> Surely it's worth the expense.
you'd think the same about parachutes for everyone which could have rescued lives on some of the plane disasters.
you'd think the same about parachutes for everyone which could have rescued lives on some of the plane disasters.
First, commercial air travel is incredibly safe.
Second, parachuting requires extensive training which a negligible number of passengers have. It's not like you just jump out of a plane and it works automatically. Not to mention dealing with cold, oxygen deprivation, landing in the middle of the ocean, etc.
Third, it's going to take at least a half hour for everyone to put parachutes on and jump out in an orderly fashion. How many aviation accidents have had a half hour of extra time where they already knew they would fatally crash?
Commercial air travel is very safe. The few crashes that do occur usually involve flight into terrain, mid-air collisions, or structural break up. Parachutes are ineffective for those failure modes. The parachute on a Cirrus mainly protects against total engine or flight control system failures, which aren't a real concern on airliners.