There are those who ask why airplanes have no parachute. This manufacturer decided to stop asking him and putting one

It is one of those questions that seem taken from an impromptu talk between friends: “And why don’t they put A giant parachute In the airplanes in case something happens? The company that achieved it is called Cirrus Aircraft, and for decades it has designed light airplanes for general aviation. His proposal was as simple as revolutionary: incorporating a ballistic parachute directly into the fuselage, as part of the plane design. Not as an accessory, not as optional. Serial. The system is called Caps, acronym for Cirrus Airframe Parachute Systemand it is present so much In the SR series as in the vision jetan airplane with a turbophah engine for five passengers, plus the pilot. A parachute that is not an accessory, is part of the plane CAPS operation It is as direct as its objective: saving lives when everything else fails. In the upper part of the fuselage, just behind the cabin, a capsule sealed with a large parachute is hidden. If a serious emergency occurs, the pilot only has to pull a t -shaped leverlocated on the roof of the cabin. In a matter of seconds, a small rocket purses the parachute up and it unfolds, braking the fall of the plane until it touches earth. Of course, there are conditions. The system should not be activated below 600 feet of altitude (about 180 meters above the ground), and its effectiveness is much greater if it unfolds between 600 and 2,000 feet. Above that altitude, the pilot has more margin to evaluate and make decisions, but it is still a valid option if the situation demands it. The history of the CAPS was not built from one day to another. In the mid -1990s, the Cirrus engineering team, led by Paul Johnston began to work on an idea that, at that time, seemed crazy: adapt a system of Complete parachute to a light plane. They were inspired by a previous prototype developed by BRS (Ballistic Recovery Systems)a company specialized in ballistic parachutes, which had already tried similar solutions for aircraft such as Cessna 150. A cirrus sr20 displays a parachute in a test In 1998, Cirrus performed his first real testin the southern desert of California. The person in charge of activating the system was a military pilot. That test was key: it showed that the concept worked. From there, Cirrus integrated it as a central part of the design of his first major production model, SR20. Not as an addition, but as a structural element designed from the beginning. Since its certification, the CAPS system has activated more than a hundred times in emergency situations. According to cup datauntil June 2025 they had Registered 136 deployments. Among them there are stories of people who survived motor failures, control losses or extreme weather conditions. Graphical representation of CAPS deployment On its official website, Cirrus states that its system has returned more than 250 people home alive. And some of those stories are especially shocking. Like Greg Huntleypilot and owner of a Cirrus aircraft, which suffered a motor failure on October 22, 2014. Activated the CAPs and managed to land with the plane hanging from the parachute. It was unharmed. Graphic Representation of CAPS IN ACTION Huntley flew every week for work. He had his base in Charlotte, North Carolina, and although he was never passionate about aviation, he acknowledged that he saved him a long time. On October 22, 2014 he took off like any other day. A few minutes after flight, some 5,000 feet of altitudethe engine stopped dry. “Just before declaring the emergency I thought: I have five minutes of life,” I would remember later. One of the many airplanes that used the Caps He made a clear decision: if at 3,000 feet he still did not see the terrain, he would activate the parachute. And so it was. The sky remained completely black through the windshield, so he informed by radio that he was going to display the Caps. “I have taken many children already their parents on their first flights. I always explain that if something happens to me, pull the lever (…) that morning, putting hands on the shooter, I thought: now it is you who is going to check it.” The plane descended and in less than a minute touched land in a grass field. Caps lever The climax of this philosophy came with the Cirrus Vision Jet, a small monomotor reactor certified in 2016. It was the first Jet of the world equipped as standard with a ballistic parachute for the entire aircraft. But Cirrus went further: Safe Return was added to the CAPS system, a function that allows the plane to land only in case of emergency. Button ‘safe return’ The idea is simple. If the pilot suffers a sudden disability, any passenger can press a button. At that time, the Jet Vision takes care of everything: Calculate the routecommunicates the situation to the controllers and performs the descent autonomously to land on a safe track. Caps and Safe Return thus form a fairly complete security package. Cirrus’s parachute system is not designed for all types of aircraft. It does not intend to be. Its effectiveness has to do with the type of plane into which it integrates, with its weight, its structure and the situations for which it was thought. While it is not perfect, it has managed to open a door: demonstrate that there is room to think about security from another angle. Images | Cirrus | POT | CUP In Xataka | They are not fighters, they are planes of the Slovakia government: the day an Airbus A319 and a Fokker 100 stole the show

