Right now, you're sitting in an uncomfortable chair at the airport, waiting for your turn to board a Boeing 737 which is going to take you somewhere that you don't even really want to go—probably, like, Houston or something—and about three minutes ago you read a headline that was something along the lines of, "'Boeing Recalls Plane Accidentally Made Out of Wet

Paper," or, "'Boeing Executive Accidentally Reveals Bicep Tattoo That Says, I Love Killing

People in Plane Crashes," and it really made you wish you had a parachute on you, and now you're wondering, wait, why aren't there parachutes on planes?

Shouldn't there be parachutes on planes?

I really wish someone would explain to me why there aren't parachutes on planes, so

I'm here to put your mind at ease and read you my favorite childhood book, All the Reasons

Why It Would Be Really, Really Bad If Commercial Airliners Had Parachutes, explained so thoroughly that this thought will never cross your mind again.

Chapter One—If You Jump Out of a Boeing 737 with a Parachute, You Will Probably, Definitely,

Die.

So, this first reason is kind of a physics thing, and it has to do with the way that airplanes are built.

First of all, jump planes and commercial airliners are very different kinds of vehicles.

Like, yes, they're technically both planes, but that's only true in the way that Wendover

Productions and I are technically both the same person—we all know that that doesn't mean anything.

Generally, skydiving is done from Cessna 182s, Cessna 208s, Twin Otters, King Airs, or Skyvans—and more often than not, those planes have been modified to make jumping out of them a lot less deadly.

They'll have specially designed jump doors, jump steps, all sorts of handles, weight modifications, and, on occasion, extra communications equipment to coordinate with the drop zone, but whatever, that's all safety stuff for nerds.

The most important difference between this thing and this thing are speed and altitude.

The cruising altitude of your average jump plane is somewhere around 9,000 to 13,000 feet.

They'd fly higher if they could, because then you'd get to spend more time flailing and screaming, but they can't.

These planes are not pressurized—in other words, they're not completely sealed, so the air inside the plane is the same as the air outside the plane.

And that's fine at 10,000 feet, but it's very much not fine at 35,000 feet, where you'll find our friend, the commercial airline.

At this altitude, the air is so thin that you'd only be getting about 20% of the oxygen you'd get at sea level, and the temperature will have dropped to somewhere around negative 60 degrees Fahrenheit.

Basically, the weather is real bad, and stepping out of a plane at this altitude would, theoretically, suffocate and freeze you to death before you hit the ground.

I say theoretically, because, in all likelihood, you would have died way before you were lucky enough to freeze to death.

In reality, even opening the door at this altitude would have created a violent, dangerous vacuum, where all of the air inside the pressurized cabin would be quickly forced out of the plane, along with you, your iPad, and your little bag of pretzels.

So no, you're not just gracefully leaping from this jet, you are being sucked out of it at neck-breaking speeds, and you'll probably just hit your head on something or get sucked into an engine before you can say, oh no, a dangerous vacuum.

Number two—parachutes are heavy, and expensive, and complicated, and you don't actually know how they work.

Well, hey, you might be thinking, even if jumping out of a plane is dangerous, it wouldn't hurt to give me the option, right?

Wrong.

There are lots of reasons why packing 200 parachutes onto a commercial airplane is actually a very bad idea.

At the scale that most commercial airlines are operating, every ounce of weight needs to be accounted for and justified.

More weight means burning more fuel, more fuel means higher costs, higher costs mean lower margins, and lower margins mean, I don't know, that this group of guys can buy fewer horses or something?

Just to give you an idea of how expensive jet fuel is, a single extra pillow on board an average commercial flight will cost the airline 5 cents in just fuel for just that flight.

A can of soda might cost another 6 cents, and a single passenger boarding the flight with a full bladder will cost the airline approximately 8 cents.

Across hundreds of thousands or even millions of flights, these things add up.

That's why you see airlines doing seemingly ridiculous things like shifting to lighter magazines or offering you a blanket so thin that it somehow makes you even colder.

But that's also why the emergency devices you do have on board planes, like the inflatable life jackets in your seats, are as small as possible, as light as possible, and crucially, stupidly simple to use.

They're more or less fail-proof and only take a couple of seconds to put on—unlike a parachute, which is way heavier, way more complicated, and you don't exactly want all 200 of your passengers in a panic trying to teach themselves how to equip and deploy a parachute while your plane is already on fire, because they'll probably end up hurting each other, and very few of them will actually get it right.

When US Airways Flight 1549 crashed into the Hudson River, only 33 of the 150 passengers managed to put on a life vest, and of those 33, only 4 actually put it on the right way.

Those aren't the kind of odds you want to take with a parachute.

Like here's a test—everything is on fire.

What does this cord do?

If you answered, deploy the primary parachute, you're wrong—I photoshopped it in.

It's an imaginary cord that doesn't do anything, and now you're dead.

Chapter 3.

Even if all of that stuff I said before wasn't true, which it is, and jumping out of a passenger airliner with a parachute would be survivable, which it isn't, you still shouldn't jump out of a crashing airplane because that's not how airplane crashes work.

So let's talk about how airplane crashes work—why they happen, when they happen, and what they actually look like.

For a plane to just fall out of the sky, you're talking about some kind of mechanical failure—but mechanical failure being the cause of a crash is actually exceedingly rare.

Only about 17-20% of crashes happen because the plane stopped working.

That's not to say that mechanical failures themselves are rare—they're actually pretty common, and you've probably even been on a plane that had some kind of mechanical failure, but in almost every case, you'll have been saved by the magic of redundancy.

On commercial airliners, every critical system is going to be at least double or triple redundant—that's means that if it were to fail, there would be two or three completely separate systems that could take over and do its job.

Take for example the tailrider on a Boeing 777.

This part is hooked up to not one, but three different hydraulic systems, and it only needs one of them to run it.

That means you could lose your hydraulics on the entire left and center of your plane, but still pilot it just fine using only the hydraulic system on your right wing.

The same thing goes with flight computers—there are usually three different autopilots all running at once, in case one dies, or is wrong, or becomes evil.

And the same even applies for engines—twin-engine jets are designed to fly with just one of their engines if necessary, and can usually glide up to a hundred miles without any engines at all.

All that is to say, if your plane crashes, it's probably your pilot's fault.

And as a result, that concentrates plane crashes in a few specific phases of flight—the phases where pilots have the most control.

The vast majority of plane crashes happen on either takeoff or landing, due to boring, generally non-lethal things like stalling or losing control on the runway, and only about 5% of accidents occur during cruise when, theoretically, you could have the opportunity to jump out of a plane to freeze or suffocate to death.

But look, don't let me stop you—for some reason the TSA does let you bring a parachute on commercial flights, so if this video didn't manage to convince you, then go ahead and knock yourself out—literally.

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