I think Guppy talks a lot of sense.
Sure he does. It's a lot of well connected words, phrases and thoughts.
The problem is that he takes a known effect, a parachute pull, works backwards to deduce that the pilot was at fault, then concludes that the parachute made them do it.
But that's looking at only 14 parachute activiations. With 75% of all fatal accidents being attributed to pilot causes, you would expect 10 of those 14 to be dumb pilot mistakes. No surprise, right?
But if there are 4,000 Cirrus airplanes and say, maybe 6,000 Cirrus pilots, what about those other 5,986 pilots with a parachute who did not get into a situation where the parachute made them do it?
If SNS3Guppy made so much sense, then would you not expect a much greater effect?
And if you think that Cirrus airplanes are flown by pilots with much less experience, like the argument made by SNS3Guppy, then consider that every one of those 6,000 Cirrus pilots starts out with zero hours of time-in-type. They all didn't fall out of the sky.
So what about the other fatal Cirrus crashes? There have been 42 other crashes with fatalities and no parachute activation (there were two previously mentioned parachute pulls that resulted in a fatality). Given that we know the flying time of the fleet, we can calculate the rate of the number of fatal accidents per 100,000 hours of flying time, just like the FAA and NTSB does for the general aviation fleet.
If SNS3Guppy were making sense, then one would expect these Cirrus pilots to be lulled into making stupid decisions, showing their lack of expertise, and killing themselves at a prodigious rate to prove him right! They don't.
When you take out the multiengine turboprop and turbojet numbers from the data, you get 1.86 fatal accidents per 100,000 hours in the GA fleet. The Cirrus numbers, depending how you aggregate their relatively small and perhaps statistically insignificant number of fatal accidents, are 1.70 for the past 12 months and 1.57 for the past 36 months. Not so prodigious.
So, it's a dramatic theatrical trick to take the 14 known parachute activations and deduce that the parachute is the problem, or Cirrus pilots are a problem.
His logic is backwards. Even if he sounds good.
Cheers
Rick