"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.