modifier
New Member
Please excuse my ignorance as I have just started investigating small aircraft, specifically bush planes and know next to nothing, but I have built and designed a lot of other stuff during my life. I have always wondered about this and thought I would throw it out to the forum to get some feed back. If you look at the way race cars are designed these days, particularly if you look at something like F1 or top fuel drag racers, the drivers can walk away from extremely serious crashes with astronomical g forces involved and this is mostly because of crush zones and safety cages being required. I know that light aircraft has a minimal "safety cage" built into the constriction of the fuselage but it seems pretty light duty and not able to sustain much damage and you often hear of people getting killed from crashing their personal planes. I know weight is paramount when talking about small aircraft but it seems to me that one could build a pretty stout cage around the cockpit including the footwell and possibly design a crush zone in the nose and maybe even a swing down engine mounting system, all without adding a substantial amount of weight if you used the right materials. Perhaps even simple airbags. I design and build off road bicycles and there is an old history of bike builders building aircraft too. The use of titanium tubing and carbon fiber is pretty wide spread in high end bikes these days. The use of those materials could be incorporated into just the cockpit area rather than the whole plane to increase safety and still keep over all build costs down. Not that anyone is planing on crashing, but if we built planes more like race cars maybe more people would live through them. Thanks for listening.
