A thought on BRS

Pretty interesting that rescue-the-aircraft parachutes have been
considered basic-responsibility common sense in the ultralight
community, while the presumptively far more properly trained pilots of
presumptively far more airworthy certificated aircraft consider them
controversial and possibly dangerous.

To me, the objections to these systems keeps reminding me of the World
War I debate about allowing pilots to carry parachutes. They don't
always work, you will have people taking unnecessary risks because
they know they have them, people will bail out of damaged but landable
aircraft, and anyway real men don't need that sort of thing. Maybe
the powers that prohibited parachutes back then were onto something!

Mind you, I'll never forget the look on a hang glider pilot's face
when her sailplane-ride pilot explained that a) you have to bail out
of the aircraft to use the parachute and b) there are no parachutes
anyway!

Just to nitpick with John Cochrane, I don't know that Pelzman actually
proved that spikes in the dashboard lower the accident rate (this
would require doing the experiment, which I didn't think he had done),
although it seems likely they would! I think his point was that the
primary effect of safety equipment in cars is to increase speeds:
essentially, drivers limit their speed to keep their fatality risk to
an acceptable level, so increase the safety equipment and they can
increase their speed while keeping the same or lower fatality risk.
Their priorities are correct: limit risk first, THEN drive as fast as
possible. What is counter-intuitive is that with those priorities,
safety equipment will alter the speed, not the safety. Speed is not
the issue in aircraft, but there is indeed a similar question: when
the safety margins are improved, will light aircraft travelers consume
the benefit as higher safety margins or as increased utility of the
aircraft? Even if it's the latter, they still gain from having the
BRS on board, and all that remains is to determine whether it's worth
the cost.