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Would you consider adding a BRS parachute to your plane ?

The only exception is PC12 no chute and far more expensive

DA40 was marketed as GA airplane that offers best compromise between C172 slow speed handling and SR20 cruise/avionics, that failed dramatically as it does not have the chute !
Even with no chute you may argue it has a begnin flying, stalled one holding stick well back and no rudder: it mushes all the way from 4000ft to 2000ft with no wing drop for 2-3minutes, unfortunately forward speed is still +50kts, so you are not walking alive from that

Paris/Essex, France/UK, United Kingdom

EuroFlyer wrote:

That’s the number one reason why so few people in the aviation industry really want to change anything. We’ve done it for 50 years. No chute for 50 years. General aviation is just declining, cannot do much. Oh, Cirrus, sure, that’s only marketing, isn’t it. No, we don’t need to change anything.

That is certainly true and it is the reason why most manufacturers of legacy airframes simply have stopped in the 1960ties and never really moved from there. The primary reason for that however is not pilots, who are quite eager to snap up new stuff, but the sheer impossibility to certify new airframes as a small manufacturer and survive the process. Cost to develop and certify new airplanes or engines have so far bancrupted every single company who tried in recent times or driven them in the hands of foreign (mostly Chinese) investors.

Add to that, that engine technology is STILL in the 1950ties even if airframe and avionics have slowly reached the 21st century. Same reason: Certification of new engines is a pygmalion project which only one company achieved and survived in any significant numbers: Rotax. Thielert went bust and got snapped up by Continentel, Austroengine developed their own engine out of the Thielert offering and those are the only real modern engines in GA. They also have shown that it IS possible to certify what amounts to a car engine developed into an aeroengine, but the price was an is very high indeed.

The final straw is numbers. Even Cirrus with some 300 planes per year makes laughable numbers if one recalls the heydays of GA. Why? Obviously because these planes are way too expensive, the reason for that being that the exorbitant development and certification costs have to be picked up by far too few airframes sold.

If one wants an example: Tesla lost money on each new car for YEARS despite producing huge numbers of cars, in the hundreds of thousands until their model 3 started to actually make money, or so I believe to have read. The very same would happen with any airplane design which really takes home all we have in todays technology! You’d have to pre-finance development, certification, production for maybe the first 2-3 years of production NOT expecting to make ANY money at all before that stage. And simply nobody sane will put that much money into a development, where 5 out of 6 new designs fail miserably.

I suppose that is why lots of people these days have a “Fraser” approach to the future of GA: “We’re doomed, I’ll tell ya, doomed”. And unless something really dramatic changes, I guess it is probably quite realistic to assume that.

LSZH(work) LSZF (GA base), Switzerland

Mooney_Driver wrote:

certification costs

How much exactly and why? I ask because I hear about CertCost since my first second in aviation, but nobody was ever able to explain why (more labour? Testing equipment? Insurance premiums for liability?) and how they are construed.

always learning
LO__, Austria

Mooney_Driver wrote:

Tesla lost money on each new car for YEARS despite producing huge numbers of cars,

Just as a side remark: In its entire existence as a car manufacturer, Tesla has produced less carts than Volkswagen is producing per month. That is not a huge number (and hence they are not profitable).

Back to the original question:
To cut a very long story short, the reason why there is no aftermarket for BRS installation to existing airplanes is, that the cost for development* and certification are extremely high while objective utility is comparatively low.
If we would invest the cost of adding a chute to our rides into better recurrent training, etc., the effect on safety would be much bigger (which is of course an odd comparison as no-one would say “I spend 5k a year on additional training because I saved this money on the chute”).

It’s not true, that GA is overly conservative and tends to do things like 50 years ago, because we did it that way the last 50 years. The dramatic change in Avionics recently (first GPS then Glas) has shown, that we actually change pretty fast (if and only if) there is a clear advantage of doing so. This is obviously not the case with BRS or new engines.

*development cost are often neglected in these discussions: We tend to always call out “certification” cost as if these are useless expenses for bureaucracy. In reality it’s not so easy to develop e.g. a new engine that lives up to the reliability of a good ole Lyconti but uses modern technology.

