Falling out of the sky may well be most passengers’ worst fear when they board a plane. With this mind, a Ukrainian inventor has proposed building airliners with detachable passenger cabins that could separate from the rest of the plane and parachute safely to the ground in the event of an emergency.
This may sound like a reassuring idea for those who find flying more of a terrifying ordeal than an exciting way to start a holiday. But as someone with a keen interest in aircraft design and technologies, I found the plan a bemusing distraction. Not only would such a design be prohibitively expensive, it would also be unlikely to save any lives in all but a very few airline disasters.
While the video proposal shows the detachable cabin deploying on a plane experiencing engine failure, it should first be noted that crashes due to this problem are exceptionally rare. Systems and power failures have accounted for less than 3 percent of all fatal accidents in the past 10 years. From the beginning the argument did not stack up.
An aircraft is most vulnerable during take-off and landing because it is closer to the ground (its biggest obstacle), and is travelling at low speeds and therefore is harder to maneuver. According to statistics from Boeing, almost three-quarters of deaths from plane crashes between 2005 and 2014 occurred during these phases of flight. But this is the time when a detachable cabin would least likely be successful at saving lives. Being closer to the ground would give the pilot much less opportunity to jettison the cabin following an incident and if it were detached it could well land in a built-up area.
