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Making Cirrus Safe Again, and risk management

Bit late to the discussion but I am shocked by the myths spread out there. I was at an airport close to my home base and got into a discussion with some guys who’d recently purchased an SR20.They were adamant that they were going to fly 80knots on final, that a ‘few knots more is also ok’ – a bounce is preprogrammed as they will arrive with too much energy, float and try to force it onto their short runway. Ok, so I’m not a flight instructor, but the guy who was telling them how to land it had ZERO hours flying a Cirrus…. who would you listen to? A guy with 400 hours on that type or an instructor with 0 hours on type?

I eventually flew onwards, wondering when I’d be reading about their accident in this machine….

I even advised them about the availability of training from a CSIP which is paid for by Cirrus, even if the aircraft is an older SR2x but no, they were happy with the ‘knowledge’ imparted to them by this instructor….

EDL*, Germany

Yea, we have those as well… and there is a bunch in most fora too.

But it becomes increasingly difficult to justify GA flying to passengers or spouses if you get crash alerts every couple of hours…. No experts needed. Actually most of the reporting on the German crashes was to the point without more drama than a car crash…

LSZH(work) LSZF (GA base), Switzerland

Mooney_Driver wrote:

Well, the last weekend has not done much to reassure people that GA is pretty safe…. 6 crashes in Germany (or nearby including the Cirrus) with total of 6 killed does not instill any confidence…

In Sweden a notorious “flight safety expert” is doing his best to spread FUD about light GA in general in the aftermath of the crash of the aircraft with skydivers a week ago. (With 9 dead).

(He is notorious because all other flight safety experts have sense enough to only say what is relevant and they know with certainty, which of course is not much at this point. So media always contacts this guy who talks a lot of nonsense.)

Last Edited by Airborne_Again at 22 Jul 08:20
ESKC (Uppsala/Sundbro), Sweden

Well, the last weekend has not done much to reassure people that GA is pretty safe…. 6 crashes in Germany (or nearby including the Cirrus) with total of 6 killed does not instill any confidence…

LSZH(work) LSZF (GA base), Switzerland

Peter wrote:

I think the GA market speaks for itself in terms of willingness to take risks with hardware

Me too, and that’s why virtually every new aircraft I see in the US has ‘Experimental’ written on the side There is considerable risk aversion when it comes to engines – few people build a plane any more with anything but a Lycoming or Rotax. Having been in a plane when its 1980s-era experimental engine failed in flight I’m strongly in that camp myself. The rest of the plane seems to be where people like to experiment.

Peter wrote:

The combination of all this, together with enduring a regulatory establishment which seems mostly set up to restrict us pointlessly and sometimes screw us, and whose regulations are nowadays so complex and so hard to find (the definitive current version of) that it takes an obscessive personality to endure it all. The other personality types tend to fall out of the system, or they find enjoyment in simple local flying (increasingly in ultralights), or aerobatics.

It comes as no surprise that a large % of pilots are into technology, and specifically software.

I’ve noticed this too, in Europe. It’s not true in the US, my pilot friends here do all sorts of things to make money: defense industry marketeer, truck mechanic, retired airline pilot, hospital administrator and community college A&P school instructor come to mind. I’m the most technical of the bunch in how I make a living. I think that’s as you say due to US regulations and practices in taking a flight being less like debugging developmental software. I fly largely as a way to focus on analog fundamentals and escape man made complexity, if that makes sense. Obviously Cirrus’s approach goes in a completely different direction but Cirrus is only a small fraction of the world’s GA market and activity.

Last Edited by Silvaire at 21 Jul 16:36

I think the GA market speaks for itself in terms of willingness to take risks with hardware: unproved products are avoided for as long as possible, in favour of old technology which while obviously not 100% reliable at least has known failure modes and roughly known risks. And for good reason: too much junk has come on the market over the decades, which the manufacturer didn’t stand behind, or was too weak to stand behind.

I think many pilots enjoy the management of flight conditions i.e. weather. So we spend money on turbos, TKS, oxygen, etc.

And navigation challenges. So many of us get the IR… even though in Europe the main use of the IR is to get a clearance into CAS so you can fly in VMC

The combination of all this, together with enduring a regulatory establishment which seems mostly set up to restrict us pointlessly and sometimes screw us, and whose regulations are nowadays so complex and so hard to find (the definitive current version of) that it takes an obscessive personality to endure it all. The other personality types tend to fall out of the system, or they find enjoyment in simple local flying (increasingly in ultralights), or aerobatics.

It comes as no surprise that a large % of pilots are into technology, and specifically software.

And I think a big part of the success of Cirrus is in marketing a neatly put together package (which when you look at it closely contains very little real innovation i.e. very little stuff which doesn’t exist anywhere else) to customers who are rather more “normal”. That, in turn, has generated a new spectrum of accidents; this is evident from the reasons why people pulled the chute. The vast majority of them were entirely reasonable candidates for a successful forced landing.

All this has been done before – put Cirrus in the search box

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

pistonfever wrote:

I think there is perhaps a very interesting discovery from this thread. Perhaps some pilots actually want risk in their flying hobby.

It is very interesting because safety studies have probably never taken that into account.

I don’t enjoy unnecessary risks- I wouldn’t mind having 100% reliable powerplant and 0% of risk of engine failure.. But i don’t want an airplane that is so well protected that you can do anything that comes to mind without any consecuences. It could be a nice A to B transport, but about as interesting as riding a train. Part of flying an airplane is the understanding that its dead serious business- if you do something stupid, you can very quickly be dead.
EETU, Estonia

“some pilots actually want risk in their flying hobby”

Does that apply to pilots who want challenge? or something different?

Personally, my high risk flights were those very boring and redundant flights to which I was just there watching it coming (sunny day going to familiar place) whereas anytime a new risk factor is involved you get back to discipline…

Paris/Essex, France/UK, United Kingdom
Airborne_Again wrote:
Silvaire wrote:
preferring a life of following in others well trodden footsteps, avoiding individual responsibility and accountability, diminished individual achievement and so on.

So that’s how you are if you don’t find risks a major attraction?

Obviously not, based on what I said. What I said as a preface to what you’ve quoted was this: “some people are at completely the opposite of the spectrum” Equally obviously there is a wide range in between finding risk “a major attraction” (your words, nothing to do with me) and being completely risk averse .

I’m personally somewhere in the middle, with a risk/reward balance that seems to lean towards actively controlling risk and fairly predictable although not certain rewards, following from studied risk management. I think that is fairly typical of pilots, and I certainly do enjoy it. I came to that through decades of motorcycling, a professional technical R&D background etc and so far (continuously since 1974) have yet to sustain injury in motorcycling. I think motorcycling is pretty good training for flying in this regard, because although the risk of accidents is IMO much higher in motorcycling, the risk of serious injury in any given incident is lower relative to flying. So its really a good training ground for life and I think starting motorcycling as a pre-teen has been very beneficial to my life so far.

Last Edited by Silvaire at 19 Jul 17:49

I think there is perhaps a very interesting discovery from this thread. Perhaps some pilots actually want risk in their flying hobby.

It is very interesting because safety studies have probably never taken that into account.

Channel Islands
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