The safety briefing at the start of any flight explains to passengers what to do in the event of an emergency on board. It will tell you things like where to find emergency exits and where life jackets are kept. One thing it won’t explain is where to get your parachute.
This may seem strange, since parachutes have been saving flyers since the 1910s, a few years after the Wright Brothers’ historic flight in 1903. In fact, the first successful use of a parachute occurred in the 18th century, when André-Jacques Garnerin succeeded in a hot air balloon. But there are very good reasons why we shouldn’t all be provided with parachutes when boarding a commercial flight.
One of the biggest problems is the height. Commercial jets typically fly at altitudes of 35,000 feet or more, with some long-haul aircraft exceeding 40,000 feet. And while it’s easy to forget when you’re drinking coffee at 37,000 feet, there are only a few inches of flight separating you from freezing temperatures and air that’s too thin to breathe. Commercial airplanes also fly at incredible speeds, up to 575 mph in some cases. The fact that most pilots will not receive training in parachutes is another problem. Simply put, hundreds of stranded vacationers stepping off a plane into a minus 50-degree Celsius, 500-mph airstream with no knowledge of how to dive is not a situation that can end well.
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To show why passengers are better off without parachutes, let’s look at the incident that happened on June 24, 1982, when a British Airways 747-200 flew through an unknowingly volcanic ash cloud. The ash disabled the engines, and the plane descended 25,000 feet before the pilot was able to restart it and make a successful emergency landing. If passenger parachutes had been available and the captain had requested to use them, the result would have been hundreds of passengers scattered over the sea.
There are no situations where turning off the seat belt light and turning on the imaginary parachute preparation light works. Even in cases where the altitude is safe and the cabin doors can be opened (which can only happen if the plane is depressurized and below 10,000 feet), the idea of panicked passengers with no parachute training forming an orderly line, jumping into the air, and landing unharmed is absurd.
Modern airplanes are incredibly safe, and air travel is still the safest form of transportation. Providing passengers with parachutes is unlikely to improve these figures. Parachutes only work when conditions permit, conditions that commercial airplanes do not satisfy. This is nothing new either; as early as 1931, aircraft operators maintained that the crash time factor rendered passenger parachutes useless. Perhaps less familiar is a system like the full airframe parachutes installed on the Cirrus aircraft. However, weight, size, cost, and doubts about its effectiveness mean we won’t see such systems on commercial aircraft anytime soon.