Germany

Ibra wrote:

unfortunately forward speed is still +50kts, so you are not walking alive from that

Why not? If you land in a field, you can touch down at that speed and not even damage the aircraft. Not every forced landing terminates in a solid concrete wall hit just at the point of touchdown!

Andreas IOM

Malibuflyer wrote:

*development cost are often neglected in these discussions: We tend to always call out “certification” cost as if these are useless expenses for bureaucracy. In reality it’s not so easy to develop e.g. a new engine that lives up to the reliability of a good ole Lyconti but uses modern technology.

Yes the two are definitly one big step. It is a fact though that certification in these days is a long way from where it was when the legacy airframes were developed. Had it been this elaborate then, I doubt we would ever had a GA scene worth mentioning. Certification makes development more difficult and is a huge time eater. Yet it is difficult to say how todays increased demand for safety and the strive to minimize risks to sometimes unrealistic levels can be achieved unless certification goes to the level it does.

But if the result is, that people walk away to uncertified airframes, avionics and engines and still have no more accidents than those which have been certified then the system needs to be put in question. For me, either an airframe is airworthy or not. Either avionic or engines do the job or not. While the exodus towards uncertified airframes is a “solution” of sorts, it is not one which regulators should be proud of. The question rather should be then how can we justify that uncertified airplanes populate the same airspace as certified ones, carrying passengers and (in the US) IFR? Or rather: How can we justify the huge certification cost and time frame killing certified aviation while uncertified airplanes go like warm bread? So if they can fly with manageable risk, why isn’t there a compromise in between the two which would stop the negative spiral in the certified market?

LSZH(work) LSZF (GA base), Switzerland

alioth wrote:

Why not? If you land in a field, you can touch down at that speed and not even damage the aircraft

I was assuming a 1ft forward stopping distance, the G-force on DA40 crash will be 10 times what you would get on SR20 with BRS, while if you have 78ft forward stopping distance the crash should be 12G*, so as dramatic as the Cirrus

*DA40 will descend at 800fpm and move forward at 5000fpm while SR20 descend at 1600fpm and 0fpm forward speed and I am assuming both have 1ft vertical stopping distance (also SR20 has 1/10 cushion factor from energy dissipation and structure, I am just taking the same for DA40)

Also, one thing people forget is that CAPS was a guarantee against LoC in the early designs of the SR20 but now it is marketed as a wild card for everything in the new models

Last Edited by Ibra at 05 Dec 10:47
Paris/Essex, France/UK, United Kingdom

BRS retrofit can have very limited certification effort and cost if 1) all its parts are inside the plane (no aerodynamic disturbance to retest) and 2) no structural parts/panels are weakened/changed, in particular to make the rocket exit door. In this way, only W&B must be updated as if a “constant baggage” was there. However, to satisfy this requirements that save on certification costs, the design effort could be daunting and expensive, and it is not by accident that the only certified BRS retrofit kits are for high-wing planes (172, 182), because it is much easier to hide the risers inside the plane. I had to invest a HUGE design effort to install a BRS into my RV7A without changing the tried-and-tested external aerodynamics, and still it would have been much more complex if I didn’t install it during the building phase (so, technically it wasn’t a pure retrofit). This thread title seems to suggest that installing a BRS is just a choice, pondering price vs utility, but in fact it is mostly an availability issue. I know for a fact that many Cirrus owners would dream of an A36 or a Malibu/JetProp with BRS…

United Kingdom

The MCR re-initiated, aigain ? Didn’t know the 912 iS was certified.

The elephant is the circulation
ENVA ENOP ENMO, Norway

Does anybody knows ALL the Rotax-powered certified planes with BRS (like the Elixir, but already in the market)? I only know the Virus 121 LSA and the PS-28 Cruiser (more than enough to give Elixir a hard time to gain market share IMHO). Still, Tecnam is winning a large share of the rotax-powered PPL training industry without BRS-equipped planes, which has always puzzled me (and makes me think further that Elixir will struggle).

United Kingdom
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