Iced up Cirrus crashes

scotta2728 wrote:

I had to reply to the incident regarding the Cirrus that recently went
down in icing conditions, at night, in the mountains. There has been a
lot of discussion on the Cirrus Owners website regarding recent
accidents and wether or not they are related to the safety of the
Cirrus. I have owned an SR22 since August and love the plane, so I'm
not unbiased, but as a reference, in 2004 there were 20 fatal accidents
in 182's vs 3 fatal accidents in Cirrus. I have no statistics on the
hours flown in each type.

What is the overall tone of the discussions over on the Cirrus group about
this accident?

--
Peter













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("Ron Garret" wrote)
Actually, this is not just Cirrus, but any high performance aircraft.

Actually, it's not even just aircraft. Studies have shown that antilock
breaks don't decrease the accident rate in cars because drivers drive
faster in worse conditions thinking that the ABS will keep them out of
trouble.


Car and Driver Magazine -The Steering Column:

The greatest advance in safety since seatbelts.
BY CSABA CSERE
February 2005

http://www.caranddriver.com/idealbb/...?topicID=60884

(From the linked article)
Two recent traffic-safety studies have thrown all of us in the auto whirl
for a loop. Last September, the National Highway Traffic Safety
Administration and the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety released
independent studies showing that electronic stability-control (ESC) systems,
which help drivers maintain control when their vehicles start to slide, have
a profoundly positive effect on the frequency and severity of single-vehicle
accidents.

The NHTSA study found that vehicles fitted with ESC had 42 percent fewer
single-vehicle crashes and 40 percent fewer fatalities in those crashes. The
IIHS study results were even more positive, with single-vehicle crashes
declining by 41 percent and fatalities in such crashes plunging by 56
percent.

With more than 15,000 fatalities in single-vehicle crashes annually, these
results suggest that if every vehicle in America were equipped with ESC,
annual fatalities would be reduced by more than 7000. That's huge—more than
three times the number of lives saved each year by airbags.


Montblack

Viperdoc wrote:

However, in severe conditions I would not want to trust my
life to the supposition that TKS makes me invincible.

I cannot imagine there is any technology that makes a pilot "invincible."

Even a condom is not 100% failsafe.


--
Peter













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"Matt Barrow" wrote in message
...

"Steve.T" wrote in message
oups.com...
Jon:

Who granted your "engineer" status? I certainly hope it wasn't the NJ
Cosmatology Board.

There are no Software Engineers that I'm aware of, only a title for a
position, but no engineers. This is a legal thing, and why I ask,
because I also do software and have for years.

Quite so! Using the title "Engineer" is granted by a state license and I
know of no states that grant a "Software Engineer" license. I work with
dozens of civil and other (real...licensed) engineers and each one has a
certificate or two on their wall. Many are incensesd by programmers using
the term and many are just amused given the haphazard way most software is
developed.

Yes, and we all know that having a government-issued license is such a
strong indicator of quality. Licensing is what happens when an industry
matures and transitions from an entrepreneurial to a guild mindset. Did John
Augustus Roebling have a license?

Having led many software projects, I will tell you that the "engineers" are
usually the ones most incensed by taking shortcuts in quality. The fact is
that the market has traditionally rewarded those who got to market first
with the most features rather than those who made the least buggy software.
It costs a *lot* to build very high-quality software. If the market would
tolerate buildings that collapsed 10% of the time but cost 90% less to
build, we'd see buildings falling down as often as Windows crashes.

-cwk.

As you say, it depends on how you count. Do you count total accidents?
Accidents per participant? Accidents per hour? Per mile? Per
passenger mile?


You could do any of these, but you have to do the same thing on the top
and bottom, and with cars as well as planes. Include busses if you
include non-spamcans.


But the more significant factor is, I think: do you
count the accidents that were caused by circumstances that you never
place yourself in?


You discount accidents that don't apply (such as helicopters and jumbo
jets, perhaps). But you don't discount accidents that result from
errors "you'd never make".

Do you count Vmc accidents in twins if you never fly a twin?

Don't count twin accidents at all. Don't divide by the number of twin
hours (miles, whatever) either.


Do you count fuel exhaustion and inadvertent VFR into IMC if
you are absolutely religious about checking your fuel, having plenty of
margin, have an instrument rating, stay current, and always file IFR if
there's a cloud within 500 nm?


Yep. That's a case of "it will never happen to me" wherein it just
might happen to you. That's the definition of "accident".

Do you count stall-spin accidents in Tomahawks if you fly a Cirrus?

Probably. You can stall-spin a cirrus. It obeys the same laws of
aerodynamics.

Do you count icing accidents in the mountains at night if...?

It depends on what lie you want to promulgate. If you want to
figure out the truth of the matter, it is important to ask the right
questions. You need enough data to be meaningful, and you need to pare
it enough to be relevant.

