Originally Posted by
extralite
The cirrus training says always pull the chute unless directly over a field. That was drummed in. Their reasoning is that apparently survival rate so far is 100 percent under a cirrus chute. Not the case with their forced landings. I know i would pull the chute rather than ditch or land on a less than ideal beach such as that situation.
Yes. In the early days of the CAPS system, Cirrus found people were dying when they could have been saved by the chute. They found pilots were reluctant to use the system. New procedures and training, including the "CAPS available" callout seems to have largely fixed that.
Of course plenty of aircraft must have been destroyed when they would have managed a power off landing, but you don't know in advance which is which. Lives have been saved at the cost of some additional aircraft destroyed.