There's no real reason to wear a seatbelt when flying but you would feel odd not doing so.
It might feel odd when your head goes through the windscreen or hits the panel, yes.
Apparently you've never heat significant turbulence, severe or worse. I have, and I can tell you that you'd better be wearing your seatbelt if you wish to maintain control, if you wish to avoid a trip to the hospital later, and if you wish to make it back on the ground. If you're injured in turbulence, you may not be able to return to land.
The seatbelt is part of the control system; you control the airplane, and the seatbelt keeps you in a fixed place in order to do that.
I've had turbulence bad enough that it broke headsets inside the airplane and stripped the guts out of my computer, in a padded bag, rolled us inverted, and shook us enough that the instrument panel was little more than a blur. I've had turbulence bad enough that a flight engineer was ejected from the flight deck. Perhaps you haven't seen a good reason to wear your seatbelt yet. Hopefully you won't. Wear it anyway, for those times that you might learn why.
The seatbelt is an integral safety component in the airplane. The airplane may or may not come with parachutes, or provisions for them. It does come with seatbelts, and in most cases, shoulder harnesses. Wear them.
Personally, if most of the control surfaces are behaving as advertised, the number of lifting surfaces you have available is roughly equivalent to the number you had on the walk-round, nothing worth mentioning is on fire, and you can see something vaguely flat onto which to make a forced landing, then staying with the airframe is a much better proposition.
BINGO!!
An excellent treatise on the subject was penned many years ago, entitled "Fly the Biggest Piece Back," by Steve Smith. I don't agree with all he had to say, but I do like his sentiment. The CAPS crowd in their Cirrus's would do well to heed the admonition.
how long does it take a tommie to spin through 4000-5000ft? good luck hitting the silk there, anybody disagree?
I don't know what a "tommie" is, but perhaps you mean a Tomahawk. Yes, I disagree.
Spinning through several thousand feet can take quite a while, and there's ample time to get out. Whether you can or not is another matter entirely.
Whether you can get clear without being struck by the aircraft, deploying the parachute early, damaging the parachute, striking your head, or running into other complications, is also another matter.
In my opinion this is the way ahead and in many ways negates the arguments for carrying a second engine in light aircraft
A second engine is for performance, and carrying a parachute doesn't replace a second engine. Ever.
All I can say Guppy is that many glider pilots lives in the UK have been saved by using a parachute, without training. They would have been dead had they not worn them, without training. I can think of no instances whatsoever where a glider pilot has jumped and he could have saved his aircraft by sticking with it, or he has jumped and been killed as a result of, and I've read every glider accident report for at least the last 20 years and many from before that. You can't argue that. Well you probably will.
Gliding in the UK is a drop in the bucket compared to what goes on in other parts of the world. When glider pilots hit the silk, it's generally either the the result of a midair collision (too many beaks in the same spot of sky under a cloud, along a ridge, or chasing thermals), or a structural failure.
This is seldom the case in powered airplanes, in when it is, rarely will wearing a parachute do much to save the tattered remains of your battered body.
Only a dedicated sky diver would maintain that risk elimination can be achieved by throwing yourself out of a functioning aeroplane. Because - and I mean no disrepect - they're nutters
You're what's affectionately called a "whuffo" in the jump industry. That's because we grow tired of hearing the phrase "Wuffo you wanna goan jump outta a perfectly good airplane, wuffo?" Or something along those lines. In the military, you'd simply be called a "leg." That's someone who doesnt jump.
Risk elimination is done on many levels, and isn't a one-time thing. It's done in the preflight. It's done in the preparation. It's done in the dirt-dive. It's done in the pack job. It's done in the rig, the harness, the testing, the second rig, the automatic activation device, in the reserve ripcord stevens system, and many other safety devices ranging from audio altimeters to crossbracing in modern canopies, to the use or zero porosity and ripstop nylon to redundancy in design, and so forth.
Skydiving isn't about risk. It's about freedom. Risk really isn't part of the equation. Skydiving is life in microcosm. We enter this world knowing that we have a finite amount of time to live. During that time we have certain duties, certain functions to perform. We may not know early in life how long the remainder of our time on earth will be, but we do know what we have to do, or we learn, or we die trying.
When we begin a skydive, we have certain tasks that must be accomplished, certain things that must be done. We have a finite amount of time remaining. When we leave the airplane, we know that we have exactly the rest of our life to open that parachute. That may be a minute, it may be thirty seconds, it may be longer, it may be less. If you were to wake up a terminal patient, knowing you had a limited amount of life remaining, you might try to make those few remaining minutes, hours, or days to be the greatest of your life. You might try to make the most of that time, enjoy what you had left.
A skydive is a celebration of that time; it is about the freedom of swimming in a medium you can breathe, about the world's fastest non-mechanized sport, about relaxation, about peace. I've found few activites that leave me as calm, as centered, or as relaxed as a skydive.
