Peter for sure it gives us something to debate but totally disagree with this opinion,
Glad to give people something to debate
in fact this is an attitude which appears to prevent people pulling the chute
You may well be right but is there evidence for that?
Re flimsy landing gear, I don't think an SR22 landing gear is particularly flimsy. It is fairly tightly cowled and I think an SR22 operated from grass is going to suffer at least as much as a traditional cowled-wheel PA28 with muck getting collected up there. But it should be fine for a forced landing in a field.
IIRC, the original position was that every BRS landing would write off the airframe, but they have salvaged some of them. (I just hope they didn't pass on the avionics to some sucker, after processing them through an avionics bench test
).
That link is interesting.
When you compare the successful CAPS pulls to the 41 fatal accident scenarios, you find remarkable similarities.
My estimation is that 30% of the fatal accidents had a high probability of success if the pilot had pulled the CAPS handle; overall 23 of 41, or 56%, had a high-to-middle level probability of success:
• VFR-into-IMC (7) • High altitude upsets (4)
• Pilot disorientation (5) • Mechanical problems (2)
• Low altitude loss of control (5)
Of those categories listed, #1 and #3 are very similar - unless one is suggesting that a pilot who is "disoriented" in
VMC should pull the chute
I bet very few non-IR pilots are going to pull the chute upon simply flying into IMC, when (a) they are supposed to have had training to do something like a 180 and (b) they are likely to be close to uninsurable afterwards. Whatever the best advice is, there is a really powerful human factors issue there.
Mech problems is a genuine reason, though that chute pull where the aileron came off would not be a good reason to pull the chute if the aircraft was controllable (as it should be, one would hope).
Low altitude loss of control is no good for BRS so I don't know why the author suggests these could have been saved.
This is possibly of interest.