[dotancohen]

This same question was asked in the early years of commercial aviation. In the end, the industry (mostly) settled on aircraft designs that could passively glide reasonably well enough to land (sometimes). But some aircraft, e.g. military jets and Cirrus, came up with different answers (parachutes for the crew and for the whole aircraft, mostly).

We'll see how the commercial spacecraft industry deals with this, but I do think that we are at far too early of a stage to start expecting progress in this area. The first few decades of commercial spaceflight will be dangerous just like the first few decades of commercial aviation, or for that matter the first few centuries of commercial shipping. The answers, varied or uniform, will be interesting and I hope that I'll be around to see them.

[candiddevmike]

Wonder if we'll ever have commercial aircrafts with whole aircraft parachutes.

[tomaskafka]

https://brsaerospace.com/cessna/

[nradov]

No. Those systems can't really scale up in size and speed. And it would be pointless anyway because the few commercial airliner crashes that do occur are mostly during take off or landing where parachutes aren't very effective.

[theolivenbaum]

There's no parachuting from 900km/h

[jasonwatkinspdx]

There's been a number of successful supersonic ejections of military pilots over the years. It's extremely dangerous and very likely to fail, but it's better than the alternative. The basic idea is a drogue chute stabilizes and slows the pilot.

Whether the same idea could be adapted to a whole plane I don't know, but I would be skeptical of just on the basis that you probably wouldn't trigger such a thing unless the plane has had a substantial failure such that it could overpower any drogue chute.

[endymi0n]

There is at least one documented survival at the insane speed of Mach 3: https://theaviationgeekclub.com/bailing-out-at-mach-3-the-in...

[eszed]

Here's Weaver's own account:

http://www.chuckyeager.org/news/sr-71-disintegrated-pilot-fr...

I love the serendipitous detail of what happened on his next flight, though I'm sure it was not so amusing when it happened.

[dotancohen]

Well, his _next_ flight was to see the body of Jim. But yes, the next Habu flight started off interesting.

[eszed]

Lol! I up-voted you (seriously, I did) because this is close to the platonic ideal of a HN comment: egregious pedantry, plus a nerd-flex.

For those out of the loop on the nerd-flex, "Habu" was an unofficial, insidery nickname for the SR-71. It's the name of a venomous snake from somewhere with an SR-71 base (was it Okinawa? I think it was Okinawa), that the locals applied to the plane, because it (like the snake) was black and dangerous-looking.

[serf]

i'd be willing to believe it's an economics thing more-so than a physics thing.

one could envisage a '747-like' sized plane with many passenger escape-pods similar to the pod from an B-58 Hustler -- but who would pay the astronomic cost for such a ticket?

and similar to what the other person in this thread mentioned : those escape pods won't help during takeoff/landing phases.