Originally Posted by
Fly-by-Wife
whether this was due to a failure of the ballistic recovery system, or a case of initiating it too late.
On the video, the "whoosing" sound appears to me as the start of the rocket pulling out the recovery chute. But it is only 1-2 seconds before the crash, while I heard that BRS is good-to-go above 500 feet AGL. This was extremely late rocket firing, and possibly an extreme late initiation too (since the chute did deploy eventually).
I am wondering if there is any study on the reasons for late BRS deployments? I have seen this happening periodically, especially with ultralight aircraft. The owner boasts about the added safety, then fails to deply in time, when got into a flat spin. Is it the cost of replacement? Or the possible repair costs for the airplane (the BRS will land it quite hard, but survivable).? Or the pilot peer pressure (hey, I heard you screwed up and deployed your BRS! LOL, what a loser you are!)? I am quite curious as we know sometimes fighter pilots are late to eject, or bail out, and BRS activation is also late sometimes.