Iced up Cirrus crashes

"Steve.T" wrote in message
oups.com...
Jon:

Who granted your "engineer" status? I certainly hope it wasn't the NJ
Cosmatology Board.

There are no Software Engineers that I'm aware of, only a title for a
position, but no engineers. This is a legal thing, and why I ask,
because I also do software and have for years.

Quite so! Using the title "Engineer" is granted by a state license and I
know of no states that grant a "Software Engineer" license. I work with
dozens of civil and other (real...licensed) engineers and each one has a
certificate or two on their wall. Many are incensesd by programmers using
the term and many are just amused given the haphazard way most software is
developed.

It's like calling someone as "combustible refuse engineer" when they really
are just a garbageman.


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

"Matt Barrow" wrote in message
...

"Steve.T" wrote in message
oups.com...
Jon:

Who granted your "engineer" status? I certainly hope it wasn't the NJ
Cosmatology Board.

There are no Software Engineers that I'm aware of, only a title for a
position, but no engineers. This is a legal thing, and why I ask,
because I also do software and have for years.

Quite so! Using the title "Engineer" is granted by a state license and I
know of no states that grant a "Software Engineer" license. I work with
dozens of civil and other (real...licensed) engineers and each one has a
certificate or two on their wall. Many are incensesd by programmers using
the term and many are just amused given the haphazard way most software is
developed.

Yes, and we all know that having a government-issued license is such a
strong indicator of quality. Licensing is what happens when an industry
matures and transitions from an entrepreneurial to a guild mindset. Did John
Augustus Roebling have a license?

Having led many software projects, I will tell you that the "engineers" are
usually the ones most incensed by taking shortcuts in quality. The fact is
that the market has traditionally rewarded those who got to market first
with the most features rather than those who made the least buggy software.
It costs a *lot* to build very high-quality software. If the market would
tolerate buildings that collapsed 10% of the time but cost 90% less to
build, we'd see buildings falling down as often as Windows crashes.

-cwk.

It's like calling someone as "combustible refuse engineer" when they
really are just a garbageman.

Or in your case a glorified carpenter? If you read the post I was
responding to you'd see I was joking about the "engineer" part...

Jon Kraus
PP-ASEL-IA
Mooney 201 4443H

In article .com,
Steve.T wrote:
Jon:

Who granted your "engineer" status? I certainly hope it wasn't the NJ
Cosmatology Board.

The state of Texas has such a legal title.


There are no Software Engineers that I'm aware of, only a title for a
position, but no engineers. This is a legal thing, and why I ask,
because I also do software and have for years.

I decided to let the bugs in the software argument go lest I be called
a mainframe bigot.

Later,
Steve.T
PP ASEL/Instrument

"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

"Dan Luke" wrote in

The more of these Cirrus accidents I read about, the more I'm convinced
that Cirrus has a serious marketing/training problem:

Nobody cares. Your opinions are of no interest to the world at large. Do
you have stats to back your claim?

chirp

moo

"Happy Dog" wrote:
The more of these Cirrus accidents I read about, the more I'm
convinced that Cirrus has a serious marketing/training problem:

Nobody cares.

Is that why "nobody" responded to the post?

Your opinions are of no interest to the world at large. Do you have
stats to back your claim?

I might ask you the same question.
--
Dan
C172RG at BFM

"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.

In article ,
"C J Campbell" wrote:

"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.

Actually, it's not even just aircraft. Studies have shown that antilock
breaks don't decrease the accident rate in cars because drivers drive
faster in worse conditions thinking that the ABS will keep them out of
trouble.

"the most chicken pilot wins." I like that rule.

Well, you have to draw the line somewhere and decide what is an
acceptable risk, otherwise you'll never get out of your house, let alone
off the ground. After all, you can get killed by a Tsunami just sitting
on the beach. Sometimes **** happens, and the whole point of spending
money on fancy avionics and getting your instrument ticket is so you
don't have to wait for CAVU conditions to fly.

This is not to say that launching into known icing in the mountains at
night is a good idea under any circumstances, but "the most chicken
pilot wins" is, I think, going a little too far towards the opposite
extreme.

I tell my passengers that flying is as safe as one cares to make it,
that most people who die in planes die because the pilot did something
stupid, like run out of fuel, or fly beyond his or her capabilities, and
that I am very, very careful to avoid the stupid things. And yes,
there's the parachute (I fly a Cirrus). But none of these things are
absolute guarantees. Still, statistically the drive to the airport is
the most dangerous part of any flight (particularly given the way I
drive). The number of people killed in planes is nothing compared to
the continual carnage on the roads. But for some reason very few people
ever give that a second thought.

rg

Still, statistically the drive to the airport is
the most dangerous part of any flight

Actually I think that's a myth. There are more car accidents, but there
are more car trips, car miles, and car hours too. By the time you
divide it out (and it can be argued exactly what to divide out), spam
can flying probably does not turn out to be more safe than driving yourself.

Jose