Steve6443 wrote:
I saw those sort of figures, hence my original thoughts of having 2 decks of cards. In the first, 1 has ‘death & destruction’ written on it, the rest have ‘collect €1000’ written on them. In the second deck all cards have ‘collect €1000" written on them. You have an aircraft equipped with a chute and an engine failure. From which deck will you chose to take a card? Attempt a forced landing – take a card from deck 1. Pull the chute – take a card from deck 2. If you don’t have a chute, then your choice is limited when facing an engine failure. Take a card from deck 1……
This is wishful thinking at best, and Murphy is the proof. 9 out of 10 times an engine will quit at the worst possible time; right after take off when you have no runway left, no places to land and not enough alt to pull the chute. 
Seriously though, this is how people get killed. The reason is they fail to maintain air speed.
I think what kills you is lack of determination and plan well before you jump into the aircraft: if your plan is to pull the chute anytime engine quits, I think it has lot of statistical chance to work, the engine will quit randomly over variours terrain/hights, so I think Steve will do very well with his decisive choice of pulling the chute early, unless he spends all his flying doing bad weather circuits over sharp rocks
There should be not much decision making or reliance on new data, things has to be simple and clear before you jump in the aircraft: push stick all forward on EFATO, land ahead bellow xxxxft, do tight high speed circuit above xxxxft, know wich way to turn, pull chute first, stick with the selected field…
Note it takes 5s to decide between left & right turn on EFATO if you have to make that call in the air, you do bleed lot of speed/options while thinking by the time things has changed 
Yes, a trimless Turbulent.
I forget the exact distance but I had at least 10nM to cover with an engine that wouldn’t do much more than idle, so the only way was down, albeit with a relatively shallow glide angle. In some ways it’s a very different scenario from an engine failure where you have to make an immediate landing, yet I can readily see how a person approaching a hedge could find themselves willing the aircraft to pass over it rather than through it, and slow down as a result.
I also believe I’m correct in saying that aircraft with light control forces are also more likely to spin in, and this rings true to me also.
kwlf wrote:
I seem to recall that about 9/10 C172 off field landings turn out well for the pilot and passengers
Seems to be the same ballpark for chute equipped airplanes. So these numbers don’t show an obvious advantage of the chute. Some believers in the chute seem to show the attitude: “If a pilot in a plane w/o a chute does not survive an engine failure, it’s always the fault of the lacking chute. If a pilot in a plane with a chute does not survive an engine failure, it’s always the fault of the pilot”.
(That’s a similar attitude that leads to some statistics counting everyone who survives a chute deployment as “life saved by the chute”)
Truth is a little different:
- Pilots die in plane accidents in plane with and without a chute
- Engine failures are very rare events but are well survivable in the vast majority of cases both with and without a chute
- In almost all cases where pilots did not survive such a situation (with and w/o a chute), they made obviously bad decisions in handling the emergency (almost always stalling the aircraft before it hits the ground).
- The anxiousness about an off field landing seems to be much higher than the actual risk – leading to panicing pilots and hence bad decisions making. Would be an interesting research topic to evaluate if this anxiousness has increased since one company started spending substantial marketing money into “explaining” pilots how dangerous an off field landing “is”….
What hasn’t been discussed here yet: Such a chute easily adds 20k to the price of an airplane. That is 150hrs. of flight time with an instructor. Just imagine we would spend 15hrs. of off field landing training every year for the next 10 years – don’t we think that this would a) greatly anti-demonize off field landings and b) increase our abilities to a level where the risk of not surving such an emergency is really minimal?
Even “just” spending the time and money of a Cirrus transition training (I think these days it’s 10hrs and about 5k EUR) into off field landing training would increase safety substantially.
Finally, the cheapest and looking at the actual casualties most helpful measure would be immediately stopping to demonize off field landings as something that is barely survivable. Almost all of the pilots killed in the cases discussed here would still live if they wouldn’t have been that scared about hitting the ground w/o engine power that they stalled their plane before that!
Malibuflyer wrote:
Seems to be the same ballpark for chute equipped airplanes. So these numbers don’t show an obvious advantage of the chute. Some believers in the chute seem to show the attitude: “If a pilot in a plane w/o a chute does not survive an engine failure, it’s always the fault of the lacking chute. If a pilot in a plane with a chute does not survive an engine failure, it’s always the fault of the pilot”.
The ball park figures of 1/10 emergency landings being unsuccessful for chute / non chute equipped aircraft I would take as normal, bearing in mind that the pilots of both groups of aircraft have had the same training. But let me take your two statements.
If a pilot in a plane w/o a chute does not survive an engine failure, it’s always the fault of the lacking chute. No, it’s the pilot’s failure to incorrectly perform the required tasks to ensure a safe emergency landing. This means setting up best glide, selecting field, etc. etc.
If a pilot in a plane with a chute does not survive an engine failure, it’s always the fault of the pilot. if the pilot is flying an aircraft equipped with a chute, is aware of the operational parameters and fails to deploy it, then again it is the failure of the pilot to choose the option that will ensure his best possibility of survival, instead relying on his perceived abilities. So yes, if you knew that deploying the chute would mean that you and your passengers would 100% survive but if you risked an emergency landing, the chance of success is only 90%, what else can you infer except that the pilot is to blame for any death or serious injuries?
