"City Dweller" wrote in message
...
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)


If the accidents were very similiar, I would say that they would support
your hypothesis, but I don't think that there is a common thread that runs
though the accidents. If 16yr old drivers have a high accident rate driving
red Corvettes off cliffs, does that mean that the color red is attracted to
the bottom of cliffs?

Mike
MU-2