Cirrus' "Failing Instruments In Rapid Succession"

Michael ) wrote:

In my opinion, it's an absolutely unacceptable decision. Test flights
are day-VFR events. I've had things go wrong on test flights before,
and they didn't always have an obvious connection to the maintenance
being performed.

That is the advice I follow. I recall returning to my home class C airport
one sunny, VFR day last fall when there was a nervous call to approach from
another pilot flying a Beech Sundowner. He had just departed and was
requesting an immediate landing back at the airport.

The controller asked if he was having problems, to which he answered that
he had to work hard to prevent the aircraft from entering a steep left
bank. He did not declare an emergency, but wanted priority to land.

His landing was uneventful and he pulled into the same FBO I keep my
aircraft. After I secured my aircraft, I walked over to this pilot, who
was still sitting in his aircraft, and told him I had heard his plight on
the frequency. He described the problem he was having, then followed the
description up with, "this was my test flight after the aircraft had just
come out of annual."


--
Peter

Got a good point there Paul (and others). It would be hard to explain the
pulling of a parachute if he had only one or two instruments fail. "Yeah,
they ALL failed!" sounds like a good story to tell the insurance company.

The other odd thing is that he says that he will buy another Cirrus. I can
only speak for myself but I sure would buy another plane where all the
instruments failed on me at the same time. So maybe he was exaggerating.

Marco


"Paul Tomblin" wrote in message
...
In a previous article, "Marco Leon" mleon(at)optonline.net said:
What irks me is how and why the aircraft experienced all these instrument
failures one right after another. If any of our
Pipers/Cessnas/Beechcrafts

You know, every time a pilot gets into a death spiral in IMC, if he
manages to report anything (like if he lives, or he says something over
the radio), he says that "all the instruments failed". But it's almost
never "all the instruments" that failed, it's the pilot that failed -
failed to trust the instruments, failed to cross check and identify if one
really had failed, failed to use the tools at his disposal (like pitot
heat and the autopilot and the checklist) and the skills he learned as a
student and never practiced again.

It's a sad thing to have to say, but most crashes are preventable and a
lot of the people who die in small planes have died for no reason other
than their pilot screwed up.

--
Paul Tomblin http://xcski.com/blogs/pt/
Some days violence is just a nice quick solution to a problem that
would need thought, planning and actual work to do justice to.
-- Wayne Pascoe




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While I generally agree with your statements about old instruments,
presumably the instruments in a Cirrus SR22 are not very old.

Mike
MU-2


"Michael" wrote in message
om...
Peter R. wrote
An interview with the pilot suggests that poor avionics maintenance may
have been the cause.

I wonder how many of those "Loss of control in IMC" accidents,
generally attributed to pilot error, are really the result of multiple
failures. Face it, guys - we're flying old obsolete junk. I know
lots of pilots who tell stories of multiple failures on a single
flight. It happens.

However, flying into low IMC immediately after the
aircraft returned from maintenance may have been a bad decision.

In my opinion, it's an absolutely unacceptable decision. Test flights
are day-VFR events. I've had things go wrong on test flights before,
and they didn't always have an obvious connection to the maintenance
being performed. However, since I always landed the plane, I was
always able to do a detailed examination of the intact systems
afterwards - and in the end, it always turned out that the failures
were related to the maintenance, though in non-obvious ways that
generally pointed out previous marginal maintenance and/or very poor
design that clearly did not include a complete analysis of the failure
modes.

But of course he had a parachute. Would he have launched into low IMC
without a parachute immediately following maintenance?

Michael

No, the pilot was IFR rated and on an instrument flight plan. He had over 600
hours in his Cirrus which probably makes him one of the higher-time pilots in
type.

Dave Reinhart


C J Campbell wrote:

"Marco Leon" mleon(at)optonline.net wrote in message
...
Sure the chute worked as advertised. Great.

What irks me is how and why the aircraft experienced all these instrument
failures one right after another.

The man flew into IMC at 400 feet (I believe he was VFR and had no
instrument rating) and probably became disoriented. His instruments did not
fail. He did.

ArtP wrote
Test flights after
maintenance should never be in anything other than good day-VFR.

