Recent fatal accident rate stats for the Cirrus show it has a lower accident rate than the general aviation fleet at large.
So, no problem then, right? Keep calm and carry on… The ecosystem Cirrus created shows some positive effects, yes. However, the accident rate of private/personal aviation is abysmal. Even more so for the advanced sector where new, expensive & owner pilot flown planes have all the bells and whistles. Systems reliability is seldom an issue there compared to the old junk that represents the majority of the fleet. So why aren’t the statistics of those planes magnitudes better then? Perfectly good airplanes are crashed and entire families are killed. Accidents such as this one aren’t clear cut. We don’t know enough, even after an accident report. Is it a break in the alignment of skill and challenge? Is it that flying “isn’t for everyone”? Are some planes “bad designs” to be sold to inexperienced beginner pilots with wades of cash? This crash video makes me sick. All the guy did was go-around. It shouldn’t be that difficult – whatever that means.
It has everything to do with training.
Is it known who trained the pilot on the Cirrus?
This crash video makes me sick.
Same here.
All the guy did was go-around. It shouldn’t be that difficult – whatever that means.
is it known who trained the pilot on the Cirrus?
Long time ago we had here a number of accidents involving inexperienced pilots flying under supervision in unfavourable conditions. Example: 70+h total time pilot in her first ever take off on Jantar glider, winch lunch in the direction of setting sun. Fatal. At the time I used to call those “instructor induced murder” because IMHO the instructor was 100% responsible for what happened. The pilot couldn’t possibly know the she was not up to the task.
Snoopy wrote:
Is it known who trained the pilot on the Cirrus?
Yes. I have a feeling the final report will talk a lot more about this matter.
I was trained by the same individual. I’m very happy. Would recommend. Nothing to say.
Snoopy wrote:
The ecosystem Cirrus created shows some positive effects, yes. However, the accident rate of private/personal aviation is abysmal. Even more so for the advanced sector where new, expensive & owner pilot flown planes have all the bells and whistles.
The whole Cirrus saga does remind me over and over again to the Bonanza story in the 1950ties and 60ties, where it got the moniker “Doctor Killer” due to the simple fact that a lot of doctors had the cash to buy but lacked the ability to fly. These kind of things have repeated themselves all over, with the Malibu where the engine was too much for most pilots, with the Cirri, where the CAPS system and a sleek new shiny airplane promises something it can’t deliver: A foolproof new design to protect new pilots from themselves.
Snoopy wrote:
Perfectly good airplanes are crashed and entire families are killed. Accidents such as this one aren’t clear cut. We don’t know enough, even after an accident report. Is it a break in the alignment of skill and challenge? Is it that flying “isn’t for everyone”?
Flying always has been quite unforgiving when it comes to accidents and survival rate. So the more it is important that we take those accidents and learn from them, which is what many pilots do, much more than e.g. car drivers, and for which many times we are regarded as “morbid” by those who don’t see the point.
Is flying for everyone? No, it’s for those who are willing to learn, who are clear on the concept that any license or rating they get means they are now on their own to LEARN not to DO without restriction. If we compare to the CAT system, where freshly minted pilots with their wet licenses are then paired with people who got their PIC after 10 years of flying beside peers with higher experience, we can see that in many cases instruction in our time is not enough to make people safe to fly. For complex airplanes, insurances are asking more and more for “mentor” concepts, where experienced pilots are compulsory for the first 100 or so hours to pick up where instruction ends and where self-flying starts. We might see more of this in the future, along with mounting difficulties to get insurance at all, which in the US already is a rampant problem.
Snoopy wrote:
Are some planes “bad designs” to be sold to inexperienced beginner pilots with wades of cash?
I would definitly not think of “bad designs” per se but to call them beginners planes may well be a false incentive. On the other hand, we also see similar accidents on even benign Cessnas and Pipers. So the crux would be: What do we want to do?
