Helicopter ejection seats
Senis Semper Fidelis
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When a Pilot Ejects, ?
This excellent 1 hour prog on UK channel 5 Sunday at 20.00hrs, showed a slo-mo of a mock up/tethered Heli with 5 blades doing their stuff, with the start and run thru procedure of all the blades firing off the rotorhead, just millsec's before the bang seat's did its stuff, I was so mesmerised I missed wether it was a Russian or American, Any one else see it , if so can you tell me who's it was, and can some one say if this every got into production or not.. .Awesome, simply unbeliveable, that head must be some strength,. .Question, would it work on a Robby? <img src="eek.gif" border="0"> 
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To: Vfrpilotpb
The problem with the use of explosive bolts to sever a rotorblade from the rotorhead is that the reliability of the explosive bolt would have to be 1. This would require multiple squibs, multiple firing paths and multiple explosive charges. Also required is the correct material in the bolt to make it 100% frangible 100% of the time. If there were a slight delay in the firing of the squibs in the bolts attaching one blade the ensuing vibration / out-of-balance would tear the helicopter apart.
Regarding ejection seats in helicopters the first Cheyenne flight vehicle had an ejection seat. It was downward firing and saw service in a Boeing B-47. On the one flight where it could have been used the helicopter was too close to the surface of the Pacific Ocean to be of any use. The helicopter suffered rotor incursion killing the pilot.
The Robinson does not need a system of explosive separation of the rotor system from the helicopter. If the helicopter is mishandled the separation will occur automatically.
The problem with the use of explosive bolts to sever a rotorblade from the rotorhead is that the reliability of the explosive bolt would have to be 1. This would require multiple squibs, multiple firing paths and multiple explosive charges. Also required is the correct material in the bolt to make it 100% frangible 100% of the time. If there were a slight delay in the firing of the squibs in the bolts attaching one blade the ensuing vibration / out-of-balance would tear the helicopter apart.
Regarding ejection seats in helicopters the first Cheyenne flight vehicle had an ejection seat. It was downward firing and saw service in a Boeing B-47. On the one flight where it could have been used the helicopter was too close to the surface of the Pacific Ocean to be of any use. The helicopter suffered rotor incursion killing the pilot.
The Robinson does not need a system of explosive separation of the rotor system from the helicopter. If the helicopter is mishandled the separation will occur automatically.
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Excellent programme,some toe curling after effects of ejection and some ingenious engineering.
The g-testing bloke with the bloodshot eyes looked like he'd been out with PLH the night before!!
The g-testing bloke with the bloodshot eyes looked like he'd been out with PLH the night before!!
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Sorry RW-1
When the pilot ejected, he took the posting before yours with him.
The following is an attempt at piecing together this shredded document. <img src="smile.gif" border="0">
[quote]What about ejecting the pilot through the rotor disk, just like some of the WWII fighter plane fired their machine guns through the propeller?<hr></blockquote>
When the pilot ejected, he took the posting before yours with him.
The following is an attempt at piecing together this shredded document. <img src="smile.gif" border="0">
[quote]What about ejecting the pilot through the rotor disk, just like some of the WWII fighter plane fired their machine guns through the propeller?<hr></blockquote>
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To: widgeon
The FAA requirements for a single point failure that would cause death or the loss of the aircraft and its' crew / passengers is 1 10-9 or one time in a billion hours of fleet operation.
That would lead you to believe that the aircraft is very safe. However on complex designs there may be 20-30 or more items that if they failed it would result in catastrophic loss of personnel or the entire aircraft. Let's take those 30 items and divide them into the 1 10-9 requirement and you get 33,333,333 hours of fleet operation. Now you add in failures caused by manufacturing defects or maintenance errors or overstress by the pilot in maneuvering and the time between failure drops even further. The FAA requirement is meaningless and the engineers are yet to meet that requirement. The product assurance group cooks the numbers in order to meet the requirements. The loss of the rudder on the AA A-300-600 had the 1 10-9 requirement and it failed long before the meeting of the 1 10-9 allowable failure rate. S-76s lost rotor blades and a BV 234 was lost due to a defect in the transmission design long before the respective helicopters accumulated 1,000,000,000 hours. It gets worse on commercial aircraft because of fleet size and the rate of accumulation of hours. I could go on and on but I think you get the Idea. This is the reason I don’t like to fly any more.
