I know this design was for safety, with a shit ton of parachutes on the passenger cabin, but modularity generally fucks the economics of a plane design. You have to have a self-contained module, a plane that is flyable (and landable) without it, and you need a way to securely connect one to the other. Things get chunky real quick, and chunky is expensive, and modern passengers are basically "walking mozzarella sticks who think that $300 and a photo I.D. gives them the right to fly through the air like one of the guardian owls of legend. (!30rock@dubvee.org) For cargo planes, a lot of older designs would drop capacity by 20-30%.
If you’re going to jettison 90% of the plane to let it fall with parachutes, why not avoid all the complications of modularity and instead just have a parachute system that could let the entire plane float down? Or if the wings are the issue with floating down via parachute, just ditch those? Surely better than letting the pilots go down with the failing plane.
Wings are strong as fuck. You don’t want them detachable.
As for why not parachute the whole thing: The wings are also where the fuel is, which can weigh a ton. And the engines weigh a ton. Much easier to design a parachute when you jettison those.
Not just a ton, and I’m only chiming in here because the numbers are staggering. In the case of e.g. a 747 it’s something like 190 tons. 63,000 some odd gallons of fuel.
The fuel is also flammable, and the engines work by at the end of the day being on fire in a controlled manner. Having the fuel and engines hit the ground elsewhere from the occupants sounds like a good plan to me if you can manage a way to do it somehow.
I would think the pilots move to the back and initiate detachment from there.
Whole airframe parachutes are a thing on small aircraft, and I’m certain this would be easier to do than a detachable cabin.
Whereupon, it deploys parachutes and drops to the ground… or ocean, or mountain top, or into the arctic circle. But, I’m sure it would be fine.
Or a cannibal island full of mutants.
Or a mutant island full of cannibals.
Or an uninhabited island that becomes full of cannibals.
Or a mutant cannibal full of islands.
If they’re all mutants they’d think I’m the one that looks messed up, so they’d avoid eating me like I was Blinky the fish
It might fall through a wormhole, and leap forward in time thousands of years, where Roddy McDowall clones dress up as apes and terrorize the populace. I mean nothing in physics disallows this, as far as I know.
Isn’t this how the kids in Lord of the Flies ended up on the island?
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Let’s entertain this concept:
The chute for the passenger compartment (if there is one) would need to deploy before separation, and looking at this design it can not.
As soon as the compartment tips and catches airflow it will just rotate straight down uncontrollably.
