Peter wrote:
Beause your post contained a number of personal attacks, Steve, it has been deleted. I am travelling and it is too complicated to edit, and editing is a dodgy thing at the best of times. I am sending you the original text by PM so if you want to repost it, minus the personal attacks, you won’t need to type it all up again. You won’t get that level of service on any other forum
Personal attacks? So it’s ok for you to attack pilots, claiming they were unqualified or that their decision making was a joke but when someone calls you out on it, you delete their posts?
…..in fairness, I took it that he called the description a joke, not the pilot …
Peter wrote:
CAPS event #8, Feb 2006, Wagner, SD (CAPS Save #7)
2 uninjured; Factors: pilot disorientation in clouds, shortly after takeoff; Activation: low altitude; Weather: IMC; Landing: flat, frozen field
IMC without an IR?
So, IMC without IR? How do you arrive at that conclusion? Here, in this report you can see that the pilot was IR rated. His experience wasn’t that great but he was qualified. However his decision making, when he realised he’d made a mistake, saved himself and his passenger. Shouldn’t we be congratulating that fact, that when he realised he was in too deep, he took decisive action?
Compare that to N614SB. Here, the pilot of a Citation 525 crashed into Lake Erie with the pilot killing himself and his family after becoming spatially disoriented. Compare that to CAPS event #8 – what was the better outcome?
No doubt the following points will be raised: “If the Cirrus pilot was that inexperienced, why was he flying.”? Or that “the Citation pilot was fatigued, he shouldn’t have been flying.” Therefore let me bring another accident into your consciousness. This accident aircraft was piloted by a crew which was rested and qualified. Even so, the captain still succumbed to SD and crashed into the sea, killing all 148 on board. Again, what was the better outcome? The pilot recognising he was in too deep and pulling the chute, saving himself and his passenger? Or riding the jet with his paying cargo into oblivion? That flight was, of course, Flash 604. Even trained, rested and qualified pilots can mess up…..
Peter wrote:
CAPS event #45, 6 June 2013, near Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, United Kingdom (CAPS Save #34 )
1 minor injury; Factors: pilot reported “navigational difficulties” while on approach to Cheltenham airport when ATC changed runways and vectored the aircraft to a different approach; Activation: approximately 2000 feet; Weather: IMC; Landing: garden in a residential area of urban city
that one was a joke; there is a video of the plane descending in plenty of VMC
Here’s the report into that accident. The 0950 hrs weather report from Gloucestershire Airport indicated surface wind from 040° at 8 kt, visibility 8,000 m, scattered cloud at 500 ft, broken cloud at 800 ft, temperature 11°C, dewpoint 8°C and pressure 1023 hPa.
Certainly not CAVOK. The report is interesting reading in that the automation did something he wasn’t expecting and, in a high workload environment, he didn’t have the mental capacity to handle it – lizard brain once more. He knew that he’d lost control and took action which saved his life. Could he have regained control before plowing into the ground? We will never know….
I take all that on board, in general, but still come back to my point here which is that IMHO the statistical value of the chute is being over-stated, and greatly so.
For example, the 10-yearly overhaul is 10k-15k. Add to that the various additional costs (capital cost, higher depreciation) which are going to be a lot more. Ask if these pilots spent that money on type specific training, would they not get better value?
That list has “lack of type specific training” and probably “lack of aircraft systems training” footprints all over it.
Cirrus has improved their training program in recent years but they have not updated the summaries from the corresponding later years.
I wonder if we are not going too much onto the pilots side here. Cirrus might have another reason for this.
If I look at the landing gear of the Cirrus, it is definitly not one which takes rough surfaces without a punishment. In the initial models there were quite a few gear collapses (Nose gear) with associated prop strikes caused by bad piloting, so I wonder how well a Cirrus would take an off airport landing. Maybe that is one more reason they don’t want this to happen too often. At the speeds of a Cirrus, a nose gear failure would almost always end up in a nasty accident.
Pilot-H wrote:
or any other BRS equipped aircraft
IMO the main reason why discussing the Cirrus BRS get so “emotional” (among Cirrus owners/pilots, not by others) is that Cirrus as a company has made such a big deal out of it. Cirrus is a safe plane because it has a chute. It is a load of crap, plain and simple.
Skydivers also have a rescue chute in addition to the main chute. This doesn’t make skydiving safe in any stretch of the word. Paragliders have rescue chutes. Hang gliders have rescue chutes. Gliders have (personal) rescue chutes, I have lots of hours in gliders. Flying aerobatics I use a (personal) rescue chute. Instructing microlight I have a rescue chute made by USH, same principle as GRS and BRS (used in Cirrus). There are lots of manufacturers of rescue chutes for different purposes and different aerial vehicles.
In every single aviation sport activity we use rescue chutes, and there is an order of magnitude more people doing these activities than there are Cirrus pilots. Is the rescue chute what makes aviation sport safe? Of course not. At best it is a last straw you can hold on to when planning, preparation, operation, training, some technical matter etc fail to deliver, which could happen out of the blue.
If you are concerned with safety, you start with training, planning, analyze the risks, those kind of things. You don’t start with the chute. You don’t focus on the chute, other than the technical usage of it. The chute is about as interesting as ear protection or knee pads.