The FAA requirements for a single point failure that would cause death or the loss of the aircraft and its' crew / passengers is 1 10-9 or one time in a billion hours of fleet operation.
That would lead you to believe that the aircraft is very safe. However on complex designs there may be 20-30 or more items that if they failed it would result in catastrophic loss of personnel or the entire aircraft. Let's take those 30 items and divide them into the 1 10-9 requirement and you get 33,333,333 hours of fleet operation. Now you add in failures caused by manufacturing defects or maintenance errors or overstress by the pilot in maneuvering and the time between failure drops even further. The FAA requirement is meaningless and the engineers are yet to meet that requirement. The product assurance group cooks the numbers in order to meet the requirements. The loss of the rudder on the AA A-300-600 had the 1 10-9 requirement and it failed long before the meeting of the 1 10-9 allowable failure rate. S-76s lost rotor blades and a BV 234 was lost due to a defect in the transmission design long before the respective helicopters accumulated 1,000,000,000 hours. It gets worse on commercial aircraft because of fleet size and the rate of accumulation of hours. I could go on and on but I think you get the Idea. This is the reason I don’t like to fly any more.
Lu,
If flying worries you that much, I presume that you also don't drive; a much more hazardous sport (especially in Quebec!).
I would imagine that the reliability of the components of any ejection system (not just rotor seperation charges) would need to be 1. It is, after all, the last resort, and failure of the system is likely to lead to a Pk of 1. <img src="eek.gif" border="0">
If flying worries you that much, I presume that you also don't drive; a much more hazardous sport (especially in Quebec!).
I would imagine that the reliability of the components of any ejection system (not just rotor seperation charges) would need to be 1. It is, after all, the last resort, and failure of the system is likely to lead to a Pk of 1. <img src="eek.gif" border="0">
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To: Ed Winchester
Here is an example why I don’t like to fly although if I have to I will. Shortly after submitting a design deficiency report to my boss, relative to the wing of the A-310 and A-300-600, explaining that under certain conditions the wing would either explode of struck by lightning or if there was an internal failure of the flap PCU it would result in the flaps ripping off of a supercritical wing causing loss of the aircraft I had to fly to England for a meeting at BAe. I drove to Zurich (Cloten) and got on a Swiss Air airplane. To my good luck it was an A-310. The whole flight was of the white-knuckle variety. I got a chance to sit up front with the flight crew and I told them about the problems. When I left the flight deck the pilots were blankly staring out the windows.
On my present assignment I had to fly on an A-330 shortly before the Air Transat dead sticked into an island airport.
Regarding driving I do a lot of that to include trips of several thousand miles each way when going on a work assignment. Quebec is another story. In a conversation with an acquaintance I told him that in the United States they teach defensive driving. He asked what that was and I gave him the following example. In the USA they teach you to drive defensively by imagining that behind every corner there would be a big green truck and it would be partially in my lane. I was taught to consider that eventuality under all circumstances. The Quebecer asked the significance of the green truck and I told him that in Quebec everybody drives green trucks.
Here is an example why I don’t like to fly although if I have to I will. Shortly after submitting a design deficiency report to my boss, relative to the wing of the A-310 and A-300-600, explaining that under certain conditions the wing would either explode of struck by lightning or if there was an internal failure of the flap PCU it would result in the flaps ripping off of a supercritical wing causing loss of the aircraft I had to fly to England for a meeting at BAe. I drove to Zurich (Cloten) and got on a Swiss Air airplane. To my good luck it was an A-310. The whole flight was of the white-knuckle variety. I got a chance to sit up front with the flight crew and I told them about the problems. When I left the flight deck the pilots were blankly staring out the windows.
On my present assignment I had to fly on an A-330 shortly before the Air Transat dead sticked into an island airport.
