"swag" wrote in message
oups.com...
Any body notice that CNN quoted the NTSB last nite as saying that the
parachute had been thermally deployed?

To me that means he was trying to recover from an airframe disaster.

NYT today: "a representative of the plane's maker, Cirrus Design, which is
working with the investigators, had determined that a small rocket
ordinarily used to deploy the chute had fired. But it appeared that the
rocket was set off by the heat of the fire that followed the crash, not by
one of the occupants while the plane was in the air"

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/13/nyregion/13crash.html