Over the past few weeks, 4 civilian aircraft were destroyed causing massive casualties.
this week alone, there were 2. One in Taiwan another over Africa
I'm thinking why has no one suggested or designed a dual deploy parachute system for aircraft?
I'm considering the tail end, right below the tip of it, provide a little bay for a drogue and a main parachute that could slow and land a 600MPH aircraft.
Is that too hard to design??
Simple answer-- $$$
I've seen designs in aviation magazines years ago for a prototype system that would jettison the entire passenger cabin between the cockpit and tail... just pop the whole thing out like a giant beer can via rockets, then deploy parachutes from each end to lower it to the ground.
It would of course require a purpose-built aircraft design, since it would be a near total redesign of current aircraft flying... so unless everybody retired their existing aircraft and replaced them with these new ones, most folks would still be on the old type non-jettisonable cabin type... and it would take literally decades to phase in new aircraft and replace all the old ones in actuality. The other thing is, such systems would weigh A LOT... and greatly complicate aircraft design and construction, and would require periodic inspection, service, maintenance, etc, further complicating the aircraft's maintenance and increasing costs all around, in design, maintenance, testing, operations, etc. It would also be mostly dead weight for the useful life of most aircraft, since it would only be used in a few extreme cases... dead weight is lost cargo capacity and requires fuel to propel, raising fuel costs and reducing the payload capacity of the aircraft throughout its useful life, if only to save perhaps a half dozen aircraft over the lifetime of an aircraft type's lifetime, out of hundreds or perhaps thousands actually constructed and operated to retirement.
In short, poor return on investment, and too much added cost for the benefits... Statistically speaking, air travel is still safer than other forms of transportation... Course if it happens that a bunch of planes crash in close proximity timewise to each other, or you happen to be on one that crashes, statistics don't do much for you... but numerically, when one figures how many flights occur every day all over the Earth, it's really a miracle more don't crash than they do...
It's sorta like the Space Shuttle... a lot of early proposals for the Space Shuttle had escape systems for the crew, jettisonable cabins that would deploy parachutes to land in the sea, things like that.... but it was ultimately found that the shuttle could either 1) have an escape capsule/crew cabin or 2) carry a payload, not both... the mass of the system to design it for the crew cabin to act as an escape capsule and have jettison rockets and parachutes and such necessary for a safe landing was SO much that it left little or nothing for the payload capability...
Later! OL JR