Regarding driving I do a lot of that to include trips of several thousand miles each way when going on a work assignment. Quebec is another story. In a conversation with an acquaintance I told him that in the United States they teach defensive driving. He asked what that was and I gave him the following example. In the USA they teach you to drive defensively by imagining that behind every corner there would be a big green truck and it would be partially in my lane. I was taught to consider that eventuality under all circumstances. The Quebecer asked the significance of the green truck and I told him that in Quebec everybody drives green trucks.
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Lu, if your remark re the BV234 refers to G-BWFC then I wish to take issue in the strongest possible terms.
Fox Charlie was lost as a direct result of a modification involving engineering procedures ordered by the CAA in an attempt to rectify a percieved yet non existant problem that had already been pre-empted by local engineers, with, if memory serves, the approval of the manufacturer, Boeing Vertol. The engineering defect was not Boeing's. It was that "fix" that killed 46 people.
Not really the fault of the aircraft in this case!
[ 29 January 2002: Message edited by: Agaricus bisporus ]</p>
Fox Charlie was lost as a direct result of a modification involving engineering procedures ordered by the CAA in an attempt to rectify a percieved yet non existant problem that had already been pre-empted by local engineers, with, if memory serves, the approval of the manufacturer, Boeing Vertol. The engineering defect was not Boeing's. It was that "fix" that killed 46 people.
Not really the fault of the aircraft in this case!
[ 29 January 2002: Message edited by: Agaricus bisporus ]</p>
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To: Agaricus bisporus
Hopefully we are addressing the same accident. In the accident I referred to there was a failure of a retaining device in one of the transmissions and the part entered into the gear mesh. This caused a catastrophic failure in the synchronizing (shaft running between the combining box and one of the transmissions).
I am not sure but I believe it was the failure of a part of the planetary gear reduction. This part was a retaining device (similar to a nut) that applied a clamping load to the axis of one of the planetary gears. The design of the part had been modified but was not fully tested. It should be noted that the original design of the transmission system was on the CH-47, which required a plethora of tests to include accelerated exposure to a salt-water environment. The new design was not tested in accordance with the original design specification to include operation in a salt environment.
In the operation of the gearbox heat is generated and when the helicopter shuts down the heat dissipates and cool air will enter the transmission. If operating in a salt-water environment the air entering the gearbox will have salt entrained along with moisture from the surrounding environment.
The old part was designed so that the moist salt entrained air could not penetrate into the clamping surface. With the new design the moist salt laden air could enter this area and it eventually caused salt induced corrosion. This lead to the eventual failure which resulted in the crash.
Lawsuits were filed in England but the English lawyers hired an American firm to try the case. Boeing was sued along with the chief engineer and the design manager of the transmission design group who approved of the design.
At least that is what I heard from Boeing employees and from an organization that I belong to.
[ 30 January 2002: Message edited by: Lu Zuckerman ]</p>
Hopefully we are addressing the same accident. In the accident I referred to there was a failure of a retaining device in one of the transmissions and the part entered into the gear mesh. This caused a catastrophic failure in the synchronizing (shaft running between the combining box and one of the transmissions).
I am not sure but I believe it was the failure of a part of the planetary gear reduction. This part was a retaining device (similar to a nut) that applied a clamping load to the axis of one of the planetary gears. The design of the part had been modified but was not fully tested. It should be noted that the original design of the transmission system was on the CH-47, which required a plethora of tests to include accelerated exposure to a salt-water environment. The new design was not tested in accordance with the original design specification to include operation in a salt environment.
In the operation of the gearbox heat is generated and when the helicopter shuts down the heat dissipates and cool air will enter the transmission. If operating in a salt-water environment the air entering the gearbox will have salt entrained along with moisture from the surrounding environment.
The old part was designed so that the moist salt entrained air could not penetrate into the clamping surface. With the new design the moist salt laden air could enter this area and it eventually caused salt induced corrosion. This lead to the eventual failure which resulted in the crash.
