There were witnesses in the building, a working crew of
contractors if I remember, that reported seeing a puff of
smoke above the airplane before it hit. Another GUESS on my
part. They saw that they were going to crash into the
building and pulled the handle hoping it would stop their
forward speed and make the crash survivable. Either they
waited too long or the chute malfunctioned. [If they did
pull the handle, when and why will be subject to more
guesses]



"Gary Drescher" wrote in message
. ..
| "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
|
|