Jose

In article ,
"Montblack" wrote:

("Ron Garret" wrote)
Actually, this is not just Cirrus, but any high performance aircraft.

Actually, it's not even just aircraft. Studies have shown that antilock
breaks don't decrease the accident rate in cars because drivers drive
faster in worse conditions thinking that the ABS will keep them out of
trouble.


Car and Driver Magazine -The Steering Column:

The greatest advance in safety since seatbelts.
BY CSABA CSERE
February 2005

http://www.caranddriver.com/idealbb/...?topicID=60884

(From the linked article)
Two recent traffic-safety studies have thrown all of us in the auto whirl
for a loop. Last September, the National Highway Traffic Safety
Administration and the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety released
independent studies showing that electronic stability-control (ESC) systems,
which help drivers maintain control when their vehicles start to slide, have
a profoundly positive effect on the frequency and severity of single-vehicle
accidents.


Interesting. This prompted me to look into this more, and I found this:

http://www.geocities.com/Athens/1944/#ABS

So it seems that it's not clear cut even for ABS.

As for overall accident rates for GA vs driving, it's true that looking
at the raw numbers GA is more dangerous (~1 fatality per 100,000 flight
hours (http://www.aopa.org/whatsnew/newsite.../04-1-144.html) vs 1
fatality per 100 million passenger miles
(http://www.lightrailnow.org/facts/fa_00015.htm)). It's a little tricky
converting from flight hours to passenger miles because you have to
assume a lot about occupancy rates and vehicle speeds, but no matter how
you slice it there are no reasonable assumptions that lead to GA being
safer overall than driving. (But you can slice the numbers in lots of
really bizarre ways, e.g.
http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=1084316012962)

I still have to wonder, though, if this would still be the case if you
ignored accidents that were caused by the pilot doing something stupid,
like launching into hideous weather without adequate preparation or
enough fuel. Unfortunately, the NTSB reports don't break the statistics
down into stupid and non-stupid.

rg

Actually, I'm not a troll.

You did catch my point, partly. One of the things that happens when you
have strong willed people who do not want to know all the details, they
just want things done, when the details have to be handled, there is no
one to delegate to.

So when these "hi-powered" people got into a fast a/c, they learned
enough to get sign-offs (if they were even required at that time), and
then went out and bent metal.

My thinking is, are we seeing a new version of this kind of behavior? A
very capable machine, in un-experienced hands, with a gotta-get-there
mindset, parachute will save the day...

I'm starting to see why my insurance company has changed the way it
thinks. 2 years ago I could get insurance for a C-210 if I got 10 hours
in type (just over 200 TT then). Now, they want much much more ($$$ and
time) - and I have over 330, and complex time (working on commercial).

Later,
Steve.T
PP ASEL/Instrument

scotta2728 wrote:

I had to reply to the incident regarding the Cirrus that recently went
down in icing conditions,

Strike one.

at night,

Strike two.


in the mountains.

Strike three, you're dead.


There has been a
lot of discussion on the Cirrus Owners website regarding recent
accidents and wether or not they are related to the safety of the
Cirrus. I have owned an SR22 since August and love the plane, so I'm
not unbiased, but as a reference, in 2004 there were 20 fatal accidents
in 182's vs 3 fatal accidents in Cirrus. I have no statistics on the
hours flown in each type.

About a million to one difference. As far as statistics go every Cirrus
crash is a bad deal because there's so few of them out there compared to
182's. Every wreck has a definite movement of the stats. One 182 wreck
doesn't move the stats at all.

Would it be ironic if Cirrus marketed an identical bird without the
CAPS that wound up having a significantly better accident record?

a.

C J Campbell wrote:
"Dan Luke" wrote in message
...
The more of these Cirrus accidents I read about, the more I'm
convinced
that Cirrus has a serious marketing/training problem:

Actually, this is not just Cirrus, but any high performance aircraft.
Consider the Bonanza, for instance, which went through a period where
it
seemed like it was practically raining aluminum. The Cessna P210 also
had
its problems like that. They are all good airplanes, but their
greater
capabilities have tended to encourage pilots to fly into conditions
that
they should not.

I know a pilot who wants a Cessna 337 with boots, "just in case" he
encounters icing. Well, the 337 is not certified for known ice, even
with
boots. If he buys such a plane, I can practically guarantee that
eventually
he will fly into ice. It is not simply a matter of accidentally
flying into
ice, but the fact that he has boots will encourage him to fly into
conditions that he would not consider acceptable otherwise. There is
nothing
"just in case" about it, even though that is how thinks of it in his
mind.
He will believe that his icing encounter is accidental, and thank God
that
he had boots on his plane. But the fact remains that he will have
flown when
he would not have otherwise. If he does it often enough, and gets
away with
it, then eventually he will get into trouble.