Lawsuits were filed in England but the English lawyers hired an American firm to try the case. Boeing was sued along with the chief engineer and the design manager of the transmission design group who approved of the design.
At least that is what I heard from Boeing employees and from an organization that I belong to.
[ 30 January 2002: Message edited by: Lu Zuckerman ]</p>
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The five-blade rotor desciption doesn't fit, but the Russian 'bang out' helicopter is the Kamov Ka-50 (3-blade co-axial rotor). The following comes from Jane's:
"Specially designed Zvezda K-37-800 ejection system for safe ejection at any altitude; following explosive separation of rotor blades and cockpit roof, pilot is extracted from cockpit by large rocket; alternatively, he can jettison doors and stores before rolling out of cockpit sideways."
T/shaft
"Specially designed Zvezda K-37-800 ejection system for safe ejection at any altitude; following explosive separation of rotor blades and cockpit roof, pilot is extracted from cockpit by large rocket; alternatively, he can jettison doors and stores before rolling out of cockpit sideways."
T/shaft
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The system would have to have a reliability of one! Get real. Tell me a system that is that reliable.
Ordinary ejection seats aren't. That is why they have canopy breakers on the top in case the MDC fails to shatter the canopy or the canopy fails to jettison.
A helicopter system could have that kind of redundancy i.e. a way of going through the blades if they fail to come off!
The top and bottom of it is, that anything is worth a try once you get into a situation which is that terminal.
Ask yourselves how many people have failed to survive a normal ejection! That doesn't put me off sitting on a bang seat.. . <img src="smile.gif" border="0"> <img src="eek.gif" border="0">
Ordinary ejection seats aren't. That is why they have canopy breakers on the top in case the MDC fails to shatter the canopy or the canopy fails to jettison.
A helicopter system could have that kind of redundancy i.e. a way of going through the blades if they fail to come off!
The top and bottom of it is, that anything is worth a try once you get into a situation which is that terminal.
Ask yourselves how many people have failed to survive a normal ejection! That doesn't put me off sitting on a bang seat.. . <img src="smile.gif" border="0"> <img src="eek.gif" border="0">
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To: Jed A1
“The system would have to have a reliability of one! Get real. Tell me a system that is that reliable”.
Response:
You have made my point. Engineers have yet to design anything that has a reliability of 1 with the exception of an un used anvil but even that would eventually fail long before reaching one billion hours. In the case of the explosive bolts there would have to be multiple redundancy within the firing circuits and a means of testing the circuit prior to flight. The conventional thinking in the field of reliability and safety is if something has not failed in the first hour of operation then it should not fail in the second hour or the third and every hour after that until it reaches the limitation of 1 10-9 and at that time it is predicted to fail. If one of the elements fails prior to 1 10-9 then the next failure can not occur prior to the expiration of one billion hours of operation.
Take the Ballistic Missile Defense System proposed by Dubyah. This system has to have a reliability of 1 otherwise a ballistic missile could impact Los Angeles or New York. It must also hit the target with its’ high powered LASER because if it is off by a 10th of a degree it could turn a lot of people on earth to toast. The system is made up of millions of parts and must have multiple redundancy in order to reach the reliability goals but this design concept is yet to turn out a device that has a reliability of 1. When the blades are commanded to blow off then they must blow off otherwise all is lost. The same goes for the interception of a ballistic missile or a reentry vehicle.
“Ordinary ejection seats aren't. That is why they have canopy breakers on the top in case the MDC fails to shatter the canopy or the canopy fails to jettison. . .A helicopter system could have that kind of redundancy i.e. a way of going through the blades if they fail to come off”!
Response:
The canopy breakers are worthless if the seat does not fire. The canopy breakers are there because the designers can’t guarantee that the explosive charges will work or the canopy does not jettison because of a reliability and safety related failure.
Here is an example. The Saturn IVB (the upper stage on the Saturn Apollo boost vehicle) was predicted to have a reliability of 5 Sigma or .99999 where perfect is .999999999999. Even with this high reliability Douglas only predicted a confidence factor of 70% that it would achieve the goal of 5 Sigma. That was the highest. Just think about the two stages below the S IVB. The only people not in attendance when these figures were being discussed were the Astronauts.
