I think IO was referring the the side stick,
Yes; I meant the side stick.
This "Cirrus business" has been done to death on every pilot forum going, UK, USA, the lot. There are a number of factors which are not going away:
Cirrus advertising, in the USA anyway, has been aimed to draw in new blood. They correctly realised that flogging a new idea (actually an SR20/22 is hardly innovative when you look at what is actually in there, and what bodge was done to get rid of the prop rpm lever, but I am talking about
perceptions here) to the ultra conservative population of ageing GA pilots was a dead horse. So they aimed it at younger affluent people who, given the cost of this hardware, are nearly all business / professional high achievers.
This in turn has created a number of issues.
Those who fly regularly IFR know that a plane will never be a car. The only plane which approaches the despatch rate of even a Trabant will be a heavily de-iced turboprop or above. But the Cirrus dealer is not going to tell you that, and neither will the PPL instructor. Even with an IR, full TKS, a turbo, oxygen, and currency you are only going to be around the 90-95% mark. Without full TKS, around 75% unless you like the odd "eventuful flight" and your passengers are very devoted to you
But if you advertise a plane like it is a 150kt car (and the current Cessna 400 adverts in the US mags, where the very smart businessman with great hair is visiting 3 cities in one day, do the same thing, if far less successfully than Cirrus have done) then statistically you are bound to draw out of the woodwork some people who believe it, and some of them are statistically bound to fall through the cracks in the PPL training system and actually try it. Hence you would expect more "stupid" crashes in Cirruses than the older types, but I can't see anybody should be blamed for this. GA cannot carry on running on WW2 hardware. It desperately needs new blood (and women
).
A large % of business / professional people are not easy to train to fly. At best, they are successful in their jobs and they are equally demanding of all service providers including their PPL instructors, and we all know that a % of instructors are technically useless and/or useless communicators. This causes a relationship breakdown, in such cases. If you want to teach professionals to fly, you need to be very competent yourself and your whole training business has to be very polished. Money is not an issue, after all.
A % of business / professional people are aggressive and arrogant. These are just going to be hard to train anyway.
Looking at the Cirrus chute pulls, most of them were in basically dumb circumstances, and it's probably due to a combination of the above factors. But even those vary. The one where they stalled/spun while probing the operating ceiling, in turbulence and icing or whatever, that has killed loads of normal pilots, and I would not call that a "Cirrus factor". The one where he pulled the chute because his aileron fell off
was plain dumb because
AFAIK the plane was fully flyable.
The chute pulls have reflected in high insurance premiums. I know one UK insurer has whacked up the deductible from £3500 to £15000, following one well publicised UK chute pull a year ago. And US Cirrus owners now pay something like 2x more than TB20 owners, despite the "low insurance rate" (haha) fixed gear which costs them about 10-15% extra avgas on every flight. Whatever you think of this trend, it is going to kill the sales, and the only way out is mandatory and thorough pilot training, but this is tricky to implement because it is way on top of ICAO requirements.
Then you have loads of traditional pilots who don't believe a proper pilot should be provided with a get out of jail card, and upon making a mistake he should die like a man, while saluting the queen of course. So a lot of Cirrus crashes get taken apart... but all the time you have people pulling the chute for daft reasons the "GA lynch mob" will carry on