How Things Work: Whole-Airplane Parachute
When everything else fails, or fails all at once, pull the parachute that saves the whole airplane.
- By Michael Klesius
- Air & Space magazine, January 2011
John MacNeill
It’s not just for stunt men anymore. Every pilot may eventually need a whole-airplane parachute. Dino Moline did last August when the wing of his RANS S-9 aerobatic airplane snapped off during a performance in Argentina. With no way to eject as his craft spun out of control, he popped the big chute. Strapped in his seat, he floated to the earth, then walked away.
The idea’s been around for a while. In 1929, Hollywood stunt pilot Roscoe Turner deployed a whole-airplane parachute for kicks before 15,000 spectators in Santa Ana, California, and landed softly in his 2,800-pound Lockheed Air Express. In 1948, pilot and parachutist Bob Fronius twice deployed a chute from a JR-V Robin sailplane near San Diego, and several times the following year from a J-3 Piper Cub. “He would climb, shut the engine down, open the chute, play around with it, then release the chute and dive to start the engine,” says Fronius’ son Doug. Bob Fronius never commercialized his parachute. “He was a better experimenter than a businessman,” says Doug. “He considered the job done once he accomplished the experimental part.”
Not true for Boris Popov. In 1975, he fell 400 feet after losing control of a hang glider, cursing his lack of a whole-airplane parachute all the way down. He survived the impact with a Minnesota lake. “I came back to the surface,” he says, “and spit out a bunch of fillings.” Popov founded Ballistic Recovery Systems, maker of the parachute system shown here. The chute was approved by the Federal Aviation Administration in 1993 for the Cessna 150. Later, Cirrus Aircraft began to build the chute into its SR20s and SR22s. More than 30,000 BRS chutes have been installed on a wide variety of airplanes and have saved 257 lives.
Michael Klesius is an Air & Space associate editor.
Related topics: Aerodynamics Aerospace Inventions
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Comments (5)
It is an idea that saves lives. You simply cannot place a value on a human life. We like to think the human race gets smarter over time without being forced by the government. Let's show 'em we can do it!
Long live BRS, and thank you Boris and all who make this great ring-slot application work!
How about we scale this up to larger aircraft?
Posted by Trent Duff on December 29,2010 | 11:25 PM
The question about larger aircraft has been asked. I was on a tour of the Airbus A380 final assembly plant in Toulouse with a group of Cirrus pilots. I asked the tour guide if they had considered fitting a whole-airframe parachute system. I got a very Gaullic 'What a silly idea!' from the guide, who was then shocked to look around and see everyone nodding approvingly at my suggestion!
Posted by Curtis Sanford on January 26,2011 | 03:20 PM
It's nice to see that I'm not the only person to have the crazy idea to equip airplanes with parachutes in an effort to prevent crashes. I applaud those who had the courage to follow through deliver a system that works on general avation aircraft.
An idea I've had in the back of my head for more than forty years is why couldn't airliners be built so that in the event of a catastrophic failure the plane could be segmented with each section recovered with it's own parachute? There is one fair question that airlines and passangers will ask: does the relative increase in safty justify the cost?
Posted by DONALD HIGBEE on January 28,2011 | 10:13 PM
I kind of took the question of "whole airliner chute" one step future and talked with BRS President Larry Williams. He said they would love to develop a system for large planes, but it's a problem of physics. The mass of an airliner is so large that deploying large enough chutes to slow a decent would be nearly impossible.
By the way the passenger's saved count now stands at 229 based on their press releases.
Posted by Jeff Hauser on October 31,2011 | 06:47 PM
Sorry the "Passenger saved" count is 266
Just trying to be accurate (-:
Jeff
Posted by Jeff Hauser on October 31,2011 | 06:51 PM