A point to ponder: 1 10 9=114,155.25 years.
“The system would have to have a reliability of one! Get real. Tell me a system that is that reliable”.
Response:
You have made my point. Engineers have yet to design anything that has a reliability of 1 with the exception of an un used anvil but even that would eventually fail long before reaching one billion hours. In the case of the explosive bolts there would have to be multiple redundancy within the firing circuits and a means of testing the circuit prior to flight. The conventional thinking in the field of reliability and safety is if something has not failed in the first hour of operation then it should not fail in the second hour or the third and every hour after that until it reaches the limitation of 1 10-9 and at that time it is predicted to fail. If one of the elements fails prior to 1 10-9 then the next failure can not occur prior to the expiration of one billion hours of operation.
Take the Ballistic Missile Defense System proposed by Dubyah. This system has to have a reliability of 1 otherwise a ballistic missile could impact Los Angeles or New York. It must also hit the target with its’ high powered LASER because if it is off by a 10th of a degree it could turn a lot of people on earth to toast. The system is made up of millions of parts and must have multiple redundancy in order to reach the reliability goals but this design concept is yet to turn out a device that has a reliability of 1. When the blades are commanded to blow off then they must blow off otherwise all is lost. The same goes for the interception of a ballistic missile or a reentry vehicle.
“Ordinary ejection seats aren't. That is why they have canopy breakers on the top in case the MDC fails to shatter the canopy or the canopy fails to jettison. . .A helicopter system could have that kind of redundancy i.e. a way of going through the blades if they fail to come off”!
Response:
The canopy breakers are worthless if the seat does not fire. The canopy breakers are there because the designers can’t guarantee that the explosive charges will work or the canopy does not jettison because of a reliability and safety related failure.
Here is an example. The Saturn IVB (the upper stage on the Saturn Apollo boost vehicle) was predicted to have a reliability of 5 Sigma or .99999 where perfect is .999999999999. Even with this high reliability Douglas only predicted a confidence factor of 70% that it would achieve the goal of 5 Sigma. That was the highest. Just think about the two stages below the S IVB. The only people not in attendance when these figures were being discussed were the Astronauts.
A point to ponder: 1 10 9=114,155.25 years.
Lu,
I will try and find the reference in a week or two, but I am pretty sure that it says something like this:
You would have to catch a commercial airliner every day for 26,000 years to gaurantee being involved in a fatal accident.
Flying a commercial airliner is 9 times safer than driving a car.
It seems you believe the media beat ups too.
BTW, if it was such a life threatning fault with the Airbus, why on earth would you have gotten on board? <img src="eek.gif" border="0">
I will try and find the reference in a week or two, but I am pretty sure that it says something like this:
You would have to catch a commercial airliner every day for 26,000 years to gaurantee being involved in a fatal accident.
Flying a commercial airliner is 9 times safer than driving a car.
It seems you believe the media beat ups too.
BTW, if it was such a life threatning fault with the Airbus, why on earth would you have gotten on board? <img src="eek.gif" border="0">
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To: helmet fire
“You would have to catch a commercial airliner every day for 26,000 years to guarantee being involved in a fatal accident. Flying a commercial airliner is 9 times safer than driving a car”.
These types of statements are based on the party line put out by all of the airlines and are based on seat miles traveled. Here is an example. Airline A has thirty aircraft that are capable of carrying 200 people. Each of these aircraft flies full from LAX to JFK and return a distance of 6000 miles.. .Each aircraft makes one round trip a day. Each trip takes a total of 9 hours round trip. In one day they accumulate 72,000,000 million passenger seat miles. In one month they accumulate 2,160,000,000 passenger seat miles. In one year they accumulate 788,400,000,000 passenger seat miles. On the last day of the year they lose one aircraft and 200 passengers plus crew due to the failure of a single part. In their advertisement they state proudly that they have had only one major accident and having flown 788,400,000,000 passenger seat miles. However they have accumulated only 98,550 flight hours on the 30 aircraft. The FAA states that the loss of an aircraft or death to a single passenger caused by a single point failure can occur no more frequently than 1 10 9 flight hours for the fleet or one time in a billion hours.
