Abstract

A problem of inadmissible complete lack of appliances for saving passengers and crews on air liners of civil aviation has been broached and ways for solving it pointed out. A triple-redundant system of saving passengers and crews of air liners of civil aviation including approved known saving appliances and their versions such as cabin rescue compartments, individual and group rescue capsules, individual and group ejected seats has been proposed. The process of simultaneous rescue of great numbers of people from aircraft under or just before fatal air crash, which seems to be inevitable, is based on a long-year experience of such developments for aircraft of military, sporting and airspace purposes. It is proposed that emergency and fatal air accident situations, actions of crews and passengers, the use of the system and of the rescue appliances are modeled with the use of GIS ArcInfo version 8.0. The authors emphasize on the necessity of replacement of the entire stock of air liners, traditionally unequipped with rescue appliances, by new ones which had been specially designed with the consideration of their safe leaving by passengers and crews in fatal air crash situations in accordance with the advanced rescue technology.

INTRODUCTION

Every person has affections and habits of its own - good and disrepute. Some people frequently travel while other rarely leave their homes. Nevertheless the system of ideas, having been formed in the majority of us during centuries, remains the same. For instance let us review one of terms - comfort, which seems to be a simplest one. As applicable to working posts of pilots, navigators, flight engineers or passenger seats the idea of "comfort" involves practically the same matter of habitual comfortable domestic environment including comfortable armchairs, other furniture, interior, typical services, TV sets, video recorders, refrigerators, health foods, communication, postal services, etc. They differ only in the rate of luxury depending on who is an owner of and for what purpose that aircraft is used: for carriage of regular passengers or governmental officers. Correspondingly, its interior is dressed either of plastics and artificial leather or with mahogany, equipped with luxury furniture, ware, resting and reception rooms. And this is not surprising as the majority of people live their pre-pension life mostly at work having too little time to be spent at home. Moreover, sleeping takes a great portion of that time.

However, we think that a confidence of a safe destination is a main thing for feeling comfortable in salons of any liner. When interrogated, the majority of people forget to say of that or they simply avoid to think of that so that, as the saying goes, "not to court disaster".

It is well known that a concept is a thought reflecting the essence of a matter. The essence of flight is a safe point-to-point carriage of people, cargo or transmission of information. It is based on safe taking-off and guaranteed landing after flight. Otherwise there will be nothing involved in the idea of "comfort". For nobody can think of the use of refrigerator, viewing TV movies, reading through fresh newspapers or of final admire of mahogany dressing of liner salons at the moment when the liner is falling down! Everybody will think of a single thing - how to save their souls. Meanwhile, numerous rescue teams, involved in search of fragments of the fallen liners, of flight recorders and of victim remains, are engaged with burial and concealment of evidences rather than with saving as such. Saving of emergency liners must be started just in flight during first seconds of fatal situation, when some measures can be still taken. It concerns not equipment, i.e. emergency liner body, which will be required only for post-accident investigation of crash causes, but first of all passengers, crews and valuable cargo. The remaining part of the emergency air liner is hazardous both for its passengers and for other aircraft (in particular for aircraft flying in lower levels and headed-on) as well as for land objects. Therefore definite safety arrangements against emergency liners must be provided.

This is briefly a core of the problem, the necessity of urgent solution of which is proved almost every day - beginning from a tragedy in Irkutsk to next crash of a Boeing airliner.

MASS SAVING SYSTEM

Proposed in this work is a triple-redundant version of a system for saving passengers and crews of civil airliners. A model of such a system based on combined use of rescue appliances, used in military, sporting and airspace aircraft, is nowadays in the process of development in the Kyiv International University of Civil Aviation (KIUCA).

Within five last centuries the humanity is engaged with the development of facilities and systems for saving aeronauts - from Leonardo da Vinchi, Fausto Veranchio, Luis Sebastian Lenormen to contemporary developments. And today, just at the end of the twentieth century, what leading companies, manufacturing civil aircraft, can offer for saving lives of passengers and crews of airliners? The answer is the same that in first two decades of civil aviation growth: crews and passengers are void of saving facilities. We think that such a situation in civil aviation is inadmissible.

