Detachable Cabine, Future of Air Travel?

 World has taken attention on the invention by an Ukrainian Engineer Vladimir Nikolaevich Tatarenko, which is a detachable passenger cabin which would safely separate from an aircraft in a time of emergency and safely land.

I have taken a freedom to comment, completely based on my opinion formed by pure observation without any calculations or analysis.

The system that is shown in the footage is technically feasible, but if I could make a bet, I would bet that we'll never see it in use.

Technically Difficult but Possible Concept

Technical feasibility has been demonstrated by several armed and air forces in the world, which successfully and now routinely expel the light armoured vehicles of about 10 tons of weight, according to the information readily available publicly on the internet. Assuming that the armoured vehicles up to 10t are safely dropped with the combination of parachutes and retro rockets that act immediately before impact, what would be required is to scale up the same concept. Because the assumed weight of the typical civil airliner or even regional aircraft would exceed the weight of 10 tons couple of times, it is required to scale up everything. So it would be necessary to increase the parachutes, strengthen the parachute links to the structure, possibly add extra parachutes, also add new rockets and make them stronger or some combination of the above.

The problem is large and should not be underestimated but it is possible to imagine that this all can be done eventually. Also, what is required is to properly design and develop a system for safe and controlled separation of the cabin from the rest of the aircraft. One of the solutions would be to use similar concept of the design of the latches used to drop bombs from the bombers, but again the size would need serious scaling up. To make the whole system of the latches work reliably enough, it would be required to limit the number of latches (uplocks). In my opinion best would be if the system can be designed to have maximum four latches. The assumption is that the pilots would escape using personal parachutes. Another assumption is that the systems rounting and ductings would shear off by pure weight between cabine and the remains of the flying aircraft.

The airplane with such capsule saving system would be heavier, more expensive (new equipment, certification cost, new tests, etc.) and because of the extra weight, they would consume more fuel and the flight and ticket cost for them would be more expensive because of fuel economy and due to amortization of investments (these aircraft would at least initially be built at lower rates). This is a simplified engineering judgment. And now I want to share couple of thoughts about the safety and economy of use.

Safety Considerations of the Current Air Travel

The probability that someone who today sits in a civil aviation airplane experiences catastrophic experience is close to one in 4.7 million. There are about 23,000 civil aircraft flying in the world and they fly more than 30 million flights annually. Today, at any time in the air there are about 700,000 passengers. A comparison for example for 2013 was the following: there were 264 people who died in aircraft catastrophic accidents and for example in smaller European country (which has about 7 million inhabitants) 643 people died in car accidents alone. There is about 1,5 milion cars in this country, but not all of these cars are driven at the same time so that it is realistic to assume that the road traffic at any time, in Serbia there are much fewer participants than there are passengers in all aircraft in the world. And those people flying by planes are safer and that is by about 23 times.

…but not Economically Viable?

Now we come to the key psychological and economical question: if you were to get in a plane flying from example Belgrade to Munich you would pay the normal ticket price 250 euros, while the price of cheap flight would average to about 100 euros, would you be willing to pay for a ticket that would cost 400-500 Euros for the same flight for increased security and the sense that you are flying to fly in the cabin that can be dropped by parachute? Suppose someone says that the probability of survival doubled. For example, instead of the victims appearing once in 4.7 million passengers, they would appear once in 9 million passengers. I think that most passengers would not accept to pay this price, because the chance of catastrophic event is very small, almost negligible. In my experience I was lucky not to have met anyone, nor did I hear that someone has someone else who died in an airplane accident in civil aviation as they are very rare. On the other hand I have seen people that do not fasten their belts when they enter the vehicle (although not too many). My conclusion is that the average buyer is not willing to pay extra cost for increased safety when the large civil aircraft aviation safety is already very high. This does not necessarily apply to general aviation with smaller number of passengers as the safety data is worse. But let everyone make their own conclusion using this or a similar logical thinking.

Please check opinions of some of my friends on the topic: an ex Boeing engineer, a current Bombardier engineer, a Ryanair pilot. You would need Google Translate or Google Chrome for a translation from Serbian language.

Interestingly Airbus recently patented similar solution but for all the different reasons.