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Would you consider adding a BRS parachute to your plane ?

Ibra wrote:


The only risks that you can mitigate with a chute is mid-air collision or aerodynamical structural failures, the rest seems manageable by pilot skills/planing and early decsions

Over alps in imc (or imc below)?
Over any terrain at night?
Sure, flying a 152 around the pattern in flat land I can see the no chute needed argument, but for any a to b flying over terrain/water/weather the chute is a last resort.

Concerning the „side of a mountain argument“:
Ok we are cruising in our cirrus over the alps at fl150. It’s imc below, or night time. The engine quits.
Ideally we have followed the terrain below using avionics/synvision, turn towards the lowest valley/ground (maybe even an airfield). I prefer routings along over wider valleys.
Foreflight shows the AGL. You can maneuver to an area until 2000-1000 agl where a chute pull will most likely not lead to hanging from the side of a cliff.

The same scenario in any other sep: you either make it to a known surface or you are most probably dead…

always learning
LO__, Austria

So I would just put the straps, and many years later, when the kids are gone, would put the chute and spend weekends in Sicily :)

LFOU, France

Snoopy wrote:

Over alps in imc (or imc below)?
Over any terrain at night?

Exactly. Ibra already does a lot of risk mitigation (e.g. not crossing the channel in winter hours), so perhaps for his current mission profile, it wouldn’t help much, but he could definitely expand his horizons.

I personally feel much less comfortable at night on a single engine with no BRS.

Snoopy wrote:

Concerning the „side of a mountain argument“:

I think stats speak for themselves, I remember there had never been death / serious injuries in “within spec” CAPS deployments.

Yes I think a lot of SEP owners do a lot of risk compensation e.g. not flying [much] at night. However, this is not a big deal because

  • in Europe, most GA-usable airports are shut after sunset
  • wx is usually best in the morning
  • it is usually much easier to sort out hotels after arrival in late morning / early afternoon, than late at night when many are locked up and unmanned

So my 30/2600hr night/day ratio is not something that bothers me much

I heard that someone in an SR22 killed some people on the ground recently, descending under a chute. OK; this is extraordinarily bad luck… but not all that many SR22 chutes have been pulled – 100? Like with the single Concorde crash after all the years of flying, all of a sudden, the stats looks really bad.

The Alps are dealt with by flying high and running a topo map. Admittedly this needs an IR; under VFR you are often kept down to ~1000ft above the peaks. But then you would probably not want to pull the chute right above a mountaintop; it would make much more sense to glide a bit into a canyon and then pull it.

Forests are a real problem, and a good chute application, but are not that common in Europe. Germany has quite a lot of them.

Personally I would not pull a chute until approaching the minimum deployment altitude. I would optimally position the aircraft first.

With water I would always ditch from controlled flight.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

I think the UK doesn’t have airfields open at night, but I’ve landed in many many different french airfields well into the night. Some of them (eg Lyon) even had traffic!

I don’t know how it works in Germany. But there (unlike here for a similarly sized airport) Hamburg is GA useable.

Nordics seem to be Reasonably H24.

For people abiding to 9-5 (or when passengers do), flying at night definitely enables a lot of travel.

I’m curious about why not parachute over water?
- guaranteed upright landing
- more time to prepare in last seconds (raft in hand instead of on the controls)
- don’t have to worry about landing in right spot in swell.
- less impact forces

So far I owned 4 planes (2 SR22, one Tecnam UL and one RV7A), ALL with brs. On a sep gives me almost the peace of mind of a twin.

United Kingdom

I bought a chute for my first plane , an UL .As a fresh pilot I was often nervous flying and that red handle made me feel more at ease.
Now that same handle sometimes worries me, I’m afraid to accidentally pull it with the headset cord or something else. So most probably my next plane, an RV7, will not have a parachute.
Flying a light aircraft with low stall speed I’m confident of being able to turn any flight accident into a road accident by landing the aircraft in a controlled way, to crash the plane but save the pilot.
Maybe that confidence is misplaced , the thought sometimes occurres to me, but if I shouldn’t have it the solution will be to stop flying, not to install a BRS
Flying over water, with less money and less weight, a raft will works better.

Pegaso airstrip, Italy

Looking at the accidents in recent times which caught my attention, most of them would have been insurance events with BRS, some would probably not have mattered. However, most of them would and looking at this thread I think there are only two main streams of thought: Those who have one and those who rationalize why they don´t but secretly wish they had. I sure as hell would love one. Why? IMC, Night, overwater and engine out scenarios day and night over populated areas where landing sites are rare up to non existant.

Yes, autoland and other such stuff may well make one heck of a difference too. But frankly, there is NO replacement for a BRS in todays airplanes short of ejection seats.

I would even go as far as to say that in most light twins, given the skill level of the average private pilot, most of them would be safer in a BRS equipped SEP than trying to master an engine out scenario in crappy weather, turbulence and ice. I´ve flown in such conditions several times in a Seneca at the time and it was very unpleasant and we needed quite a bit of power to keep going, a OEI scenario would have been scary. Apart, also several of those loss of control accidents we have seen recently could possibly have survived using a BRS if they had them. In this regard, for the target audience of e.g. Cirrus, CAPS is the MUCH safer variant then relying on twin skills. Several horrid Vmc accidents have proven that point. Even if many of those occurr from below min BRS height, still quite a few would be saved.

Last Edited by Mooney_Driver at 20 Nov 20:41
LSZH(work) LSZF (GA base), Switzerland

Mooney_Driver wrote:

In this regard, for the target audience of e.g. Cirrus, CAPS is the MUCH safer variant then relying on twin skills.

Not over cold open water. And not at night.
And I’ve been told many times that in twins like Cessna 421C and DA42 the engine loss is almost a non-event.
So, we are back to discussion of single vs. twin… Again…

EGTR
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