Falling from 10,000 meters without parachute was a safe death. Until Vulović appeared

Suddenly, the hostess Vesna Vulović Recover knowledge. He is bite and can barely move due to his partner’s inert body. Half of Vesna remains on the plane, and the other half is out. What had just happened was going to challenge physics for decades: no one, neither before or after, had been able to survive a free fall without parachute from 10,000 meters high after the explosion of a commercial flight. The question since then is simple: how the hell managed to leave alive? The wrong flight. On January 26, 1972, Vesna Vulović, a young 22 -year -old Yugoslava flight Jat company for a confusion of names with another partner. The itinerary included several scales between Stockholm and Belgrade, and nothing presaged that it would be the most extraordinary and tragic flight of his life. The accident. After taking off from Copenhagen to Zagreb with 28 people on board, the plane reached cruise altitude. Minutes later, at 4:01 p.m., while the then Eastern Germany, He disappeared from the radar suddenly. An explosion at the front of the luggage compartment left the McDonnell Douglas DC-9 in two to more than 10,000 meters high. What followed was a brutal vertical fall, a bleak scenario in the snowy mountain of Srbská Kamenicein the then Czechoslovakia. There was only one survivor: Vesna. Silence: an attack. Just a few hours after the accident, Czechoslovacos secret services They took control absolute of the place. Access to press was not allowed, much less civilians. The next day, an unidentified man, in a somewhat strange Swede, called the Kvällsposten newspaper ensuring that he was Croatian and a member of a nationalist group that had placed the bomb. The Yugoslav government immediately pointed to The UstachaCroatian ultra -right organization. Ten days later, the remains of a alarm clock supposedly linked to an explosive were presented as proof. Black boxes were never found, there were never arrests, or claims by any organization. An McDonnell Douglas DC-9 by Jat Airways identical to the accident The documented miracle. As we said, the official report indicated the cause of the accident Like a bomb placed by a Croatian nationalist group, although the culprits were never identified. Even so, the authorities closed the case in 1974 attributing it to an explosive attack. The official story argued that Vesna fell from More than 10,000 metersprotected by a series of improbable factors: a catering cart that kept it trapped in the fuselage, the friction of the air that damping the fall and the so -called terminal speed (maximum speed that reaches a body moving within an infinite fluid under the action of a constant force), the snow on the slope of the mountain that reduced the force of the impact, and finally a part of the relatively intact plane protected from the final blow. That was so amazing that even the mythical Mythbusters reached Recreate the case And they concluded that the possibility of surviving was not void, although, of course, tiny. Tributes. Vulović suffered multiple fractures, entered a coma for almost a month and was temporarily paralyzed from the waist down. However, he managed to recover, walk again and even fly again. In fact, the woman was honored in London By the book Guinness With a record that remains: that of the person who has fallen without parachute and has survived (prize, by the way, delivered by Paul McCartney himself). The doctor. Over the years, Vesna shared Some memories rebuilt from what they told him. In her words and those of the man who rescued her, a former German army doctor named Bruno Henke, she was in the central part of the plane, not in the tail, contradicting the official theories that explained their survival. Henke, a neighbor of the area, argued that he found it in the middle part of the plane, at the height of the wings. He found her head down, with the torso out of fuselage and legs inside. Vesna always He believed his testimonyIn fact, he had a close relationship with Henke. Vulović (right) during his visit to Czechoslovakia, November 1972 Something does not fit. Let’s recapitulate: Vesna’s body, as we said at the beginning, was partially inside and outside the fuselage, with that “miraculous” cart literally nailed to his back. And here appears one of the great doubts, because that incongruity undermines the physical hypotheses about how he could survive, since a person in the middle zone of the device could hardly have remained within it After an explosion that left it at two high. Herself He pointed out thatas the plane was half empty, it probably moved among the passengers, according to the service protocol. To do everything a little more complicated, Vesna’s amnesia about everything happened on that date prevented verifying the details. Boom. In 2009, the story He took a turn unexpected. An investigation by journalists Peter Hornung-Andersen, Pavel Theiner and Tim Van Beveren, published by Tagesschau and issued by the ARD chain, He unearthed documents Dak For mig fighters of the Czechoslovak Air Force when it flew to low height, just 800 meters from the ground. According to This versionthe plane descended by an emergency and was confused with an aerial threat when entering a restricted area, perhaps linked to a Soviet missile base, or coinciding in the airspace with the plane of the Soviet leader Breznev’s own leader in official visit to East Germany. The demolition would have been Undercover by the Police Secret, which built the history of the “world record” to hide the incident. This version was based on official documents, testimonies of witnesses who saw the plane flying whole before exploding, and what is doubtful, the apparent physical impossibility of surviving a fall from such a height. The official silence. Czech authorities They denied categorically the alternative version without offering contrary evidence. They never explained the absence of black boxes or responded with documentation to refute the new findings. A general came to declare that “at least 200 people should … Read more

