Great discription about what a software bug is... I too am a
programmer... errrr sorry... Software Engineer... and you hit the bug
description "nail on the head".. I don't think that the Cirrus issues
are because of bugs in the airplane... It may be "bugs" in the training
process but from what I can tell the airplane (hardware if you will) is
a good design and inherently safe... When I moved up to our Mooney from
the 172's that I flew for 3 years the insurance company required 10
hours dual and 10 hours solo before carrying pax... This seemed like the
minimum when I first started flying the airplane... I wondered if I
wopuld ever get the hang of flying it.. But, low and behold things
started to come together and I am now pretty comfortable flying the plane..

The biggest thing I found when moving up to a faster airplane is you
MUST plan ahead... We are talking many miles ahead especially if you are
fly high.. you may need 40-50 miles to decend to pattern altitude at a
speed where you can get the gear down... If you wait too long and think
you can just "Dive and Drive" you'll never get it slowed down in time..
(been there done that got the t-shirt).

That being said.... What kind of plane are you looking at?

Jon Kraus
PP-ASEL-IA
Mooney 201 4443H

City Dweller wrote:

I have been following the Cirrus crash statistics closely as I was at one
point considering buying one. I ended up ordering another airplane, and I am
sure glad I did.

The sheer number of destroyed airplanes and dead bodies have gone way beyond
the point where you can use the "too-much-of-an airplane-for-the
typical-buyer" argument. When last December I heard a pilot at our flight
school say "they just keep falling out of the skies" I thought of it as
somewhat of an exaggeration, but not anymore. We are barely half-way through
February, and there's been three fatal crashes taking 5 lives already this
year, and 13 total. Yes sir, they do fall out of the skies with a vengeance.

I am a software engineer, and I deal with crashes every day -- software
crashes. Almost every recently released product crashes when put in
production, no matter how hard the programmers and testers pounded on it
during development and QA phases. Software usually crashes because of bugs.
A bug is by definition an error in the code which only surfaces in rare,
unusual circumstances. You can run the software package for days, months and
even years and never encounter the bug, because you were lucky never to
recreate that rare sequence of events in data flow and code execution that
causes the bug to manifest itself and crash the system. However, in a
real-world production environment, with thousands of users, the probability
of that happening increases greatly, and that's when the fun begins.

The reliability of software depends, among other things, on how serious the
programmer is about testing it, and whether he is willing to admit that an
occasional crash of his system maybe the result of a bug in the software,
not a "hardware problem", a common brush-off among my colleagues.

It seems to me that the general attitude of the Cirrus people is just
that -- "it's not a bug in our system, it's how you use it". Well, the grim
statistics does not back that up anymore. Cirrus is buggy, and them bugs
must be fixed before more people die.

-- City Dweller
Post-solo Student Pilot
(soon-to-be airplane owner, NOT Cirrus)