As I indicated in my post above there are many single point failures that have downed aircraft and they occurred long before the respective fleets had accumulated 1,000,000,000 hours of operation.
Here is another way the FAA obfuscates the truth about the calculated safety of an airliner. Hopefully you have some knowledge of a Fault Tree Hazard Analysis. It consists of and gates and or gates that represent different elements of a given system. The place these various gates in a logical order so that it can be shown how the elements of the system are related to each other when the system / systems are operational. In every case the top gate in every system is a “and” gate which means that several things have to occur at the same time for the system to fail. Using Boolean Algebra it can be “Proven” that the system has a predicted rate of failure of 1 10 12th or up to 1 10 17th. The problem is that if any one of these systems fails you lose the aircraft so, to truly represent the operational safety of the aircraft as a total entity each system must migrate upward to an “or” gate. Using the same Boolean Algebra it can be shown that the aircraft as a total entity has a failure probability of less than 1 10 9th. The FAA regs. do not require the last step as to do so would indicate that the aircraft is not as safe as they state in the regs.
“You would have to catch a commercial airliner every day for 26,000 years to guarantee being involved in a fatal accident. Flying a commercial airliner is 9 times safer than driving a car”.
These types of statements are based on the party line put out by all of the airlines and are based on seat miles traveled. Here is an example. Airline A has thirty aircraft that are capable of carrying 200 people. Each of these aircraft flies full from LAX to JFK and return a distance of 6000 miles.. .Each aircraft makes one round trip a day. Each trip takes a total of 9 hours round trip. In one day they accumulate 72,000,000 million passenger seat miles. In one month they accumulate 2,160,000,000 passenger seat miles. In one year they accumulate 788,400,000,000 passenger seat miles. On the last day of the year they lose one aircraft and 200 passengers plus crew due to the failure of a single part. In their advertisement they state proudly that they have had only one major accident and having flown 788,400,000,000 passenger seat miles. However they have accumulated only 98,550 flight hours on the 30 aircraft. The FAA states that the loss of an aircraft or death to a single passenger caused by a single point failure can occur no more frequently than 1 10 9 flight hours for the fleet or one time in a billion hours.
As I indicated in my post above there are many single point failures that have downed aircraft and they occurred long before the respective fleets had accumulated 1,000,000,000 hours of operation.
Here is another way the FAA obfuscates the truth about the calculated safety of an airliner. Hopefully you have some knowledge of a Fault Tree Hazard Analysis. It consists of and gates and or gates that represent different elements of a given system. The place these various gates in a logical order so that it can be shown how the elements of the system are related to each other when the system / systems are operational. In every case the top gate in every system is a “and” gate which means that several things have to occur at the same time for the system to fail. Using Boolean Algebra it can be “Proven” that the system has a predicted rate of failure of 1 10 12th or up to 1 10 17th. The problem is that if any one of these systems fails you lose the aircraft so, to truly represent the operational safety of the aircraft as a total entity each system must migrate upward to an “or” gate. Using the same Boolean Algebra it can be shown that the aircraft as a total entity has a failure probability of less than 1 10 9th. The FAA regs. do not require the last step as to do so would indicate that the aircraft is not as safe as they state in the regs.
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Vfrpilotpb,. .That film is of the Sikorsky/NASA Rotor System Research Aircraft (RSRA) an experimental flying wind tunnel that was built in the 1970's. It had an S-61 rotor system (5 blades) and the fuselage derived from the S-67 Blackhawk. The extraction seats used a nylon tethered rocket to pull the pilot from the seat and out the upper window, after the blades were severed with explosive (!!) charges. The film was made during a NASA rocket sled test.. .I saw the film in a safety meeting about 1975, and when we test pilots saw it, we sat there, stunned!