I've spent time in an intensive care ward as a result of a bad parachute, high winds, rough terrain, and some cactus. I've had three malfunctions with attendant reserve rides. I've had some interesting experiences, and some downright spiritual moments. I've jumped into the dark, jumped into the mountains, dropped into the desert, over the ocean, into corn fields, and even into a county fair. Presently I own two sport parachute rigs. Those rigs don't represent danger, they don't represent hazard. They represent freedom, salvation, and a ticket to an aircraft unlike a balloon, unlike a gyrocopter, unlike a helicopter, and unlike an airplane. The chance to pilot a canopy is every bit as enjoyable and rewarding as to fly a J-3 cub around a traffic pattern. In the jump world, we call people who fly canopies "canopy pilots," which is an apt description, especially given some of the extremely high performance canopies in use today.
None the less, we don't undertake a jump frivolously. Very thorough gear checks are done. Parachutes are carefully packed, lines cleared. When packing a parachute, I check every bit of fabric that might be trapped between lines, and clear it. I check every bit of cable, housing, webbing, closing loop, container, reinforcing seam, control line, brakes, riser, and so on, carefully, methodically. The skydive itself is planned; we rehearse how we're going to exit the airplane in what order, and who will do what, when, where, and how. We cover emergencies, we review them, we check each other, we signal, we communicate.
We carry gear in the parachute rigs which automatically deploys a parachute under certain conditions. We have means to cut away one parachute, keep another. We have means to quickly release everything in the event of a water landing. Some parachutists carry cord or equipment for highly unusual circumstances, such as getting out of a tree. We carry hook knives to cut. We wear altimeters on our wrists, chests, and inside our helmets against our ears. We watch each other. We train, we jump, we enjoy, and we live.
Skydiving isn't about risk, but risk elimination is practiced. To the Whuffo, skydiving is risk. It is not. It is freedom.
For those who wear a parachute but never train with it, how do you know what the canopy is supposed to look like? Can you spot a malfunction? If you're using around canopy, which many pilot rigs are, do you know how to address line twists, or about an inversion or mae west? Do you understand a line-over or what it means, and can you steer the canopy? Do you know how to do a parachute landing fall when you come down, or are you content to break your legs or back, especially in wind? Are you truly aware of the consequences of being near powerlines, under canopy? How about a water landing? If your rig has releases such as capewells or shot-and-a-halves, do you you know how to use them? What if your canopy inflates on the ground and drags you? What do you do? How about a tree landing? That can prove fatal if you don't know what to do. What a shame to survive your bail-out, yet die in a tree or falling from a tree.
If you're going to carry a gun, learn how to shoot it, use it safely, secure it, clean it, maintain it, load it, unload it, carry it, safe it, and employ it. If you're going to drive a car, learn how to go, stop, turn, park. If you're going to do anything, carry anything, use anything, then most of the time, you should learn about it. This is especially true in the case of a parachute when you're thinking of stepping into the void with little more than a non-existent aircraft bundled on your back that you hope will materialize when you do *something.*
Advocating the carriage of a parachute without advocating receiving parachute instruction is a foolhardy endeavor, but it's very much in line with many of the other comments we see here...pilots released to get their private who haven't a clue what to do with the mixture or carburetor heat or who can't calculate performance using the manufacturer data because they've never been allowed to see the flight manual. Simply because such a state of ignorance is tolerated and normal in some sheltered circles doesn't make it right; don't project that level of ignorance into critical equipment such as a parachute by suggesting that one shouldn't be trained and experienced on the gear. One should.
Whether the gear is warranted or not in most general aviation powered airplane operations is another matter entirely.
Wearing a parachute doesn't replace a second engine. Nobody loses an engine in a twin and says "it's okay, I have a parachute." Manufacturers don't say "Let's just make it a single engine airplane, and issue everybody parachutes."
Wearing a parachute doesn't mean one should bail after an engine failure. One should fly the airplane back down. If you can't land off field then you should ground yourself and seek competent instruction. It's not a superhuman event; it's a basic bare-bones skill, and if you don't have it, then you have no business being a private pilot. After all, if the engine quits, you're
expected to be able to do it.
If you have a choice between a day flight and a night flight in a single, especially a cross country which may take you away from possible landing sites, then take the day flight. Just like flying IMC or over a layer, it's not just about the engine quitting; it's about lack of redundancy, single electrical sources, single vacuum pneumatic sources, instrument issues, etc. Flying a single isn't a do-all event. It's limited, and should be so, if you have any common sense. Generally those who cry the loudest about that are those with the least experience; you'll find that most experienced aviators are far less welcoming to single engine night cross country, single engine over water flights, or single engine IMC...that's usually the bailywick of the less-informed.
If you think that level of ignorance can be compensated by the wearing of a parachute, you're only compounding the original ignorance and making it worse, but you're welcome to that dangerous view. It's all yours.
You certainly won't find it much down the road when you gain some experience, or seek among those who do have some experience.
As per the above, for the average potential user of an emergency parachute, should they have to eventually use the thing then a downwind water landing into trees and powerlines with a canopy problem is probably going to kill them. Staying with the airframe is certainly going to kill them.
Ah well. There you go. The argument to maintain ignorance and bury one's head in the sand is that one was likely to die anyway, so one certainly shouldn't engage in any training that might save one's life.
With that logic, next time the barn burns down, we should dehorn all the cows. It makes no sense, but at least we're doing something. Unlike advocating ignorance of one's emergency pilot parachute rig.
Wouldn't it be much better to learn water landings, tree landings, a parachute landing fall, and experience several canopy rides and receive actual competent training, instead? Is that too complicated?