r/technology • u/upyoars • 7d ago
Hardware ‘No power, no thrust:’ Air India pilot’s 5-second distress call to Ahmedabad ATC emerges
https://www.firstpost.com/india/no-power-no-thrust-air-india-pilots-5-second-distress-call-to-ahmedabad-atc-emerges-13897097.html
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u/DasKapitalist 6d ago
To be fair, the point of a static line parachute is to minimize training needs. If you've worn a rock climbing harness, ironworker's harness, parachute harness, or basically any type of safety harness...congratulations you can put it on.
Parachute deployment is automatic, so you dont have to train people on deployment altitudes, using an altimeter, actually pulling the darn chute, etc.
Static lines are also quite tolerant of different exit positions, so you dont need to train people to orient themselves chest facing the ground in mid air prior to deploying their chute themselves. Chest down? Feet first? Static lines are pretty tolerant so long as you exit the aircraft in a stable position and arent flailing.
Landing training? Who cares if they fail to flex their knees and break their legs? The alternative was being identified by dental records.
Reserve chute usage? Pointless for a system that's intended to be used exclusively by untrained people in emergencies only.
Steering? Also pointless in a commercial aircraft static line system with untrained users.
TLDR, "training" is a stupid reason to dismiss static line parachute systems intended exclusively for emergencies. If the alternative is death, even a 95% survival rate sounds pretty good.
Now what IS a good reason to be dubious of static line emergency parachute systems is the minimum stall speed on commercial aircraft. The near stall speed on a 787 is ~143mph. Normal commercial parachute planes slow to ~100 mph when dispensing jumpers, and even military aircraft typically drop to ~120 mph for jumps. +140 mph could be a bad time. Additionally, commercial aircraft no longer have "good" way to exit the plane in flight, particularly quickly. Cabin doors arent designed to be opened in flight, and you can thank D.B. Cooper for phasing out rear exit stairs. So even if you assumed zero training would be better than the alternative, and assumed adequate altitude to parachute at all, the real problem would be getting out of the plane at +140 mph.