Meanwhile, an increase of passenger carrying capacity at practically any cost is a major trend both for subsonic aircraft, exercising mainly so called feeder carriage from airports of local air lines to main airlines, and for long-haul main and intercontinental liners. For example, in accordance with the standard regulations, in stations of transonic aircraft having cruise M number 0.98 six passenger seats per row with two pass ways may be laid, while with M number 1.2 a longer fuselage with four seats per row and a single pass way is required to provide the same carrying capacity. These recommendations are oriented first of all for commercial loading. Can a transonic air liner having cruise number M equal to 1.2 be more competitive than a subsonic one, if in doing so its aerodynamic properties get deteriorated by one third? It appears than it really can as due to increase of flying speed his productivity is higher. But it is true that this results in two- or three-fold greater fuel consumption than for subsonic aircraft Moreover, supersonic liners use the process of fuel afterburning in afterburning units, which is highly dangerous for the environment, to say nothing of a hazard of fatal situation thereon which may arise because of the loss of flight aerodynamic properties.

In accordance with the World civil aviation statistics most hazard situations and the majority of fatal air crashes occur during take-off and landing. With this the major difficulty will result from significant overloads, arising for example, during steep diving at sharply rising speed and loss of aircraft controllability, caused by aerodynamic elevator interlocking, rather than from a small flight altitude and change of cabin positioning. Failure of critical engine and presence of asymmetrical thrust aggravate liner balance so that a pilot is unable to take a decision of passenger saving at once without waiting for a non-controllable liner attitude. As liners change significantly their original geometrical shape in flight, they behave as flexible air-resilient constructions having a certain strength reserve. However deformations of wings, fuselage and empannage make only a visible part of those processes. Deformations of linkage of liner controls and of transmission links laid along the aircraft body are much more hazardous. Systems, assuring ejection and uniform balancing of load along aircraft boards during movement of passengers inside the liner or when they start leaving the liner in the process of saving, are also deformed.

In accordance with the rate of hazard emergency situations in aviation are divided into four categories: aggravation of flying conditions, hazardous situation, emergency situation and fatal air situation. With the occurrence of the latter prevention of people death or of liner damage appears practically unreal. Is it really more saving to pay a "compensation" to relatives of victims than to expend huge amounts for finding, transportation, burial and then guess at causes of crash disposing only of fragments and flight recorders instead of saving alive witnesses including crew members? Luis Lenormen who was the first to say the word "parachute", had never supposed that it will be forgotten just in civil aviation carrying great quantities of passengers. Nowadays schemes of simultaneous landing of numerous parachutists from transport aircraft as well as of small numbers of parachutists from military and sporting aircraft had been elaborated many times. Though take-off weights of aircraft with cruise numbers M 0.84, 0.98, 1.2 are 110.91 m, 130.32 m and 225.17 m correspondingly, they are not much greater than weights of assisted take-off rackets of reusable space vehicle "Space-Shuttle", which are parachute-descended upon fuel propellant utilization, fuel tank being separated from the main structure. But it must be noted here that in civil aircraft fuel tanks are traditionally rigidly fixed in wings, without which flights are impossible, as it is well known, as well as emergency landing with full tanks, increasing the weight of aircraft passenger-carrying body, which had lost its flying ability, e.g. because of engines halt, due to hazardous mixtures. Probably, it will be a reason for aircraft designers to thing of this fact or to develop flying design bureaus so that their striving to land safe arise in every designer before designing such an unreliable structure.

Still, for justice, it must be noted that some pilot specimens of civil aircraft were equipped with facilities for saving testing crew members. For example, a pilot specimen of aircraft ??-42, stored in a hangar of the KIUCA, has an additional door for leaving by testing personnel in fatal air situations and appropriate saving appropriate saving facilities. A pilot specimen of aircraft "Ruslan", made by O.K. Antonov Scientific & Technological Complex, was also equipped with saving facilities. However, unfortunately those facilities cannot fit to leave this air giant at low altitudes.

Here a paradoxical situation arises: in commercial aircraft carrying not by testing personnel but regular passengers, are void of even those saving facilities which were provided for testing crews as well of additional doors, the purpose of which nobody can know in order to exclude occurrence of premature questions that with no saving facilities air liners cannot be admitted to operation.

Hence, let us analyze, what road stones prevent from technical implementation of the problem of saving of passengers and crews, that is a technical aspect of the saving problem.

