard, and the fact that it’s a massive amount of extra weight that requires training that the average person doesn’t have, there’s little point and nearly nothing to gain from doing something like that, while it would have significant downsides on flight efficiency and increase the costs of fuel per flight due to the extra weight.

Then there’s the consideration of, even if they were able to successfully parachute to the ground, what then? It’s pretty much a guarantee that nobody has a radio, and that you’re far enough away from civilization that your cellphone doesn’t work, so now you have hundreds of people spread out over potentially thousands of miles of terrain/water/whatever that you now need weeks to search and rescue everyone. Taking weeks on search and rescue, pretty much guarantees that you’ll find people who landed safely, then died from exposure to the environment.

On the flip side, if everyone is in the plane when it crashes then all you need to do is find the plane; everyone will be in that general area, whether alive or dead.

There’s just too many downsides to having parachutes on board to make it feasible.

Throwing untrained people out of a commercial airliner at high speed in the middle of a emergency is a good way to ensure no one survives. The equipment would add a significant amount of space, fuel and maintenance burden too, and require major compromises to the aircraft design itself. All to resolve a problem that effectively never happens.

I remember seeing an article back in the 90s or maybe even 80s that was exploring the possibility of the entire passenger compartment separating from the wings and rest of the fuselage and parachuting down in the event of a major failure. The thing is, it would be ridiculously expensive to implement, and there are very few situations where such a system would be any better than keeping the plane in one piece.

An explosive release canopy for an ejection seat system on an airliner would just release the entire top half of the plane, and don’t forget that fighter pilots are both wearing flightsuits and get specific training for the event.

Even beyond the material and engineering costs it’s a difficult ask, probably better to just focus on reliability in the first place.

Parachuting isn’t as easy as pulling a wire and gently floating to the ground. Those who parachute professionally take hundreds of hours of training. If you’re brand new, you’re required to strap yourself to a professional.

Rigging a commercial airline with that many ejection seats would add significant weight to the plane. You’d probably triple the cost of commercial airflight if you did this just from reduced seating capacity, and even assuming that it could be implemented without that overhead I still don’t think this would actually help much.

Imagine you’re on Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 in a 737 Max nosediving towards the ground and the roof just opens up and launches you and all 148 of your fellow passengers out of the plane at 400MPH. Somehow I imagine that you just end up scattering the mangled corpses over a wider area.

Some valid answers are already given by other commentators. Just want to highlight that commercial airlines are operating barely cost positive. Every extra bit of cost added has to be at least covered by some other stream of revenue. How much more money can a seat in these crammed airliners make to cover the cost of R&Ding and maintaining additional safety measures?

No, comics are the primary legitimate source of facts so I’m sure it’s true.

And in the rare horrific crash, the seat will not remain attached to the floor anyway.

Yeah, and this is a much more frequent thing than crashes. I’ve been on planes multiple times when there was sudden turbulence and people without seatbelts lifted out of their seats. I don’t think any of my personal experiences resulted in someone hitting their head, but that happens. There was just video of one earlier this year.

Yeah, it’s a similar reason your wear a helmet on a bicycle/motorcycle, if a car hits you doing 50+ MPH you’re probably done for regardless of whether you’re wearing a helmet. If you go over your handle bars face first into the pavement doing 10 MPH it keeps that injury from being catastrophic.

I have observed that “very clever” people on the internet have a tendency to disregard solutions that are only partial, even if there is little to no downside to them.

Yeah but the cartoon is funnier.

Also in the event of a crash you don’t become a projectile that kills someone else.

Or if you are on a Boeing plane and a side panel/door spontaneously flies off off you don’t get sucked out

/s, but not really /s

Also, Aloha Airlines Flight 243

And when there’s a collision on ground. And when the pilot just breaks too hard after landing.

Never been on a flight never assumed I would be afraid of flying however that sounds horrific, so thanks for giving me a new fear of flying.

Do you have a source for that? I’m skeptical.

there’s probably just missing frames

The seat belt is hiding his boner.

Planes rarely reverse into mountains.

And the survival statistics have a lot to do with the amount of work that has been put into making the worst case “controlled descent into terrain” scenario exceptionally rare.

About 20 years ago I read a grim book about plane crashes. They claimed that the number 1 predictor of crash survivability on commercial craft was being a male between the ages of 20 and 50. They’re apparently much better equipped to claw and climb over the other passengers on the way out.

Grim. I fly a lot and think about it at least every other trip.

The stats of surviving in a plane are quite high.

The stats of surviving in a plane with at least one death are very low.

Usually, if anyone dies, everyone dies.

Like, you have higher survivability odds in the back of the plane

But when you’re sitting in the front during a crash the snack cart comes by one more time.

Jump seat behind pilot for helicopters, I assume due to the supporting framework from the engines and not in blade range.

Middle of planes over the wing root - easy access to exits, crumple zone infront, not going with the tail if it hits, and strongest part of aircraft. Also right over a fuel tanks, so results vary.

I think this every time I’m the back which is loud because of the engines.

You also have hugely increased survival odds with backwards seats.

Tell that to the people in the back of the plane on Lost 🤣

Yep - the seatbelt and the crash position are extremely effective at preventing death and lessening injuries