The same could be said for every other hazard in general aviation:
low level
maneuvering, VFR into IMC, flying with broken equipment, etc. You
know that
you don't really need that vacuum pump; it is just a short cross
country and
you know the way like the back of your hand, so you go. Of course
nothing
happens; it was a great flight. So next time you try it but the cloud
cover
is a little lower. Next time you were just skimming the bottoms of
the
clouds, but nothing happened. It gets to be a regular practice, then
suddenly your laziness, complacency, and need to get there all
combine to
get you in serious trouble. You will really wish you had fixed the
vacuum
pump, that you had paid more attention to the weather, that you had
filed
IFR, that you had decided to stay home, etc. Every link in the chain
of
events leading up to the accident had been there for many flights,
but this
time it got you. You did not just wake up one morning and say, "Today
I am
going to fly VFR into IMC without a vacuum pump," because you know
that is
incredibly stupid. But you did something incredibly stupid anyway.
And let
me be clear about this: the pilots who do this are not bad pilots or
stupid
pilots or greenies. To the contrary, they are typically the most
experienced
and capable pilots. The real problem is that they learned the wrong
lessons
from their experience.

All right, Cirrus tells pilots that their parachute system can save
their
lives. Their salesmen will tell say that it can save your butt if you
are
IFR in the mountains at night when the engine quits. So it might. But
what
is the message here? Cirrus is teaching pilots to fly IFR in the
mountains
at night in a single engine plane. They are effectively saying that
it is
safe to do so because the Cirrus has a parachute. Perhaps the engine
has
been running rough, or the AI does not seem up to par, but you have
your
little ace in the hole, right? So they go. Next they take off into
low level
IMC and/or ice and/or without doing a proper instrument check and
they are
found later in the day a mile from the end of the runway with bits of
that
parachute all around them. They got into trouble, were still too low
for
effective CAPS deployment, and died. Did Cirrus intend for them to do
that?
No, but they encouraged that behavior by selling the CAPS system.

I don't mean to imply that CAPS is a bad idea. I would like to see it
on
other planes, along with air bags, better crashworthiness, advanced
avionics, and all the rest. But these should not be sold as a means
of
escaping the consequences of your own bad judgment. Airliners have
fantastic
redundancy and safety capability, but their pilots do not have bad
accident
records, despite the fact that these aircraft are arguably much more
complex, faster, and less maneuverable than anything in GA.

Professional pilots and general aviation pilots are separated not so
much by
the differences in equipment and capabilities of their aircraft
(though
these are enormous) but by training and supervision. An airline pilot
who
takes too many risks is likely to come to the attention of others who
can do
something about it. A GA pilot may become the subject of hangar
gossip, but
he is likely to continue doing whatever it is that he is doing. An
airline
pilot is largely locked into rigid rules and procedures that he must
follow -- a lot of his decisions were made for him a long time ago.
The GA
pilot has considerably more freedom to bend his personal rules, if he
has
any at all. He has considerably less guidance, and when he has a
problem he
can't always call up dispatch or maintenance to ask their opinion.
Loneliness, less training, no simulator training, inferior or aging
equipment, fatigue, complacency, manufacturers' safety claims,
alcohol and
other personal problems: all these add together to create general
aviation's
terrible accident record.

John and Martha King, among others, have been attacking this problem
head
on. These pilots and instructors are no longer willing to say that
general
aviation is safe, because they know what a dangerous message that is.
Flying
is dangerous. The pilot who forgets that is even more dangerous. The
Kings
have a rule: "the most chicken pilot wins." I like that rule. It
should be
expanded even to passengers. "The most chicken person on board wins."
That
is, if anyone is even slightly uncomfortable about the flight, then
the
flight does not go, no questions asked. Modern methods of teaching
risk
management and scenario based training are taking far too long to be
adopted
by the training community. We need this, and we need better
simulators for
general aviation, and we need better recurrent training. If we had
those
things, I think that we could go a long way toward cutting the
accident
rate.

"scotta2728" wrote in message
...

I had to reply to the incident regarding the Cirrus that recently went
down in icing conditions, at night, in the mountains. There has been a
lot of discussion on the Cirrus Owners website regarding recent
accidents and wether or not they are related to the safety of the
Cirrus. I have owned an SR22 since August and love the plane, so I'm
not unbiased, but as a reference, in 2004 there were 20 fatal accidents
in 182's vs 3 fatal accidents in Cirrus. I have no statistics on the
hours flown in each type.

How many SR20/22's in the inventory and how many 182's? The 182 is the
second most popular airplane out there.

I'd venture to

--
Matt
---------------------
Matthew W. Barrow
Site-Fill Homes, LLC.
Montrose, CO