Hasta La Ideas

In an earlier entry we looked at inflatable airplane slides, which are designed to allow passengers to safely descend from a couple of stories in height. But what about when the distances are greater? For that there are escape chutes.

The central design challenge with an escape chute is how to arrest gravity to modulate the escapees’ speed, so that you don’t have people breaking their legs at the bottom and/or piling up on top of each other. What’s interesting are the different approaches by which companies try to tackle this. The Ingstrom Escape Chute, for example, works by pure friction:

(more…)