Edit: My point is that almost anything is better than crashing down with the plane.
A fighter jet gets around the being too close to the ground problem by adding a rocket motor. When you "eject" the rocket shoots the pilot's entire seat into the sky first. If you want to eject the entire cabin you're going to need a very big rocket.
Not crashing the plane is better. The goal is to not crash the plane whereupon this is all irrelevant. If you're wondering why that wasn't enough for fighter jets the answer is that the other guy's fighter jet is trying to shoot yours out of the sky. Planes don't fly once you put enough bullets into them. How many is "enough"? Well it may be prudent to eject before getting a firm answer.
Small prop planes can fit parachutes that try to save the whole fuselage, these have been seen to work at least sometimes, but they're very much a last ditch, they are expensive and they're only "practical" (if that's even the right word for something so expensive and relatively ineffective) for small planes.
You also can't open a hole at the back and let them slide out backwards, you'd need a cylindrical tube in a tube which can then slide out. That's a HUGE amount of extra weight and complexity.
Planes are so so much safer than cars. Before we parachute people out of passenger planes we should be ejecting people out of the roofs of cars if an imminent collision is detected :)
I'd be "accidentally" driving into a lot of trees if cars had that. Sounds like major fun!
I don't fancy the chances of the crew getting the whole cabin of a 737 out of a single door, in flight, after fitting parachutes, but without parachute training, before hitting the ground, though. Even leaving aside the weight and bulk of the parachutes.
As you say, not a great idea.
Though I agree that broadly safety is solved. And obviously we must heavily reduce air travel to combat global warming.
Now what happens when this system malfunctions and one wing pops off for no reason in normal flight?
The remaining ‘crew and passenger capsule’ would need to remain sealed.
This speculation is just pointless. It's simply not a solution given the engineering practicalities and cost constraints.
It's also not a good way to solve what is essentially a software problem.
Well-designed planes are ridiculously safe compared to almost any other mode of transport. And it's completely possible to design planes that handle all but the most extreme and unlikely edge cases.
The problem here isn't that passengers didn't have a Rube-Goldberg escape route, but that Boeing made some serious design errors - and then apparently tried to cover them up.
Unfortunately, ejection seats suck to use. Like, mild chance of killing you, very high chance of breaking bones, almost certain to make you a few inches shorter from compressing your spine levels of suck. This is assuming that you don't hit anything on the way out, of course - and don't land in the fireball. And that's with trained, fit pilots who are expecting the ejection. Can you imagine what happens to Grandma who's started to lose bone density? Or the baby on their mother's lap? And that's before you start considering the issues with having that many parachutes and rockets in close proximity, or the weight.
So that's why planes don't have features to save these people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_incident...
The other problem is, a lot of death/damage is done after plane hits the ground and starts to burn. You wouldn't be able to prevent that, since emergency parachute falls are hard ones. So you might still end up killing everybody on plane.
Of course, if everybody in the plane wears one, you could have a space problem, but it would provide extra protection by compartmentalization.
some air vehicles have whole frame parachutes but not the scale of 737.
I was wondering if a plane could not be made out of separate cabins coupled together (I can hear engineers die of laughter) so that they could be break loose with their own parachute.