Just about every flight I made in my SR20 was after maintenance.

But you do understand that this is not normal, right? My airplane is
almost 40 years old, it's more comples (2 engines instead of one,
retractable gear instead of fixed) and when my plane got into that
mode (it seemed that for a few weeks things were constantly breaking)
I brought it down for 3 months to do an extensive annual and
fix/replace all the problem items.

Sometimes I had to have maintenance performed at my local FBO just so
I could fly the plane to the Cirrus service center. If I couldn't make
that flight the plane would be grounded for another 2 to 3 weeks while
I waited for the next available appointment.

Then you have a lemon. Fix it or get rid of it.

Michael

"David Reinhart" wrote in message
...
No, the pilot was IFR rated and on an instrument flight plan. He had over
600
hours in his Cirrus which probably makes him one of the higher-time pilots
in
type.


Hmmm. Even though he was instrument rated and on an IFR flight plan, I still
think it is far more likely that he was disoriented than that 'multiple
instruments on different systems' failed. I am not saying that it is
impossible for everything to go wrong, just that it is far more likely for
just one thing to go wrong. In this case, I would suspect the pilot, though
the instruments will certainly need to be checked out in the investigation.

A lot of IFR pilots get into real trouble with the loss of the vacuum
system, even though we supposedly train them to recognize such errors. There
is a lot of difference between a genuine instrument failure and covering up
the instrument with a sticky. I think more training time in the simulator
would be valuable.

Michael ) wrote:

Then you have a lemon. Fix it or get rid of it.

Apparently, you don't recall Art's post history sharing his various SR-20
lemon stories. He's been pretty active in this group about that subject.

Knowing about his history, I took his post to be sarcastic humor.

--
Peter

"Michael" wrote in message
om...
Peter R. wrote
An interview with the pilot suggests that poor avionics maintenance may
have been the cause.

I wonder how many of those "Loss of control in IMC" accidents,
generally attributed to pilot error, are really the result of multiple
failures. Face it, guys - we're flying old obsolete junk. I know
lots of pilots who tell stories of multiple failures on a single
flight. It happens.


Well, maybe *you* are flying old obsolete junk, but a Cirrus hardly
qualifies. In fact, even the old obsolete junk tends to have fairly new
equipment in it.

I know lots of pilots, too. Some of them have even more experience than what
you claim to have. And they tell a lot of stories. I don't think that
necessarily means that the stories are accurate depictions of events or that
the pilots interpreted those events correctly. Even so, I will allow that
multiple failures in different systems happen and I never said that they
didn't. I have lost the radar, the oil pressure in one engine, and had a
life raft deploy and wrap itself around the tail simultaneously while IMC
and in thunderstorms. What are the odds?

My point is that Occam's razor usually works -- the simplest explanation is
generally the most probable. The most probable explanation here is that the
pilot became disoriented and only thought all his instruments were failing
when none of them or perhaps only one or two of them were actually failing.
That does not mean that I don't think what the pilot says happened is
impossible. It is just a less likely scenario. I think you are the only
pilot I know who claims to have your kind of experience who disagrees with
that.

"ArtP" wrote in message
...
On 15 Apr 2004 08:02:58 -0700, (Michael) wrote:

Test flights after
maintenance should never be in anything other than good day-VFR.

Just about every flight I made in my SR20 was after maintenance.
Sometimes I had to have maintenance performed at my local FBO just so
I could fly the plane to the Cirrus service center. If I couldn't make
that flight the plane would be grounded for another 2 to 3 weeks while
I waited for the next available appointment.

If Michael actually follows all the rules and restrictions that he likes to
impose on others then he almost certainly does not fly much. Actually, he
sometimes sounds more like a trial lawyer than a pilot.

C J Campbell ) wrote:

snip
My point is that Occam's razor usually works -- the simplest explanation is
generally the most probable. The most probable explanation here is that the
pilot became disoriented and only thought all his instruments were failing
when none of them or perhaps only one or two of them were actually failing.
That does not mean that I don't think what the pilot says happened is
impossible.

Your explanation certainly seems plausible to me.

--
Peter