Owen writes:

He earned his pilot’s license last off-season and tried to assure
everyone that his CirrusSR20, a four seat plane he bought for $187,000.
was safe.

“The whole plane has a parachute on it,” he told The Times last month.
“Ninety-nine percent of pilots that go up never have engine failure, and
the 1 percent that do usually land it. But if you’re up in the air and
something goes wrong, you pull that parachute, and the whole plane goes
down slowly.”

Famous last words. I think those Cirrus planes give pilots a false
sense of security. The idea is not to pull a cord when you get into
trouble, it's to stay out of trouble to begin with. Obviously, in
this case, the parachute didn't help.

The subject of a player piloting a plane was already somewhat sensitive
for the Yankees. In 1979, Thurman Munson, the Yankee catcher and team
captain, was killed in the crash of a plane he was flying.

General aviation does not share the safety record of commercially
scheduled airline flights.

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