When the Bonanzas fell out of the sky in the 1950ties nobody thought that the Bonnies would eventually become one of the most reliable airframes in the world. But were they in the right hands? Nope. What we may see in the future, mandated by insurances rather than regulators, are higher minimum hours and / or increased training requirements possibly including Sim training rather than on the airplane. The big question will be: What will that do? Minimum hours, if someone has 500 hours on a C172 is he fit for a SR22 any better than a well trained 100 hour guy? Do we really want this kind of further restriction to GA?
Where I would put an emphasis on is the marketing which gets people a false sense of safety in those airplanes. They are obviously misleading. An SR22 is not an airplane which belongs into the hands of someone who has only flown a 150, but someone who has worked his way up via a PA28 to higher performance planes gradually. The ATO I work with used to get people who came from their PPL syllabus and wanted to fly the Cirrus to do the Mooney as a go-between, to make the transition from a 90 kt airplane to a 180 kt hot rod via a 140 kt complex.
In the end, there is no way around what @Pilot_DAR wrote about experience.
Learning to fly, and in particular transitioning to a new type, maybe with a cockpit full of self protection gadgets, is not; “you’re done your training, you’re released to the skies”, it’s; “you’re on your way, go fly with great caution, in easy conditions, and then gt more training and practice.”.
The thing is that Cirrus could not have sold anywhere remotely near their ~10k aircraft unless they did marketing which uncovers completely new strata of customers.
And the only available direction is to pitch it at people who are quite new to flying. This in turn means people who are largely outside the “GA community” which reads the flying social media (including magazines, back when people used to read those).
I don’t believe an SR22 is hard to fly. You can train somebody ab initio to fly a turboprop (quite common in modern AFs) and then transition fairly quickly to a fast jet. But there is a key difference: those not good enough, well over 90%, get eliminated (and become navigators (in the old days) and those who can’t do that become mil ATCOs, etc 
) whereas in the civilian sphere that process does not exist. The thing one is not allowed to say is that most people can get a PPL and fly something fairly benign but can’t go beyond that. In most cases it sorts itself out automatically because those less good do not enjoy flying and give it up. I had a business partner just like that.
Whether this has any bearing on this accident I obviously have no idea. There will be “ground information” of course; there always is.
I am not convinced that this accident had much or anything to do with the aircraft type. A go-around after a bounce is tricky in any SEP and, IMHO, should be avoided, as I wrote earlier. Although we have two Cirri (SR20 and SR22) in our club, I don’t fly them as I don’t really see the benefit of spending about $ 4000 for the insurance- mandated Cirrus transition training. I am, however, informed by those who fly them, that the sidestick takes some time to get used to and can present difficulties in exactly this scenario, where a lot of force is required.
172driver wrote:
A go-around after a bounce is tricky in any SEP and, IMHO, should be avoided, as I wrote earlier.
Not sure I would agree with that. I have done a go around after a bounce. If you add power and push the nose down to stay in the ground effect the airplane becomes stable and fast pretty quickly and you can fly away safely. The most important thing is to remember to push the nose down (and partially retract the flaps as you gain speed). On the other hand if you don’t go around after a bounce you may porpoise where you could have a prop strike, break the nose wheel and/or have a runway excursion.
See this for instance:
https://www.boldmethod.com/blog/2014/01/the-danger-of-porpoise-landings/
we also see similar accidents on even benign Cessnas and Pipers.
Really?
But there is a key difference: those not good enough, well over 90%, get eliminated
Military is a sphere of its own.
Probably over 90% aren’t even admitted in the first place after assessment centers?!
I have done a go around after a bounce. If you add power and push the nose down to stay in the ground effect the airplane becomes stable and fast pretty quickly and you can fly away safely. The most important thing is to remember to push the nose down
When learning to fly from nothing in a tailwheel aircraft, nearly losing control when landing and fixing the situation with full throttle, lots of right rudder, push forward and retrim when able is par for the course. Once you have the plane flying level you can breathe again. It’s one of the basic skills that you learn concurrent with learning how to avoid it, mostly, once you’ve figured out the landing technique 