Major causes preventing from equipping of air liners with saving facilities, are as follows:

1. Increase of an additional aircraft weight load resulting in reduction of passenger carrying capacity and increase of fuel consumption as well as in the necessity of weight re-designing and change of aircraft layout. When speaking of weight perfection of aircraft, it must be noted that maximum structure mass reduction may be obtained only if the structure is originally designed for equipping with developed saving facilities.
2. Development of innovative saving facilities for mass use. Specific feature of such facilities is that they are to be used not by professionals, but by any user, who occasionally became aircraft passenger having occurred in fatal air situation.
3. The necessity of development of new aircraft constructions equipped with saving systems and facilities. Consequently, the necessity of making appropriate changes in assembly conveyors, production processes and cycles.
4. The necessity in replacement of the entire stock of aircraft not equipped with saving facilities.
5. Training crews and passengers in the use of saving facilities in extraordinary situations.
6. High costs.
7. Formation of public opinion of the implementation of such great changes in civil air fleet, which. in its turn, will incur heavy expenses to air carriers, operating aircraft not equipped with saving facilities, at the consideration of refuse of passengers to buy tickets for their flights.
8. Lack of transport information technologies able to calculate and model mass saving systems. The development of technology of geographic information systems (GIS) up to the level of ArcInfo version 8.0 will make this problem quite soluble.

Facilities for saving passengers and crews must provide their saving at any moment of time and in different situations. The importance of the implementation of GIS technology for this purpose can be explained by the fact that emergency modeling programs operate in relative coordinate systems where accident point serves as an origin of coordinates and their accurate conversion for connecting with pre-numbered maps is required. Moreover. Sometimes emergency situations occur, which may be foreseen and, consequently, a collection of general models of separate crashes can be formed. The transition from a general emergency model to its separate local occurrence requires mutual re-calculation by GIS at an ArcInfo level. A specific feature of the developed saving system is the use of a superposition principle when every substandard situation is considered as a composition of separate emergency situations, and models of finding ways out of them are substituted as functions of finding ways out of more hazardous situations, this time not in coordinates of the point of accident but in relation to each object to be saved as an individual being at the origin of individual coordinate system. It is necessary to watch for its movement in liner salon not admitting clogging of pass ways which may deteriorate free passage along salon to the provided guaranteed individual saving point. Thus, not only air crash situations but also ways out of them for each passengers and crew members are modeled. These models serve as bases for preparing preliminary plans of actions during saving.

When modeling mass saving system we have analyzed known technical designs of saving facilities, in particular of detachable cabins, saving capsules, ejected seats, parachutes designs, flexible wing, systems with lifting rotor, etc. As a result we have concluded systems for saving passengers and crew members must be triple-redundant and operate differently depending on certain situation.

The process of leaving air liner, having become a fatal trap for more one hundred people, is based on a simple sequence of actions for their group movement and on a number of preparative operations.

Salons of modern air liners look like several cinema halls, separated by partitions, where rows of seats are installed, which are separated by pass ways. It is well known that such a layout is the worse from the point of view of people evacuation. With such a distribution of people in salons it will be unreasonable to distribute them in special compartments. An optimal version of saving cabin, elaborated for space vehicles, is configured in the form of car lamp, which is most convenient for joint landing of a group of people under a common parachute canopy. Therefore, when dividing the passenger cabin into compartments, try to use a cottage-like salon layout with which groups of passengers are compactly seating at several layers in a limited space having independent sources of life assurance. All isolated compartments are provided with exits to common passenger cabin corridors, where all types of services, which are excluded from isolated compartments in view of safety and weight limitations. Each compartment includes saving capsules which. in their turn, incorporate ejection seats.

Updating of saving facilities is connected with reduction of their weight parameters and with incorporation of common parts such as powder charges, rocket engines, group seats, common guides, large parachute structures, etc. Separation of passenger cabin saving compartments, arranged most conveniently along the fuselage, towards different directions may be provided by the use of auxiliary wings and empennage which increase maneuverability of saving structures. Compartments must be projected so that to from the beginning use independent power sources and minimum connections and joints with main fuselage body.

The task of each saving compartment is quick evacuation at a safe distance from the air liner body of a great number of people and its next travel with the aid of a special propulsion unit.

Upon the accomplishment of this task and depending on situation progress, saving compartments may be left from by passengers in group or individuals capsules able to land. Ejected seats must be used when saving capsule occurs in dangerous situation, e.g. when it is carried towards dangerous rock areas or high-voltage lines.

CONCLUSION

Naturally, the proposed version of saving system is not final but may serve as a working specimen till trial testing. It requires further changes which we are ready to make in cooperation with partners interested in our proposal and wishing to support it.