There were talk about “lizard brain” up here somewhere. Funny expression 
I think such stuff is damaging, nonconstructive. I like to think in constructive terms. For instance. Climbing out of a glider, after first “jettison” the canopy and opening the belts, in mid air. Then pulling the chute, doesn’t occur to me as a particularly simple thing in “the heat of the battle”. Therefore the procedure is rehearsed over and over, and is always part of the “checklist” just before launch. All experience show that this works just fine in “hot” situations, even though actually climbing out and pulling the chute is never practiced. Nothing “lizardly” about this. It’s a complex procedure that no lizard would ever be capable of doing. But a human is capable of doing it perfectly (in most cases) the first time ever, and will do it without even thinking a single constructive thought.
Also, when the engine should stop and there is no good runway within gliding distance, it’s better to think of the aircraft as the safety device that will save your life instead of nonconstructive thoughts of saving the aircraft. Just this simple switch of perspective is enough to start to think constructively of how to let the aircraft structure take the damage instead of you. Wheel up in smooth-ish fields for instance.
Cirrus is a safe plane only when the pilot makes it a safe plane. No difference from any other plane. This is what all statistics show. The chute could potentially make it safer, but only when all the other safety aspects are done properly by the PIC.
LeSving wrote:
Cirrus is a safe plane only when the pilot makes it a safe plane. No difference from any other plane.
Yes there are differences from other planes and it does make it safer in a lot of conditions where many of us decide not to use their SEP due to the lack of options in case of cases.
- Night flying: Engine failures at night are in any case life threatening. A parashute will increase the chances for survival massively.
- Low IMC: Same thing .With a conventional SEP, flying IFR to a ceiling below 1000 ft below the whole trip is dangerous. A shute will change the odds massively.
- Over Water: The Cirri with their fixed gear are dangerous to land in water as they very well may flip over. A ditching per shute is massively safer.
- Rough terrain: Same thing. The landing gear of the Cirrus is a massive obstacle to a safe landing in a field or other rough terrain where other planes can land gear up or have lower Vref to deal with.
This also goes for other BRS equipped plane. I fully expect that in the future there will be a regulation that new planes must have a BRS to be certified one day. It is just the same thing with airbags and seat belts in cars. How many people still think “real men” don’t need them. I call BS on that. And even if the “real men” are too macho to admit that these things work when it comes to safety, normally their wifes will put their feet down.
We should not forget that most of us grew up in a society where safety was treated very differently as it is today. How many people wore helmets when skiing or biking? Practically nobody. Cars without seatbelts were commonplace, most planes only hat lap belts. Nobody would drive like that today. So BRS won’t go away, it will become standard and all those who snub it will go out of business. It is as easy as that.
Mooney_Driver wrote:
So BRS won’t go away, it will become standard and all those who snub it will go out of business. It is as easy as that.
I don’t think mass market style regulation is often reflected in GA. Extrapolating real GA trends would have a greater proportion of sole owned planes in Experimental Category in 20 or 30 years, a category that doesn’t exist in cars and is growing successfully in GA. Regulation wont play a role there but maybe some of the builders of those planes will incorporate BRS, if the market wants it. Not much sign of that today.
I can imagine what you describe happening in Switzerland and why you might have that point of view, but the world is not Switzerland and (more broadly, worldwide) Cirrus represents only a very small fraction of 2020 GA activity and values.
Silvaire,
There is no mass market in aviation. Neither certified nor experimental. The latter is totally irrelevant in Europe for any form of serious flying as long as it is still restricted to day VFR and subject to restrictions of travel everywhere. Only if those issues get resolved, which I do not expect in the political climate here, would experimental have relevance.
For the certified market, we are almost there already. Cirrus is the only manufacturer to sell in sustainable quantities. Mooney is dead, Piper in ICU, Cessna has some residual sales and they do offer BRS as well if i am not mistaken. The rest sells in single digits. That is not a “mass market” that is not even a market.
Looking at the developments, my personal prediction for the next 10-20 years will be that GA will die out in the relevant parts of Europe whereas new airplane purchases are concerned. They are even now negligible. Last year at Friedrichshafen I talked to a Cirrus guy who told me that they are mainly there to market the jet but have the SR22 there as it might generate a sale or two. In their whole scope of things, Europe even now is irrelevant. Same thing I was told by Mooney last year, they sold exactly ONE exemplar to Europe of the 30some they made. Possibly Eastern Europe will stay healthy in GA, maybe France and Southern Europe may well stay on it’s current level. Germany, Switzerland, e.t.c. are on the best way of self-destruction due to the climate hype, GA will be used as a low impact example and harassed out of existence.
What happens in the US will depend hugely who takes over the WH in the 2020 election. Some of the candidates make our bunch here look pretty benign. But generally I would assume America will most probably have a better outlook for GA than anywhere. Maybe we all should get the relevant papers while we still can.
Mooney_Driver wrote:
There is no mass market in aviation. Neither certified nor experimental. The latter is totally irrelevant in Europe for any form of serious flying as long as it is still restricted to day VFR and subject to restrictions of travel everywhere
As I mentioned, I think the lack of a GA mass market leads to mass market regulatory treads being largely inapplicable to GA. Not many car buyers remove the instrument panel of their car and replace it every so often either. Planes aren’t cars.
I wasn’t making any reference to where the GA market is centered by country only that the world market as a whole exists, is what it is, and that Cirrus and its corporate values are only a small fraction of 2020 GA activity. Certified manufacture of small planes is at a low ebb because most buyers have much less expensive and therefore more attractive options – existing planes and Experimental Amateur Built. Cirrus then fills the remaining niche of the non-commercial market that will pay disproportionally for a new factory built four place plane, and that market has its own very particular preferences. Cessna and Piper likewise fill a small niche, mostly selling trainers to commercial flight schools that have their own particular values.
I don’t think the world in general, and GA in particular are quite as dramatic a place as some might assert.
