"Dave Katz" wrote in message
...
As far as we can tell, this has not been the case thusfar. With 1000+
planes in the air and several hundred thousand hours of time on the
fleet, there's no sign of this theoretical demographic. I suppose

Well, we do know that SOMETHING seems amiss in the accident statistics of
the Cirrus. There was a recent article in Aviation Safety which made this
clear by comparing accident rates of various airplanes.

The Kentucky pilot that attempted to pull the chute (which didn't
deploy, resulting in an AD that appears to have had the desired
effect) got into unusual attitudes in IMC after an apparent gyro
failure with the autopilot engaged. Normally the NTSB reports in such

Do you not think unusual attitude recovery ought to be within the capability
of an instrument pilot?
If we recommend that Cirrus pilots pull the chute whenever a gyro fails in
IMC, there will be an awful lot more parachute pulls as their vacuum systems
start aging. Perhaps a backup electric AI would be helpful on the original
steam-gauge Cirrus models.

The details of the Florida case are yet to be revealed, though another
high-time Cirrus pilot who talked to the high-time Cirrus pilot that

I agree it will be very interesting to see the details.

Bottom line is that you don't get to back up in life and try another
choice and compare how things come out. You make your choice and stuff
happens. Making a choice that results in your walking away uninjured
is pretty hard to argue with when the alternative must remain unknown.

I agree here. In fact, purely from the perspective of minimizing injuries
the chute should probably be pulled if the thought comes to the pilots mind
and he starts to debate himself. I agree that approach would make the
Cirrus quite safe -- the economics of insuring such an airplane are the
question though, and I guess we just have to wait to see how the statistics
work out. So far insuring a Cirrus seems to be a good bit more expensive
than one might have initially thought for an airplane designed with safety
first.



--------------------
Richard Kaplan, CFII

www.flyimc.com