Iced up Cirrus crashes

They charge more for an SR22 than for a Glasair III.

Really? For the same hull value and the same coverage?

Michael

I am getting the Diamond DA40 Star. Slower than the SR22 and even SR20,
but its safety record is impeccable.

Now back to the bug question: I too agree that there is nothing wrong
with the Cirrus design, but that does not mean it can't have bugs.

A few weeks ago I watched a great program on TLC about NTSB's effort to
investigate a series of 737 crashes more than a decade ago. After years
of meticulous and thorough "debugging", the did find a bug in that
aircraft -- a tiny-teeny rudder valve which sometimes jams. You can
read more about it he

http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/trib.../s_247850.html

Unfortunately, you can't expect that level of effort on NTSB's part
when investigating the crashes of small potatoes like the Cirrus, and
that's a shame. Cirrus will have to do it themselves, or risk having
their entire fleet grounded.


-- City Dweller



Jon Kraus wrote:
Great discription about what a software bug is... I too am a
programmer... errrr sorry... Software Engineer... and you hit the bug

description "nail on the head".. I don't think that the Cirrus issues

are because of bugs in the airplane... It may be "bugs" in the
training
process but from what I can tell the airplane (hardware if you will)
is
a good design and inherently safe... When I moved up to our Mooney
from
the 172's that I flew for 3 years the insurance company required 10
hours dual and 10 hours solo before carrying pax... This seemed like
the
minimum when I first started flying the airplane... I wondered if I
wopuld ever get the hang of flying it.. But, low and behold things
started to come together and I am now pretty comfortable flying the
plane..

The biggest thing I found when moving up to a faster airplane is you
MUST plan ahead... We are talking many miles ahead especially if you
are
fly high.. you may need 40-50 miles to decend to pattern altitude at
a
speed where you can get the gear down... If you wait too long and
think
you can just "Dive and Drive" you'll never get it slowed down in
time..
(been there done that got the t-shirt).

That being said.... What kind of plane are you looking at?

Jon Kraus
PP-ASEL-IA
Mooney 201 4443H

City Dweller wrote:

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)

I think the plane is the mission. The reason you get into more Wx in a
Mooney is because its faster with a higher load. It becomes the
airplane of choice for people who want to fly long distances. If it had
shorter legs like an Arrow, it wouldn't cross as many wx systems.

In article ,
George Patterson wrote:

Dan Luke wrote:

To be fair, one must consider that this snazzy new design may be
attracting a lot of new flyers. Is Cirrus is selling a disproportionate
number of airplanes to inexperienced pilots?

That doesn't appear to be the case. The latest AOPA Pilot "Safetypilot"
article
reported comparison studies of so-called "Technologically Advanced Aircraft."
These are aircraft with at least a GPS navigator, a multifunction display,
and
an autopilot. Cirrus made 1,171 of these during the study period. Eight of
them
had crashed by press time. The other manufacturer made 1,003 of the other
aircraft during that period. Eight of them had crashed by press time.

The other aircraft? The Cessna 182.

How many fatalities where there? If they were the same, what does that
say about the safety chute?

The only issue seems to be that every Cirrus crash gets an inordinate amount
of
attention in these groups.

George Patterson
He who would distinguish what is true from what is false must have an
adequate understanding of truth and falsehood.

On Fri, 11 Feb 2005 15:12:27 GMT, George Patterson wrote:

W P Dixon wrote:

That's pretty cool (Pardon the pun ) Where can I read up on that George?

I read about it in the 70s and don't remember where; probably a Science Fact
article in Analog or Popular Mechanics. As I recall, the technique is to dig a
hole large enough to keep your water container completely below ground. Cover it
during the day and insulate it (the Romans used straw). Leave it open to the
night sky. It will freeze in a few days. The article said it only works in areas
where the night sky is usually perfectly clear (ie. the desert).

This site gives a reference:

http://www.madsci.org/posts/archives/nov99/941723540.Sh.r.html

Marty

In article ,
"Martin X. Moleski, SJ" wrote:

Two masses in contact with each other (airplane skin and the air
that contacts it) have got to reach thermal equilibrium, all things
being equal and given sufficent time.

Not quite. They have to reach thermal equilibrium if there is no heat
flowing in or out of the system. But, as you correctly note, heat can
(and doe) flow in and out via radiation. Surfaces can "soak up" the
cold of the night sky (actually, they radiate their heat into the night
sky) and become colder than the surrounding air, just as they can "soak
up" the heat of the sun and become warmer than the surrounding air.
Eventually some of the cold/heat does get transferred to the air. This
is why clear nights tend to be colder than cloudy ones (and why clear
days tend to be warmer, all else being equal).

rg

"Roger" wrote in message
...
On 10 Feb 2005 20:41:13 -0800, "houstondan"
wrote:

insurance? of course. seems that the insurance companies would be
pretty good judges of the aircraft. what do they have to say? any
special stuff beyond what they demand on similar aircraft and yes, i
just realized that "similar" might be sticky.

They charge more for an SR22 than for a Glasair III.
Over 1/3 of what I was quoted for on a new TBM 700 as a low time pilot
(1100 hours in mostly high performance retract) with no turbine
experience.

Could you rephrase that last sentence? I'm not sure what you're saying
there.


--
Matt
---------------------
Matthew W. Barrow
Site-Fill Homes, LLC.
Montrose, CO

But getting into weather is not in and of itself enough to cause an
accident. You also need to make bad decisions and/or mishandle the
airplane. The higher the workload, the more likely you are to do that,
all else being equal.

The workload of flying a Mooney is higher than the workload of flying
an Arrow. It's not as forgiving. Thus I would expect that the same
pilots flying the same airplane in the same conditions would
nonetheless have more accidents in a Mooney.

Michael

"George Patterson" wrote in message
...


Stefan wrote:

Peter wrote:

The temperature of a surface that's radiating heat to a clear night
sky
can drop considerably below the ambient air temperature.

Err... no.

Err ... Yes. The Romans used to make ice in North Africa by taking
advantage of
this phenomena.

You were there?


--
Matt
---------------------
Matthew W. Barrow
Site-Fill Homes, LLC.
Montrose, CO.

In article ,
Ron Garret wrote:

In article ,
"Martin X. Moleski, SJ" wrote:

Two masses in contact with each other (airplane skin and the air
that contacts it) have got to reach thermal equilibrium, all things
being equal and given sufficent time.

Not quite. They have to reach thermal equilibrium if there is no heat
flowing in or out of the system. But, as you correctly note, heat can
(and doe) flow in and out via radiation. Surfaces can "soak up" the
cold of the night sky (actually, they radiate their heat into the night
sky) and become colder than the surrounding air, just as they can "soak
up" the heat of the sun and become warmer than the surrounding air.
Eventually some of the cold/heat does get transferred to the air. This
is why clear nights tend to be colder than cloudy ones (and why clear
days tend to be warmer, all else being equal).


It is worth noting also that dark surfaces absorb and radiate more
readily than light ones, and so they get hotter during the day and
colder at night. Cirri are all painted white in order to take advantage
of this phenomenon and keep the skin from getting too hot in the sun.
(You'll never see a non-white Cirrus. It's part of the certification
conditions to paint the white.) Accordingly, Cirri are less prone to
radiation-induced cooling and icing than a dark-colored plane would be,
all else being equal.

FWIW,
rg