As for ’an engine will always fail at the most inopportune moment, as a pilot you can plan for that. Brief your departure:
Engine failure before take off: actions
Engine failure after take off but before achieving minimum chute deployment height: actions.
Engine failure after achieving minimum chute deployment height: actions.
It’s why, when I reach 500 feet AGL, my call is CAPS – touching the parachute handle to remind myself it’s now a viable option – Maps – changing the MFD from the Engine page to Navigation page and Flaps – retracting them from take off.
With regards expense: You correctly state training will improve performance. But even so, no-one is infallible. You can train and train and train yet circumstances work against you. Let’s say you improve your chance from 1/10 bad emergency landings to 1/1000 through training. Those are pretty good odds.
However are you still going to be happy drawing a card from deck 1 where ONE of 1000 cards says ‘death and destruction’ and the rest survival, whereas, if you fly a chute equipped aircraft, you can elect to pull from Deck 2 where NONE of the cards have ‘death and destruction’ on them?
At the end of the day, it’s an added insurance. Do you have insurance for your car? Your house? You hope that you’ll never need them. But at the end of the day, you pay. It’s the same with the chute. I know I’ll NEVER be 100% competent so I accept the cost to improve my chance of survival in case of an engine failure from 9/10 to 10/10.
If you believe you will always be competent, that the chute will NEVER offer you any benefits, that’s your decision but I would recommend you review the old PPL Books, in particular one with regards Human Performance Limitations because you’re committing one of the biggest No-Nos in the book.
I know personally 2 pilots who are still here IMO 99% I would say due to the Cirrus chute.
As they described the event they were flying an SR22 from LFRI to (brain fade I can’t remember where to) but it was planned, if I remember correctly,as around 2 hrs each way, one pilot flying the outward journey the other the return. The first leg was night IFR. Not long after take off but having reached the selected flight level they suffered engine failure. They knew the area and could also bring up the nearest airfields section on the MFD. There were quite a few in gliding range, however, none had runway lights or they considered the distance to be too risky. So they pulled the chute.Their description of what happened next I found both amusing and surprising.
“After the launch of the chute all went quiet as if they were in a glider, they had tightened their harnesses, and because of the blackness of the night in the area they could see nothing, they just sat lost in their own thoughts for what seemed like forever. Finally, one pilot commented that it was taking an incredibly long time to get down. The other agreed and plucked up the courage to loosen his harness slightly so he could peer outside and down, before announcing incredulously, “-I think we are on the ground” and they were.
I will point out that this is not my story but that of the pilots, told in the maitenance hangar when it arrived for repair and it is flying again now.
IMO there can be no doubt that the chute saved their lives. Also that they would have agreed with the OP that it was not their first choice of action.
In considering the debate here,one can wonder if they would have undertaken the flight without a chute, I think they possibly would have. But that also started me wondering, because I get the impression from this forum that there have been quite a number of Cirrus accidents (I will call them accidents even though the chute has successfully saved crew and passengers and been deployed non-accidentally for that purpose) over the last two years. More so than accidents in other types of aircraft. If my impression is correct, why do you think that is? The fact that the chute enables more people to survive to tell the tale should help us greatly here.
Malibuflyer wrote:
Finally, the cheapest and looking at the actual casualties most helpful measure would be immediately stopping to demonize off field landings as something that is barely survivable. Almost all of the pilots killed in the cases discussed here would still live if they wouldn’t have been that scared about hitting the ground w/o engine power that they stalled their plane before that!
I can tell you this: They probably weren’t scared. They just made mistakes. They misjudged their approach because an aircraft with an engine on idle has a different glide performance than one with a stationary prop. Or were flying an aircraft with slightly different performance. I remember flying an early Arrow (180HP) and was amazed about how much it’s slab wing lost height – I think I needed 6 or seven attempts before my first ‘practice forced landing’ was good enough. Then when I went back to flying a C172, I needed to readjust. It’s not FEAR. It’s mistakes. If you believe you’re infallible, I refer to my previous post.
We all make mistakes. The question is: what are the consequences of those mistakes…..
Steve6443 wrote:
you can elect to pull from Deck 2 where NONE of the cards have ‘death and destruction’ on them?
Unfortunately the only way you can create this deck is “stop flying”. Buying a plane with a chute does not create total safety as is proven by the fact that people still die in chute equipped planes – because people make mistakes also in chute equipped planes!
Even if all planes were equipped with chutes and even if we established the “armchair rule” that one should always pull there will still be pilots who don’t and there will still be pilots who die. Again, saying “if I pilot who could but doesn’t pull the chute dies its his stupidity and one can’t blame the chute while if a pilot w/o a chute stalls the engine it’s because no-one is infallible and therefore it’s not the pilot to blame” is a very questionable statement.
So in reality we are not talking about two options with one giving you 100% survival and one giving you less than 100% (which would indeed be an easy choice) but about two options wich both give you less than 100% survival rate but it’s hard to analyze the actual figures.
In addition the fact that there are pilots that in some situations take higher risks because they think their chute is a “get out of …”-card doesn’t help to get a clear picture.
Steve6443 wrote:
We all make mistakes. The question is: what are the consequences of those mistakes…..
1000% agree!
And the answer to your second question is simple: In flying there are mistakes that kill us – in planes with a chute as well as in planes without a chute!
Malibuflyer wrote:
Unfortunately the only way you can create this deck is “stop flying”
If you can’t accept 1/10000 (with chute) or 1/1000 risk (without chute) just don’t fly