The KA-50 Werewolf counter-rotating gunship uses a blade separation system with ejection seats that seem to work very well. At a symposium once, I spoke right after Dr. Sergei Mekeyev described the system to the group. When I was asked if Comanche had such an ejection system, I told the group, "We did not chose to spend the 250KG of weight on an ejection system, we instead spent it on weapons and sensors to make sure the other guy used his."
Regarding the long tirade on "another way the FAA obfuscates the truth", Lu can speak his opinion, but I have always found the authorities quite open about all this. First, it is the NTSB who publish the data that Lu doesn't trust, so no wonder he finds the FAA a problem, he's looking in the wrong place! Here it is for all those who might want to see it:
<a href="http://www.ntsb.gov/aviation/Stats.htm" target="_blank">http://www.ntsb.gov/aviation/Stats.htm</a>
As you can see, there is no obfuscation at all!
Simply said, the airline carriers have a 20 year safety record of 2303 passengers dead in 9.4 billion passenger emplanements. That is a rate of 244 deaths per billion emplanements, or about 1 fatal airline accident per billion flights, if the average aircraft holds 244 people.
Not too shabby.
For 270 million Americans, with about 40000 dead each year in cars, it works out to 1 car death per 6750 citizens. That works out to 1.57 deaths per 100 million miles driven, or 15.7 per billion miles driven (see <a href="http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/news/local/html98/s1cars23m_20000723.html)" target="_blank">http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/news/local/html98/s1cars23m_20000723.html)</a>
For the Airlines, at 2303 deaths for 9.4 billion emplanements, it is 4 million emplanements per death. If we assume 500 mile average flight, it is 1 death per 2 billion miles of airline flight.
So the Airliner in the US is about 30 times safer than a car in the US.
[ 31 January 2002: Message edited by: Nick Lappos ]</p>
The KA-50 Werewolf counter-rotating gunship uses a blade separation system with ejection seats that seem to work very well. At a symposium once, I spoke right after Dr. Sergei Mekeyev described the system to the group. When I was asked if Comanche had such an ejection system, I told the group, "We did not chose to spend the 250KG of weight on an ejection system, we instead spent it on weapons and sensors to make sure the other guy used his."
Regarding the long tirade on "another way the FAA obfuscates the truth", Lu can speak his opinion, but I have always found the authorities quite open about all this. First, it is the NTSB who publish the data that Lu doesn't trust, so no wonder he finds the FAA a problem, he's looking in the wrong place! Here it is for all those who might want to see it:
<a href="http://www.ntsb.gov/aviation/Stats.htm" target="_blank">http://www.ntsb.gov/aviation/Stats.htm</a>
As you can see, there is no obfuscation at all!
Simply said, the airline carriers have a 20 year safety record of 2303 passengers dead in 9.4 billion passenger emplanements. That is a rate of 244 deaths per billion emplanements, or about 1 fatal airline accident per billion flights, if the average aircraft holds 244 people.
Not too shabby.
For 270 million Americans, with about 40000 dead each year in cars, it works out to 1 car death per 6750 citizens. That works out to 1.57 deaths per 100 million miles driven, or 15.7 per billion miles driven (see <a href="http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/news/local/html98/s1cars23m_20000723.html)" target="_blank">http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/news/local/html98/s1cars23m_20000723.html)</a>
For the Airlines, at 2303 deaths for 9.4 billion emplanements, it is 4 million emplanements per death. If we assume 500 mile average flight, it is 1 death per 2 billion miles of airline flight.
So the Airliner in the US is about 30 times safer than a car in the US.
[ 31 January 2002: Message edited by: Nick Lappos ]</p>
I mean no disrespect, but as the majority of airline passengers also travel to/from airports by road, aren't all these comparative statistics a tad academic! Door to door safety is what really counts ..... mind you, your own kitchen can be dangerous!
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If the purpose of traveling is to get from 'A' to 'B', and 'A' to 'B' is a measurement of distance, then jogging may result in the most deaths per miles traveled.
When the ticky-tick-ticker translates into the past tense. <img src="smile.gif" border="0">
When the ticky-tick-ticker translates into the past tense. <img src="smile.gif" border="0">