Mh wrote:<< In one “fast experimental” for instance, the rocket would burn your feet rather than deploy.>>
Was that referred to my installation? If so, please elaborate, I’m very open to critics
Sorry MH, I think not many experimentals have a brs (maybe less than 10 in Europe?) and I posted a lot in this thread about mine, so I thought you referred to mine (btw, I took a lot of “engineering care” about rocket deployment and feet protection).
If it does not delploy due to malfunction or pilot mistakes, then it become problematic later in a crash, that is a big risk to consider even in a certified versions…two years ago a glider that crashed in the UK was cut in pieces by emergency teams to extract the pilot while the chute rocket was in a fuzzy state
most likely destroying the airframe in the process
The idea is to give the occupants a reasonable chance to survive, not to save the plane. With that constrain it should be easy to engineer something that works. This is not rocket science – or ?? 
LeSving wrote:
The idea is to give the occupants a reasonable chance to survive, not to save the plane. With that constrain it should be easy to engineer something that works. This is not rocket science – or ??
My point is that you can’t be sure that the installation works before you’ve tested it. For factory-installed BRS systems, that’s not a problem as the factory can afford losing an airframe in a BRS test. As every manufactured aircraft have identical installations, you can be quite certain that the BRS will work as expected on other individual aircraft of the same model.
But when you make a retrofit, the installation is unique, and there is no way to test that it works without losing the aircraft. Unless you happen to have two (or more) one aircraft of the same type and is willing to make a BRS retrofit to both and then test it on one of them you will never know what will actually happen.
Could one test it (to some extent) on the ground? At least the rocket firing process could be tested. I am sure e.g. Cirrus must have done that; nobody would go up in a plane with an untested rocket installation in it
Do the UL manufacturers test their chute systems? Are there numbers of success vs. failure?
Peter wrote:
Could one test it (to some extent) on the ground? At least the rocket firing process could be tested. I am sure e.g. Cirrus must have done that;
I’m pretty sure that Cirrus have tested the system both on the ground and in the air…
nobody would go up in a plane with an untested rocket installation in it
Except a factory test pilot with a parachute…
Well, not if the rocket might just explode and kill the pilot