The airlines will always let you carry a parachute inside the plane. The only problem is that it is useless

There was a time when Mounting by plane was a luxury. Today, experience is more similar to that of tin. In addition, the organization It is not the most optimal And, although it is very safe, the anxiety to fly It can cause some passengers to consider measures as extreme as that of carrying their own parachutes. The short answer is: you can. The long one: you can, but with enough restrictions and reasons why it will never be part of the usual safety equipment on board. It is not realistic. Looking for information on the matter, it is curious that the first responses allude to commercial airplanes do not need parachutes because they are very safe and it is not necessary that the passage jump from the vehicle running. Inquiring a little more, we can find perfectly logical reasons why neither the crew carries parachute (no matter how much they have seen in some films). The first thing is that the height at which a commercial plane flies is very, very high. Jumping from about 10 kilometers high is not only risky, although the user has an oxygen mask: the temperature is so low that the remedy can be worse than the disease. In addition to the height, he plays against speed, also being high and turning the jump into something very dangerous. Well, and the pressure that can cause a loss of consciousness. AND Not to mention sparkling the cabin To throw us … Bad idea. To get an idea, a commercial flight is going to between 10,000 and 12,000 meters of altitude, already speeds between 800 and 950 km/h. On a flight prepared to jump in parachute, normal It is that the altitude is between 3,000 and 4,000 meters, with exceptions to a couple of more meters. And the speed is about 200 km/h. Jumping from a commercial plane on if it has a problem would cause, surely, the engines swallow us. And if we jumped from the tail door, the easiest thing is that we end up spoiled against the rear rotor or so unbalanced by aerodynamics that we do not know where we have to throw to act the parachute. It is still a backpack To bill. Those are the reasons why commercial airplanes do not carry parachute, but, as we said, we can carry a parachute in a plane of this type. And the airlines treat it as one more lump. Thus, a parachute (which is folded is camping backpack) has as a piece of luggage. In some airlines, we could not enter with the parachute and with a normal backpack, for example. But it could always be billed. And with restrictions. Now, it is not as easy as saying “ok, because I have only the parachute because I don’t need more luggage.” It is not so simple because they must be packed very precisely, the bag must be special for this type of elements and there can be no more clothes or any type of personal article. If the parachute has some safety element such as a smoke boat, it will not be allowed either. And if they have gas cylinders, pyrotechnic elements or any other type of prohibited article, more of the same. The airlines themselves They contemplate The possibility of carrying this type of luggage whenever what we have commented is met: “The bags and cases of sports teams should not contain clothes or other personal items. They should only be used to transport sports equipment. The entire team must be safely packed in a special container for paratrooper equipment or in a resistant bag, or canvas, for sports articles. ” Go with the lesson learned. Now, although the airlines allow and transportation administrations also They contemplateit is possible that we have to explain what we carry. Therefore, a couple of recommendations are: Pack the article separately to facilitate your inspection if necessary. Keep a copy of the authorities regulation so that the airport/airline staff not familiar with the issue has more information about it. And, as the team is very likely to attract attention, the recommendation It is that you arrive with a few minutes – more – in advance in case it is time to pass a control. If many times I have had to explain in the control that what I carry to take photos with my analog camera are reels that can be damaged in the scanner … as if to explain why I go with a parachute. And be careful, as many times in these cases, it is always better to go caught. Such as the TSA (the security body in the transport of the United States) Comment In this regard: “The final decision on whether an article is allowed through the control post corresponds to the TSA officer.” Images | Adam Reeder, Hunini, In Xataka | The crazy history of the airline that has operated for 34 years without success: it has not yet managed to climb a single passenger

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