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> Parachutes have a minimum altitude. If you have the money, zero/zero ballistic parachutes have been a reliable thing for more than half a century. For ultra
by VLM 5y ago
> Parachutes have a minimum altitude.
If you have the money, zero/zero ballistic parachutes have been a reliable thing for more than half a century.
For ultralight sized aircraft, they cost about 1/5 the cost of a new airframe.
Generally they don't provide much survivability IMHO. Most ultralight deaths seem to boil down to CFIT and similar "happened too fast too close to ground" incidents with a side dish of refusal to do maintenance, and you know they're not going to maintain their airframe parachute or how its attached or how to engage it if they refuse to maintain their engine... But they are available and in special cases they might be useful.
- NovemberWhiskey 5y ago>If you have the money, zero/zero ballistic parachutes have been a reliable thing for more than half a century. That's called an ejection seat, right? As in a rocket-propelled vehicle to launch you sufficiently high out of your aircraft to allow your parachute safely to deploy (i.e. about a hundred meters, as described in the prior post)
- IshKebab 5y agoNo, it's a parachute that is deployed via a small explosion so it doesn't rely on falling through air to open.
- NovemberWhiskey 5y agoCan you provide a link to such a system? I did a best-efforts search and failed to turn up anything.
- brianwawok 5y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballistic_parachute https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballistic_parachute
- NovemberWhiskey 5y agoI'm unaware of any of those which are zero-zero. The Cirrus CAPS system has a minimum altitude of 400 ft or 920 ft after a one-turn spin, for example. BRS doesn't make specific claims for their system as far as I know but I'd be amazed if it were that much improved over the Cirrus one.
- obmelvin 5y ago> "happened too fast too close to ground" The Jetson One video seemed to show them flying pretty close to the ground - I was wondering if that was to reduce fall height in the event of loss of power. Your comment seems to indicate that one is sort of trading problems, not really significantly reducing risk (at least at the speeds one would want to go) - do I understand that correctly? Mind slightly expanding? Is the problem that you basically hit the ground with your full speed rather than having some wind resistance reduce your speed before impact?