I have no kool aid going for the Cirrus, but „pull early“ was a good initiative when accidents showed pilots were not using CAPS. It worked and, along with other measures, fatal accidents in Cirrus decreased considerably.
I can see why Cirrus from a liability management perspective would adopt that policy. They may even have lower product liability costs (insurance and damage claims) as a consequence?
It’s not just that… forgetting financials, it saves lives. SR22 full flap stall speed is 59kt, but under the parachute the vertical impact is approx 16kt. Given kinetic energy is a square law, then that’s around 4x less energy involved in any crash (assuming no headwind, but also a touchdown at stall speed). The fixed gear also act as a ‘crumple zone’, there are special seats which deform to absorb vertical impact, and you avoid the chance of the fixed gear digging in and flipping the aircraft.
All this stuff means there’s pretty much been a 100% survival rate from Cirrus ‘chute deployments. I don’t think that could be said for an equivalent number of forced landings off-field in the same airframe. In fact I know there have definitely been fatals when pilots have landed SR22s off-field. I’d certainly always use the parachute unless a runway landing was 100% guaranteed (or a few other odd exceptions such as ditching during a very powerful storm).
This doesn’t apply to other types – for example an LSA with say a 30kt landing speed should have a much better average outcome during a forced landing.
It also does not mean that every Cirrus parachute pull has resulted in lives saved (some / lots of these pulls would have been successful forced landings… but not all of them).
channel-hopper wrote:
SR22 full flap stall speed is 59kt, but under the parachute the vertical impact is approx 16kt. Given kinetic energy is a square law, then that’s around 4x less energy involved in any crash (assuming no headwind, but also a touchdown at stall speed).
That is a “milkmaid calculation”*. In the vertical impact with a chute the energy is destroyed within 2cm of path while only very few (if any) forced landings hit a wall in a way that the braking process is not spread over at least multiple meters.
Fact is: Pilots die in Cirruses as they do in other planes. Fact is also: If applying the right landing technique, in the majority of cases a forced landing is survivable. Prevalent reason for pilots to not survive forced landings is that they do not fly the airplane until it hits the ground. If you do, you rarely die.
Fact is: The statistics made up by some interest groups that every person in a Cirrus that survived a chute landing is a “life saved by the chute” is obviously BS.
But fact is also: There are some accident circumstances (e.g. at night) where the odds of survival in case of an engine failure with a chute is much higher than without one.
The theoretic discussion, how many of the chute accidents could or could not been survived w/o a chute (and how many would not have happened in the first placed as the flight would not have been commenced without the “chute induced invincibility syndrome”), is pointless. Both with and w/o chute forced landings are not a big killer of pilots.
However (!): The chute is the most important differentiator of Cirrus vs. other manufacturers.
The single reason why Cirrus preaches that “if in any doubt pull the handle” policy is simply that they make (lots of) money by creating the impression amongst pilots, but even more importantly amongst pilots’ significant others, that a forced landing is a true killer and only in a Cirrus airplane you can escape certain death by that.
(1) Don’t know if this term exists in English – it is used in German as a figurative for a naive reasoning based on questionable assumptions
If you do, you rarely die
Yes one likely to survive a landing “if they keep flying the aircraft” (there are plenty of evidences)
But I would be interested to see exact stats of fatalities in off-field landings that did not involve a loss of control? and how many saves were due to flying “wing level at VS+few kts”?
I do agree that with 59kts stall speed and not being able to slow down bellow 80kts (which what most of Cirrus pilots claims to be the case or have difficulties with), I would pick the chute as the best tool to option to reduce kinetic energy
As long as the kinetic energy is small, the choice of the field is irrelevant…
If you fly your plane until the very end you should, to a high degree of probability, be able to land without having to die.
I made 13 off-field landings in gliders in my “competition career” and only in 2 of them I had some minor damage on the plane which could be fixed easily (gear flaps and such stuff). So in 11 of 13 off-field landings there was not even a single scratch to the plane. Needless to say that I “survived” all of them unhurt. A high performance glider also has quite high landing speeds, near-comparable to normal SEPs, but to be fair, it’s a lot easier to land a glider and in particular to adjust the glide path. The mass is very low down, so it just won’t turn over so easily like an SEP.
In contrast, when you go down hanging below a chute, the plane is lost. That’s a point taken by the manufacturer. Insurance pays, another plane to assemble. Win-win I’d say. (and in addition, hitting the ground with a vertical speed of 8 meters per second (16 kts) hurts. Quite possible to break something in the back.)
And in no way is a chute meant to let you skip the flight preparation. There are some accidents on records where there have been flown things you would never even consider without a chute (and conservative flight planning, so to say). But which ended up deadly.
However, this topic here wasn’t “yet another Cirrus-chute-discussion”. Because it’s pointless. Statistics don’t acknowledge a real surviving benefit of having a chute. But this won’t be accepted by a big fraction of pilots. So we have facts and alternative facts and opinions and a narrative played by the manufacturer.
In the present case, the pilot wore a personal chute (ah no, it was two of them). And in my own experience, the only situation where I put a safety chute on is when I know that it’s possible to have a mid-air collision, so that the plane might not be steerable any more. Like when you fly with lots of gliders in the same thermals. This happens, and that’s why glider pilots typically always wear chutes.
It is not that easy, since the body can withstand much higher forces forward, when restrained by a (proper) belt, than downward in a sitting position.
That is why you are more likely to survive flying into the ground/fences/trees (between) than stalling and falling sown vertically from relatively small heights.
That said, I understood that the gear (meant to be one time use, then) and the seating (special damper material) are designed to take most of the load from the downward speed under the chute ?
If that is true, then 16kts may have been designed away.
ch.ess wrote:
That said, I understood that the gear (meant to be one time use, then) and the seating (special damper material) are designed to take most of the load from the downward speed under the chute ?
I’ve seen videos from cirruses going down below a chute, in one it was the nose pointing straight down, in another one the wing was pointing down upon impact. In both cases landing gear and seating was useless.
Malibuflyer wrote:
The chute is the most important differentiator of Cirrus vs. other manufacturers.
The single reason why Cirrus preaches that “if in any doubt pull the handle” policy is simply that they make (lots of) money by creating the impression amongst pilots, but even more importantly amongst pilots’ significant others, that a forced landing is a true killer and only in a Cirrus airplane you can escape certain death by that.
I think that that mantra came up when initially there was an appalling number of accidents involving Cirrus products because those who bought them misused them or took the shute as an excuse to fly totally reckless rubbish. A bit like when the Bonanza became the doctor killer, the airplane was quite different from others and on top had the shute, which got some people to be really careless. Initially, the accident rate was remarkable, very few accident were the fault of the airplane but mostly of people who lost the plot. (I recall the totally crazy accident of a Polish Cirrus at ZRH after loss of some electrical systems, where the airplane managed to become VMC while halting airport operations in the process and then crashed on final turn due to loss of control even though they had 3 huge runways to land on, or another one which tried to land on a VFR airfield in total IMC and that sportist who crashed into a NY highrise and several more).
So Cirrus had to react and they came up with the pull soon, pull often mantra. It absolutely has saved lifes, but mostly not from airplane failures but from themselves.
Malibuflyer wrote:
That is a “milkmaid calculation”*.
…
(1) Don’t know if this term exists in English – it is used in German as a figurative for a naive reasoning based on questionable assumptions
What is the German for it?
Milchmädchenrechnung.
