Wednesday, February 26, 2014

On flight safety

I've been watching the Nat Geo series 'Air Crash Investigations' for a few days continuously. My shallow mind is pondering on a few simple matters which I always have felt could be useful in increasing the safety in an airplane.

1. Cameras - a few action cams/closed circuit cams well protected from weather can keep watching the airplane from different angles and positions. These will give the pilots a very clear idea about what's happening to their aircraft, whenever they need it. Costly? I guess it won't increase the cost of the airplane manufacturing by more than 1%. Disadvantages? I haven't figured out any.

2. Better design of the fuel tank: Even a car has compartmentalised fuel tank. If there's a leak in the fuel tank, even in case of a substantial one, only quarter of the total fuel will be leaked out. I don't know about the latest aircrafts but if I'm right the earlier ones didn't have any genius put in to safeguarding the fuel from leaking in many scenarios. A design like in the F1 cars' fuel storage in flexible bags or adding self-resealing capability to it may not be feasible very soon but there definitely is scope for improvement.

3. Spacious exits: Every time I get into an airplane I feel the entry/exit is very small, considering the fact that people won't be able to use windows and that there are no other emergency exits which can be opened by breaking a glass cover with a hammer, as we see in buses and trains. Providing these would definitely mean a serious design remake of the airplanes, and would be costly.

4. Parachutes: Fitting a parachute which can hold the entire weight of the huge commercial aircraft is neither cost effective nor easy to design and implement. But it always has been a necessity like an airbag in a car, and is a feasibility of the future. If fighter jets and space ships can be equipped with parachutes strong enough to quickly bring them to a halt from a high speed, we can't just rule out the possibility of fitting them in commercial airplanes.

5. If I were in a good position in an aircraft design firm, I'd think of possibilities of making the whole engine detachable in case of an emergency. Since many of the fires are caused by or originated in and around the engine, a quick detachment of the whole engine would prove useful in some cases. If the plane over the Atlantic or the Pacific or a desert, there's nothing to be feared about dropping an engine from the airplane, and wherever it is, it's lighter than a falling airplane.

6. It may sound a bit crazy, but it'd be nice if even the commercial airliners were able to land vertically. That would improve the aircraft's safety by many folds. At least in smaller aircrafts this can mean a revolution. If the corporate jet or small plane can land in company premises, this could mean a new era in general aviation. Thrust vectoring or tilt jets/rotors or whatever it takes is justified by scale of the advantages it brings to aviation.