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Cirrus BRS / chute discussion, and would you REALLY pull it?

Granted I didn't go through other brands' statistics but I would've expected icing / LOC accidents to be lower as a percentage of the total.

No, it is almost always the pilot.

EGTK Oxford

Granted I didn't go through other brands' statistics but I would've expected icing / LOC accidents to be lower as a percentage of the total.

Why?

A lower % of fatals perhaps - because they have the chute.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

I realise it's always the pilot - I just wouldn't have thought ther'd be so many upsets in IMC (supposing we're not talking about VFR pilots doing inadvertent IMC here).

This cirrus is in a club and I had in mind (just last week) to call them to try the SR20. What are the odds ?

I heard a story of a chute being deployed in the hall at Aero in Friedrichshafen, any one also heard that story ? Apparently someone sat in the plane and pulled the lever, just like that.

In response to the original question, 400ft AGL is the recommended minimum altitude for deployment.

This presentation sets out the arguments and documents the history of CAPS pulls.



It's an hour and a quarter long but well worth watching if you are interested in the CAPS debate.

EGSC

Slightly off-topic, but I always thought COPA stood for Canadian Owners and Pilots Association...which has been around a lot longer than the Cirrus.....wonder why the Cirrus owners association did that....

YPJT, United Arab Emirates

As far as I know there has been one successful deployment at around 500 ft AGL. Some experts say 700 ft AGL is enough. I would say my minimum is 1000 ft AGL. But of course there can be situations (midair, loss of control in IMC) in which you would try it at lower altitudes. ...

When my eTAWS systems reports "Five Hundred" i forget about CAPS. Below that altitude I'd try to put it down in a field if the engine stopped.

The accident ratio's are not better for the Cirrus. In my believe it is because each pilot has his own risk profile and just will take more risks when flying an aircraft with more safety features. For myself, I do more in the Cirrus than I would do in the Piper Archer 3 I also fly.

Then, the chute sells. Your wife will love you to fly an aircraft with a chute. Flying at night, the chute gives an extra option in case of an engine failure. I consider it an alternative to a second engine.

EDLE, Netherlands

I watched most of the video posted by Jonzarno above.

Rich Beach makes the same points which he has made in his many pilot forum postings around the place, which is to pull the chute more or less immediately. He calls it shifting from "last resort" to "first consideration". The rationale he makes is that nobody who pulls the chute (within the correct parameters) gets killed, whereas some of the others that have accidents do get killed.

To me, this seems the same as flying with a personal chute and simply jumping out of the plane if things aren't going right. On a purely "numerically-fatal" basis it will always be presentable as the correct policy.

However I am not sure I would have put online his description of most of the accidents. This is what I find particularly disturbing. Sure every other aircraft type has accidents - plenty of them - but there seems to be a definite thread here of an accident type which I would describe as one piece of sheer pilot stupidity (or appalling pilot training) after another.

One pilot pulled a chute because a door was open in-flight and rain was coming in.

Another was a "high altitude upset at 13000ft". They ended up inverted. I don't recall whether it was an SR20 or a 22 but both of those should be capable of stable flight at 13k. What was the pilot smoking?

There was a number of other "high altitude upsets" followed by spins. Does the SR20/22 have strange high altitude stall characteristics, perhaps flipping into a spin immediately following a stall? No Part 23 certified plane should do that. It should fly at Vs at the certified operating ceiling. Maybe the chute was used to sidestep some of the requirements up there, and not just the publicised low altitude spin recovery whose certified-level demonstration the chute presumably avoids. But as you probe the ceiling, what happens is that the plane pitches up and up, eventually the stall warner comes on - at this point the plane is still fully controllable, or should be - and if you ignore that you get the stall buffet. You have to be well out of it to just sit there and do nothing. Sure turbulence is going to make this hard but a pitch-down will (?) regain speed and control immediately.

One pilot got icing and entered into a 15 turn spin, didn't pull the chute, all got killed. The "elephant in the room" question is how far down the road do you need to be in terms of hugely obvious ice accretion to get into that stage of a total loss of yaw stability? Or is there something subtle about the design which causes it to suddenly "flip" in yaw under icing conditions - perhaps preceeded by a rapid and unstoppable wing drop - like a PA38 but much worse?

Perhaps I have higher expectations from a pilot who has spent all the $$$ to buy a Cirrus and is prob90 a high achiever in his/her professional life. If these types of accidents were in the context of the microlighting or low-end-homebuilt community then I am sure nobody would think anything of it.

There is what appears to be a significant rate of accidents with an instructor in the RHS. This perhaps reflects the lack of type-experienced instructors.

COPA is trying to convince the checkride examiners to accept that: "if you do an emergency task, and the pilot elects to use CAPS, stop that test as successfully completed". This is to avoid reinforcing the idea of not pulling the chute.

Rick mentions insurance. Apparently some US insurers will waive the deductible if you pull the chute. They are trying to convince them - not as yet successfully - to treat chute pulls as non loss / damage claims.

I have just phoned up UK's biggest GA insurer (who I have been with for 11 years) and the view, compared to a TB20, was as follows:

At 1500hrs PIC, the premium is between similar and +10%. They want 10hrs training with a Cirrus specialised instructor. He as applying this to me - 1600+ hrs and a CPL/IR, and was quite relaxed.

At 300hrs PIC, the premium is 20-30% extra (at best) and they want 50hrs training. Much below 300hrs, there is little prospect of even getting insurance. That would be the much more usual PPL case.

This was incidentally not the insurer who did the massive hike in the excess (the "deductible") following UK's first chute pull.

I wonder how many of the "really silly" US accidents were below 300hrs? But if you haven't had decent aircraft handling training by the time you are at 300hrs, you will never get it - unless you do the FAA CPL, with its chandelles.

4 planes were listed as having been repaired post-chute-pull. It definitely can be done, and perhaps in the UK where one can insure for "agreed value" the insurer will have a big incentive to repair the plane. But not many are getting repaired. The number of chute activations is heading towards 100.

There was a lot of stuff about spin recovery. But how can you get into a spin, other than close to the ground, and generally in the base-to-final turn? Any chute pull at those levels is likely to be fatal. Is there a special tendency for the type to enter spins? This one comes up often in relation to non-BRS planes and the whole "spin training in the PPL" argument, but I cannot see how one can enter a spin without doing something exceptionally reckless - except close to the ground during the aforementioned approach.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom
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